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Tumbrils, whole no. 7, May 1946
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T U M B R I L S Published for the Vanguard Amateur Press Association, by James Blish, at 787 Washington Street, New York 14, N.Y. No. 7; May, 1946 ------------------------------------------------ ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FILLER Through the munificence of the Veteran's Administration in granting me a $90 book allowance this term -- plus the collusion of a professor in circumventing the V.A.'s precautions that it remain unspent -- I now own a copy of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, a work so expensive that probably I should have gone without it for years to come under other circumstances. I have been reading it with that special pleasure which comes from owning a book of one's own that can be marked whenever one feels the urge; and with the additionally special pleasure of having instantly available at any time a work accessible before only through enormously protracted sessions at a library, with all the painful retracing of steps such piecemeal reading requires. Becoming re-acquainted with such a book, against a background of a.p.a. activity and of contingent political quarrels, involves a number of temptations. Had I allowed these free play I would now -- halfway through Vol. I - have enough epigrams and other percepts to supply me with squibs, fillers, Three-Dots paragraphs, and so on for years. I quoted Spengler in TUMBRILS No. 3, rendering there as a filler one of the most incisive of the lines I had remembered, but these things multiply out of all control when the full text is actually lying beside the typewriter. As a squib, for instance, in the New Yorker (and familiar Vanguard) manner, it is hard to resist running the following under the heading "The Pellucid Crystal Ball:" Hard as the half-developed Socialism of today /1199/ is fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch-expansionist with all the vehemence of destiny. Or consider the temptations of the following as a filler: The time for art and philosophy had passed; they were exhausted, used-up, superfluous, and /the Roman's/ instinct for the realities of life told him so....It would have been absurd in a Roman of intellectual eminence, who might as Consul or Praetor lead armies, organize provinces, build cities or even be the Princeps in Rome, to want to hatch out some new variant of post-Platonic school philosophy at Athens or Rhodes. Consequently no one did so. It was not in harmony with the tendency of the ago[?], and therefore it only attracted third-class men of the kind that always advances as far as the Zeitgeist of the day before yesterday. It is a very grave question whether or not this stage has not set in for us already....This may be deplorable...but it is not in our power to make otherwise. It will not be -- already it is not -- permissable to defy clear historical experience and to expect, merely because we hope, that this will spring or that will flourish. These from the first 40 pages; from the very title itself a substantial contribution to the "foreign language phrase" question could be made for ( . . .), for the implications of Der Untergang des Abendlandes are amazingly suggestive compared to Atkinson's English equivalent; or certain prepositions from the chapter on comparative mathematics could be proposed to Stanley with great interest. The point is that given any similar base this sort of thing could go on indefinitely. One of the characteristics of a great creative work, whether it be the one under discussion, or Wagner's Ring, or the Divine Comedy of Dante, or the Odyssey, is its encyclopedic nature. To make really fruitful contribu-
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T U M B R I L S Published for the Vanguard Amateur Press Association, by James Blish, at 787 Washington Street, New York 14, N.Y. No. 7; May, 1946 ------------------------------------------------ ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FILLER Through the munificence of the Veteran's Administration in granting me a $90 book allowance this term -- plus the collusion of a professor in circumventing the V.A.'s precautions that it remain unspent -- I now own a copy of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, a work so expensive that probably I should have gone without it for years to come under other circumstances. I have been reading it with that special pleasure which comes from owning a book of one's own that can be marked whenever one feels the urge; and with the additionally special pleasure of having instantly available at any time a work accessible before only through enormously protracted sessions at a library, with all the painful retracing of steps such piecemeal reading requires. Becoming re-acquainted with such a book, against a background of a.p.a. activity and of contingent political quarrels, involves a number of temptations. Had I allowed these free play I would now -- halfway through Vol. I - have enough epigrams and other percepts to supply me with squibs, fillers, Three-Dots paragraphs, and so on for years. I quoted Spengler in TUMBRILS No. 3, rendering there as a filler one of the most incisive of the lines I had remembered, but these things multiply out of all control when the full text is actually lying beside the typewriter. As a squib, for instance, in the New Yorker (and familiar Vanguard) manner, it is hard to resist running the following under the heading "The Pellucid Crystal Ball:" Hard as the half-developed Socialism of today /1199/ is fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch-expansionist with all the vehemence of destiny. Or consider the temptations of the following as a filler: The time for art and philosophy had passed; they were exhausted, used-up, superfluous, and /the Roman's/ instinct for the realities of life told him so....It would have been absurd in a Roman of intellectual eminence, who might as Consul or Praetor lead armies, organize provinces, build cities or even be the Princeps in Rome, to want to hatch out some new variant of post-Platonic school philosophy at Athens or Rhodes. Consequently no one did so. It was not in harmony with the tendency of the ago[?], and therefore it only attracted third-class men of the kind that always advances as far as the Zeitgeist of the day before yesterday. It is a very grave question whether or not this stage has not set in for us already....This may be deplorable...but it is not in our power to make otherwise. It will not be -- already it is not -- permissable to defy clear historical experience and to expect, merely because we hope, that this will spring or that will flourish. These from the first 40 pages; from the very title itself a substantial contribution to the "foreign language phrase" question could be made for ( . . .), for the implications of Der Untergang des Abendlandes are amazingly suggestive compared to Atkinson's English equivalent; or certain prepositions from the chapter on comparative mathematics could be proposed to Stanley with great interest. The point is that given any similar base this sort of thing could go on indefinitely. One of the characteristics of a great creative work, whether it be the one under discussion, or Wagner's Ring, or the Divine Comedy of Dante, or the Odyssey, is its encyclopedic nature. To make really fruitful contribu-
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