Nice, WW; no wonder you are such a fan. Eerily prescient, wasn't she?
'...very few care...about the truth.' Yeppers.
Another dystopian was Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano in particular. But worse than being replaced by machines, many workers are replaced by off-shoring. And not so much above by engineers and business bosses, because money is made by selling the phoney derivatives-of-money.

p.s. Can I see the Golden Notebook in video?

Definitely a must read for everyone. One of the first "influential" books to come my way when I first entered college many moons ago. It has been awhile, so I should probably read it again. One of the lasting impressions of the book was that it captured the real attempt to navigate the world as it is while trying to better that world at the same time maintaining one's autonomy and connections to others, looking for road maps and discovering the maps we do have aren't exactly accurate. In other words, there are no easy answers, in love or in war. Disillusionment comes easy.

Wendy,,

I'm going to try and get a copy of this.

Wise women (you and Lessing), we need many more! (And of course, more than three wise men!)

Greatly appreciate.

That's funny
Always an optomist

Now you see; there you go. I've read all of Lessing, more than once but...not her science fiction. Maybe there her prescient thought is most obvious. I'll read it, starting tomorrow. Thank you.

Thanks for this Wendy - very thought-provoking as always. I have a great site for used books; in fact they have "The Golden Notebook" for $1 plus shipping of $2.65.

It is abebooks.com, and I can vouch for it; I've gotten quite a few bargains and all the books were in great shape.

Because in all of us brought up in a Western democracy...

Ms. Lessing's foresight may be 20/20, but her hindsight is apparently dim. She grew up in Persia and Rhodesia, neither of them "Western democracies," and it's probably a mistake to assign the narrative voice of the Golden Notebooks to "Doris Lessing," ex-wife of the East German Ambassador to Uganda, and an extraordinarily mixed-up personality at every stage of her long, long, long and mixed-up life.

Ha. Can't get the link to work here.
If you want to read some more,
go to google books, type in
"The Golden Notebook" (inside quotation marks).

C'Ville: as they say in the south: "Praise Jesus." The library is well-intentioned but causes one to fret in terms of immediate gratification. And the librarians are so humorless when it comes to margin notes, underlinings or bent tabs. Thank you, then, for this link.

I'm not disillusioned. I'm just mad that a few have hijacked the many. I mean really really MAD.

I try to reread 1984 and Brave New World at least once a decade, because I seem to have a different take on it as I age, things I didn't see before.

I will try to pick up a copy of Lessing.

Thanks ma'am.

Well…the energy available to us is both negative and positive. We operate with both. We’re just electrical, surging this way and that. We can use either direction and transform it toward the good. Of course that line wavers but we reach for it anyway. Synchronicity exists and energy builds on itself. So I just look at it as available energy without judging the merits and go from there. (Lessons learned plunging into depressions and suffering physical pain.) What works for me is a kind of temporary judgmental detachment from events, viewing them as extremely “interesting” at least until I can get creative and work my way up and out of a negative state of mind.

When I write I often use a highly negative impetus (like Palin last night). But changing it is fun and during the forward motion I feel better. When someone, me or you or anyone, gets a good vibe, that’s the best. We’re all part of the same energy, so when you laugh, even with painful chagrin, we join in some marvelous exchange of energy. We’re all connected and affect each other in zillions of ways and I give a very large hot-damn! how it feels to be here exchanging energy with you and Doris Lessing and everyone else, yes even George. A negative view is just another part of the energy field - a place we bounce new ideas from.

hahahaha

I have trouble with eyes

hahah

I agree Wendy. I reread Slaughterhouse Five just a few months ago. Either I wasn't paying attention the first time or it is only now that what he wrote touched me. What images (the cart amidst the rubble looms large for me) affected you?

Vonnegut's 'Hocus Pocus' was one of his unsung classics, in which he portrayed a future world in which the US has subcontracted out the running of all federal prisons to a Japanese firm. Vonnegut saw the move toward privitization of public services clearly only a short time after Ronnie Reagan slept his way through 8 years of the US presidency.

The protagonist "is fired from his job as a college professor after having several of his witticisms surreptitiously recorded by the daughter of a popular conservative commentator. Eugene then becomes a teacher at a nearby overcrowded prison run by a Japanese corporation. His employer, and occasional acquaintance, is the prison's warden, Hiroshi Matsumoto. After a massive prison break, Eugene's former college is occupied by escapees from the prison, who take the staff hostage. Eventually the college is turned into a prison, since the old prison was destroyed in the breakout. Ironically, Eugene is ordered to be the warden of the prison, but then becomes an inmate, presumably via the same type of "hocus pocus" that led to his dismissal from his professorship."

Kurt Vonnegut was one of the good ones. Prescient, while still maintaining a sense of humor. No mean feat.

Great quote. So apropos.

“After a while I realized I was doing what I had done before, creating the “third” - the woman altogether better than I was. For I could positively mark the point where Ella left reality, left how she would, in fact, behave because of her nature; and move into a large generosity of personality impossible to her. But I didn’t dislike this new person I was creating; I was thinking that quite possibly these marvelous, generous things we walk side by side with in our imaginations could come in existence, simply because we need them, because we imagine them. Then I began to laugh because of the distance between what I was imagining and what in fact I was, let alone what Ella was.”

Could you and Strato explain this to me? I hate being so thick, but...there it is.

I've been tempted to download 'The Golden Notebook' onto my kindle, but I'm afraid, based on your quoted text, that it might cut so close to the bone, it might facilitate my falling into despair while traveling alone in foreign lands, (something I'm completely capable of accomplishing without Lessing's help). Know any good comedies?

Political comedies? Is that an oxymoron? Oh, maybe Palin's book and it's satiric other?
I wish I could recall the name of the book I read last year by an American journalist living in London. Her chapters on speeches in Parliament and decision-making debate by MPs was so funny I could not finish my turn in reading it out loud with friends. It'll come back to me...

Oxymoron? Hmm... I'm thinking redundant, maybe?

As I interpreted Lessing's intent, her character Ella was an independent, self-sufficient career woman (a novelty in the post-WWII era) who gradually subsumed herself to a married man with whom she was having an affair. However, rather than succumbing to the temptation to rationalize and justify her own actions as "the other woman" by seeing his wife stereotypically as a harpy who did not understand him, she consciously focused on what she perceived as the inherent goodness of his wife -- a woman who was keeping the home fires burning, raising two children without the assistance of her betraying, absentee husband. And so, ironically, it was this admiration for a woman she had never met, but only imagined, that caused Ella to go against or beyond her own nature to become "more like her." Thus, though she retained her job, she gradually gave up her hard-won independence -- the quality that had attracted the man to begin with -- in an effort to be as "good" a person as his wife.
I don't know that this character would fly fifty years later, as our culture would no longer automatically endorse the idea that passive endurance by a woman is her higher level of "good."
But then again, maybe I'm having an outburst of irrational optimism.....

Brilliant, Querty. Thanks. Animal Farm -- another must re-read.

Spot on.

Thank you wwstaebler and Ickyma. I shall be reading The Golden Notebook and Messiah when I get jaded again, i.e. in the very near future!

I thought it might be about the vital imaginations
we need to survive our circumstances and move forward.
More "anything is possible" than bummer. Ha.

Cheers Staebler!

Beknowen full
of it or non
The wisest wit I warn
be ever torn.