In this tragicomic portrait, Clarke vividly illustrates Barfield’s concerns about the destruction of meaning in the modern world. He has picked up some of the fragments and stares at them intently in the hope that they will eventually bring him new knowledge.” This puzzles him, but at the same time part of him refuses to accept that the sphere is broken and worthless. The man has used his sword to shatter the sphere because he wanted to understand it, but now he finds that he has destroyed both sphere and sword. Roundabout lie other broken pieces, the remains of a sphere. “It is a statue of a man kneeling on his plinth: a sword lies at his side, its blade broken in five pieces. In this chapter, Piranesi describes the Other’s alienation imaged by one of the statues: In his influential essay “The Rediscovery of Meaning,” Owen Barfield tries to account for the “pure cussedness” of the fact that “the more able man becomes to manipulate the world to his advantage, the less he can perceive any meaning in it.” Piranesi seems to embody original participation where the Other represents the modern alienation from nature and meaning.
Throughout the podcast, we observes some of the philosophical underpinnings of the book, namely Barfield’s idea that premodern man had a more meaningful relationship with nature, which he called original participation. In this final revelation, we wonder: will the man called Piranesi be okay? We wish we could live in a world where we didn’t know about evil, where meaning came naturally an intuitively to us. As we grieve Piranesi’s loss of innocence, we grieve our own. And now, as we draw to a close we see that he was.
#Piranesi meaning book full#
We think he does not have the full picture, we think he might be in danger. Throughout this book, we as readers have been haunted by a tension: we love the way Piranesi sees the world, and yet we are concerned for him.
Below are some of those thoughts in writing, some borrowed from a review I wrote of Piranesi for Plough.
On the episode attached above, I pull some of the thematic strings we have been following together, and attempt to describe why this book was so important to me. We have reached the end of our book club.
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