From Superfluous Man to Superman: Revised and Reformatted Weblogs

ISBN-13: 9781512149609 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 54 str.

John O'Loughlin

Opis

All the pieces in this third collection of revised and reformatted weblogs originally hosted by Wordpress.com date, like the previous two, from 2011, which would seem to be a pretty productive year for Mr O'Loughlin. As before, the author has been careful to ensure that the original chronology of weblogs has been replicated, so that one can proceed through the material with a growing sense of continuity and even thematic enhancement, two crucial advantages of book publication over what may often appear to be the disjunctive if not chronologically unrelated nature of blogging. Even so, he has usually tended to approach weblogs from a standpoint centred in his metaphysically-oriented philosophy of Social Transcendentalism and intended, as far as possible, to achieve some kind of thematic continuity in spite of the formal limitations of blogging, and we believe that, here as in previous such compilations, he has largely succeeded in producing a body of work that not only adds up, but also seems quite inter-related and even cohesive, partly, we suspect, because few of his weblogs were ever written in situ but, like previous such texts, usually derive from prior notes which he was then able to copy-in and upgrade or 'beef up', preparatory to downloading them to a local file which would subsequently serve as the basis, following revision, for a new e-book and/or physical book. Hopefully, this one is as good as if not better than each of the previous ones, including its immediate precursor, 'Musings of a Superfluous Man', and should serve to show, moreover, that a man who sees himself as being superfluous in and/or to one kind of society may well prove of superhuman and, more particularly, supermasculine significance to himself which the type of society he inhabits would be unable to comprehend, much less appreciate. In this latest publication in John O'Loughlin's considerable oeuvre, he has achieved something akin to a personal or, rather, universal resurrection which leaves the 'superfluous man' of the previous title trailing far behind in the depths of worldly despondency, as he scales new heights of metaphysical certitude that resolve the long struggle, or 'journey', towards Truth which was the original motive for everything of significance that he has since written.