Indeed, Robert Graves had advised Wilson against doing the book.īut Wilson was nearing 40 years old and he was low on money for his young family, and he took it on. I feel it important to bring up this personal aspect to this first commissioned book of Wilson’s, which he himself hesitated in writing, as the subject was such dangerous territory for a serious writer. These words were pertinent as I recalled reading The Occult for the first time in 1984, and compared it to my impressions upon re-reading it more than a quarter of a century later to write about it here. Over the years my experiences, my tastes, my prejudices have changed: as the days go by, my memory keeps reshelving, cataloguing, discarding the volumes in my library my words and my world – except for a few constant landmarks – are never one and the same.” A few pages later, he expands the same idea: “A book becomes a different book every time we read it.” Alberto Manguel, in his preface to A Reader on Reading, (Yale University Press, 2010), writes this about the act of reading: “What we believe a book to be reshapes itself with every reading.
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