“I hope it won’t be taken as defensiveness if I raise an objection to what Professor Richards has said here today, though I found his remarks quite useful indeed…”
These politic words were among the last I ever heard from Theodore Banner, the American philosopher and occultist who died—under rather mysterious circumstances, as you’ve probably heard—just last month. The words were spoken at a conference on the theme of “Magic in Literature,” held at the University of Virginia some twenty years ago; I can no longer recall the precise point of contention that had been raised, but somehow I remember Banner’s next sentences exactly: “The intellectual movement that I am affiliated with, or what some well- meaning souls have dubbed ‘magical hyperrealism,’ does not submit to the idea of ‘the supernatural’ at all. In spite of what some of our detractors have said, here and elsewhere, we’re not mystics. We’re logicians.”
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