Knowing too much can be a curse. In this case it’s the knowledge of good and evil. Of course I’m told there is no good and evil really, and sometimes I even think I manage to grasp it, but buying into my judgemental partitioning of the world for now, I sometimes hark back for the days I would find a bottle of Tassies perfectly adequate, or a David Eddings book the best way to spend a weekend. (If evil is too strong to describe Tassies, the infamous red wine blend, let’s just call it bad. However evil is a good description of David Edding’s atrocious Mallorean). Nowadays I’m more likely to be satisfied with a bottle of Longridge Brut lovingly (and expensively) bought from the farm after a wine-taste at the farm, or a masterpiece by Ben Okri or David Zindell’s science fiction (his Neverness provides the name of this blog).
I recently visited a friend, and the wine was flowing in copious quantities, but it all tasted like drek to me. Since I can hardly insist on being supplied R90 bottles of wine on demand, I eventually made do with water, and probably had less fun than my 20 year-old counterpart would have (but then I also remembered the evening slightly more clearly).
Similarly, I recently read a book by James Patterson, called Roses are Red. It was truly awful. I groaned at every second sentence, the grim cliches, the torturous metaphors. Yet I finished the entire 400 odd pages in one evening. It’s the kind of book I may have enjoyed as a teenager, the gruesome murders and sexual titillation. And it must have still had some appeal for me to keep going.
I guess the more you know the less you know, and the more you judge the worse everything is.
By the way, no prizes for guessing the title of the sequel to Roses are Red. Aaarrrghhhh!
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