Posts

Showing posts from February, 2017

My Years of Magical Thinking, by Lionel Snell

Image
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Years-Magical-Thinking-Lionel-Snell/dp/0904311244 Lionel Snell is without doubt one of the great magical thinkers of the last half-century. This book is somewhat different to his other books, because he is offering his arguments to the wider public beyond the magical ghetto. It is a concerted defence of magical thinking - but as one of four basic types of thinking, four basic human ways of apprehending our worlds. This four-directions model is not new - Snell's first book, SSOTBME, from 1974, laid out this model of human apprehension, but I must confess I never got that it was supposed to be a normal mode of thinking; somehow I assumed he was smuggling it in to complete his picture, and that it was still a fringe thing. Thinking back, I am puzzled at how I misread that idea, but it no doubt has to do with the fact that my own approach to magical thinking has often emphasized the fringe-y, even freakish nature of such thinking - the freakiness of whic