melodies: preamble
Three of David's Book set provided by his father. The Story of Civilization. By Will Durant.
Summer. December 2025/2026
‘ Koestler's fundamental idea is that any creative act is a bisociation (not mere association) of two (or more) apparently incompatible frames of thought ’.
The Sleepwalkers. Arthur Koestler. 1959

I have lived in the same house in Christchurch since 1991. Our bookshelves are adorned with some texts. I picked up one of David’s - The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler. 1959. ( Koestler 1905 -1983) . Koestler is a significant author of the 20th Century. I knew that wars, drought and fire had affected family trajectories as well as wedding bells, good food and generally well sustained pastoral and cultural licenses. I am not a student of history. I am more partial to Art History.
I took note of several of Koestler’s words. When I was completing my undergraduate studies there was a popular critical phrase, “ English Departments provide set work from the canons of literature from dead white men”. The 1990’s were times of complaint about this. There was a rapidly increased population of women advancing into university studies. In The Sleepwalkers there is a chapter on what this author called the ‘ Timid Canon’. It was in the 1400’s that the notion of Humanities broke from rigid papal rule. The men up north were thinking about Earth’s rotations. In 1514 there was a canon Koppernigk ( Polish. A polymath ) who was asked to reform the calendar.( page 149). He did, but the man hesitated for years. Eventually his thesis ‘ stopped the sun’.
In the book, Koestler wrote:
‘News travelled fast and far in the 16th century. The pulse of all humanity was quickening as if our planet, after travelling on its journey through space, some somnolent and bemused zone of the Universe, were now emerging into a region bathed in vivifying rays or filled with cosmic Benzedrine in the Interstellar dust. It seemed to act simultaneously on all levels of the nervous system of mankind, on the higher as well as the lower centers, as a stimulant and aphrodisiac, manifesting itself as a thirst of the spirit, an itch of the brain, a hunger of the senses, a toxic release of passions. The human glands seemed to produce a new hormone which caused the sudden surge of a novel greed :curiosity - the innocent, lecherous, creative, destructive, cannibalistic, curiosity of the child.

He continued:The new machines - type foundry and printing press - ministered to the devouring curiosity by a flood of broadsheets, newsletters, Almanacs, libellea, pasquils, pamphlets and books. They spread the news at a hitherto unknown speed, increased the range of human communication, and broke down isolation. The broadsheets and brochures were not necessarily read by all the people on whom they exercise that influence; rather, each printed word of information acted like a pebble dropped into a pond, spreading its ripples of rumours and hearsay. The printing press was only the ultimate source of the dissemination of knowledge and culture; the process itself was complex and indirect, a process of dilution and diffusion and distortion, which affected ever increasing numbers, including the backward and illiterate. Even three and four centuries later, the teachings of Marx and Darwin, the discoveries of Einstein and Freud, did not reach the vast majority of people in their original printed text, but through second - and third- hand sources, through hearsay and echo. The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through textbooks - they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied form of contact, or simply by breathing the common air’ ( p 150 - 151 .1959)
My brother Anthony with Nana Irene with his first car. 1963. Same family. Same house of residence Different budgets. Elmshill. I think Frank sold the car back pretty soon. It was no fun on shingle roads, so he picked up the Ford.
More like it. 1928. Frank. Priscilla and Irene Tiffen in the Ford. Elmshill