Bruce Charlton's Notions

Friday, 6 February 2026

Alan Garner versus JRR Tolkien - the "Anxiety of Influence"

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The book in which Garner decisively began to react-against Tolkien I discuss Alan Garner's work in term of his Anxiety of Influence wit...
Thursday, 5 February 2026

The "AI" dupes: Thumbs in the scales

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One of the difficult lessons, particularly emphasized by Owen Barfield , is that in every way the spiritual is prior to, and encompasses, th...
13 comments:
Wednesday, 4 February 2026

I Very seldom think about it, but I've always hated the "sport" of Curling

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Ever since, as a young child, I saw a Scottish Curling game on TV ( something like this ), I have strongly disliked it - for one simple reas...
4 comments:

What's the difference between a fantasist and a liar? Self-deprecating versus self-aggrandizing.

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Michael Green : self-deprecating comic fantasist - 1927-2018 People who are untruthful in a character-driven way, whose discourse (spoken or...
3 comments:
Tuesday, 3 February 2026

Files don't prove... anything - and anyway, we should by-now Already Know what is needed

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The Alt Media is abuzz about some "files" that have supposedly been released by the Establishment that "prove" the Estab...
8 comments:
Monday, 2 February 2026

An auspicious Candlemass?

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Yesterday could be considered Candlemass (nowadays equated with the Celtic cross-quarter day of Imbolc - coming about halfway between the wi...
Sunday, 1 February 2026

There are no "good causes" in politics 2026: only effective excuses for an evil agenda

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Dear oh dear; but people are so so gullible (and I include myself) when it comes to politics! Some politician (whether national or internati...
Saturday, 31 January 2026

Was the Omni-God concept a consequence of the development of human consciousness?

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It is interesting to speculate how the incoherent and mass-apostasy-inducing  Omni-God concept arose and came to dominate Christian (and so...
10 comments:
Friday, 30 January 2026

We can never "know" completely and finally; but can Love wholly and eternally

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From Exegesis by Philip K Dick, referring to his novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)  This is a strange ending [to the novel...

A big danger is that we will "find" whatever we "seek"

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There seems to be a fundamental problem in life, that while passive, assimilative compliance leads (in our society and world) to disaster an...
Thursday, 29 January 2026

Atheist materialism versus Church religion - only one winner, unless...

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Atheist materialism - the mainstream ideology of the West, that monopolizes the entirety of public discourse - is a system of reasoning that...
3 comments:
Wednesday, 28 January 2026

The perspective of psychotherapy is something new and assumed. A gross and harmful distortion of modern biographical writing

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I have read and continue to read a lot of biographies; both formal biographies, and more journalistic accounts of people's character, ac...
6 comments:
Tuesday, 27 January 2026

Big events are distorted versus micro/ non-events getting inflated - Two kinds of media manipulation

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In that seminal year of 2020 we saw example of the two extremes of coordinated global media manipulation.  At the start of 2020 was the Bird...
1 comment:
Monday, 26 January 2026

The problem of "reacting" to current affairs - the example of the 2020 Birdemic

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Much of the public space is taken up by people "reacting" - especially to news and current affairs; including a wide rage of stuff...
2 comments:
Saturday, 24 January 2026

Why do I find so few blogs worth reading? Disengagment and its rationale.

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In the past few months, I have begun to limit my reading of blogs more and more - including those I have been reading a long time. This was ...
8 comments:

Lord of the Rings has a Hobbit-centric perspective - except for one short passage...

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Gimli, afraid of the ghosts under the Dwimorberg: picture by DavidDeb Over at my Notion Club Papers blog ; I discuss the short passage, duri...
Friday, 23 January 2026

Badly phrased proverb number one: "You can't have your cake..."

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"You can't have your cake and eat it too" - is a very badly phrased proverb, for two reasons.  1. Having cake is intended to ...
10 comments:

Why do so many people live so many years of decrepitude beyond what they say they want? Repenting sins in extreme old age?

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Continuing on the theme of death and dying ; and exploring the idea that the greatly extended lifespan in The West nowadays may have a spiri...
6 comments:
Thursday, 22 January 2026

Sturgeon's Law again - or, is Romantic Christianity *necessarily* just-another liberal apostasy?

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If Romantic Christianity is an insistence that the individual (rather than a ny external authority, such as a church or a prescribed-inter...

In spiritual work, we need to make conscious effort... But not too hard or narrowly

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In spiritual life here-and-now; it seems to be A Bad Idea to be too specific about what we want to achieve; because then there is a danger t...
2 comments:
Wednesday, 21 January 2026

It's time to think about death...

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William Wildblood has published an excellent post about a subject that almost nobody (in Western civilization) thinks about, except when co...
2 comments:
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Bruce Charlton
Bruce G Charlton. Anonymous comments are deleted without being read. Comments are moderated (pretty severely). Established commenters are privileged, but in general I only publish comments that I judge to contribute to the intended effect of the blog post.
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