Sanity and things
The cover for Violet Mackerel’s Brilliant Plot is very nearly done now. I saw an almost-final-version yesterday and I think it’s beautiful! I hope it won’t be very long at all now before I can post it here. The release date for the book has been brought forward to November – hooray!! It is such a lovely thought that it might find its way under Christmas trees this year…
Also, last week Penguin sent me the finals for Sophie’s Salon and they’re looking lovely, I think! So all the wheels sort of feel as though they’re in motion now.
With all this in mind, I’ve been thinking that soon this should start being a blog for child readers more than for the little handful of my mainly adult friends who read here (and for whom I’m very grateful!). I’m having daydreams about posting craft projects and children’s poems and more beautiful pictures like this one and this one.
In the meantime, though, I’m reading a very interesting book by psychotherapist (and philosopher, I’d say) Adam Philips, called Going Sane. It’s a kind of critical analysis of the concept of sanity, looking historically and sociologically and psychoanalytically at the way the concept is constructed and the implications it might have. The following passage gave me something to mull over during my train journey to work this morning:
“It is often acknowledged that the best lives, just like the worst lives, are driven lives. On the one hand we idealize the artist, the lover, the person with a passion for justice, the person who seems to have no choice but to do the good thing that she devotes her life to; and on the other hand we fear the addict, the workaholic, the person who is driven to ruin his life, to harm himself and others. It is the project of the cultures we grow up in to tell us what our lives should be driven by, what we should have an appetite for, what forms our passions should take. A sane life in this context is one in which a person is driven by the right, by the socially acceptable things; or it is a way of describing a life in which one is not driven at all. But either way sanity seems to suggest an unusual degree of self-possession, of independence in relation to appetite. Whether the sane person resists his hungers, or has found satisfying ways of including them, of weaving them into the texture of his life, his sanity will be a story about appetite” (Phillips, 2006:118-119).
Interesting hey!
