ALTERNATIVE BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS OF ALL THINGS

A massive compendium of the author’s thoughts on society, religion, and other topics.

In this follow-up to Science, Religion, Politics, and Cards (2023), Blair presents his thoughts on a wide variety of subjects, from incidents in history to aspects of religion and spirituality. Despite the author’s attempts to broaden his focus, virtually everything in these pages remains intensely personal, oriented entirely around Blair’s own thoughts and experiences, often delivered in fragments and without any context. Long breakdowns of various religious concepts jostle against hand-drawn alternate Tarot cards and single-paragraph reviews of movies (about 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Blair enigmatically writes, “Extraordinarily expressive virtually any way a person can behold it if the viewer does not feel jolted by implications”). The prose often reads oddly, as when the author describes the Oneida Colony as existing in “something like the Nineteenth Century” (it existed in the 19th century) in “something like upstate New York” (it was located in upstate New York) “an extremely long time ago” (it ended in 1875). Many of his reminiscences included here are abbreviated, incomplete, or jarringly self-incriminating. When someone asks Blair a pro forma question about what sets him apart from other people, his response is, “That is on a need-to-know basis, and you don’t need to know it at this time. If someday a situation happens such that you wind up needing to know that, then maybe you will wind up knowing it then.”

At the beginning of this book, Blair includes a note advising his readers that they need not have read its preceding volume to appreciate this present work. Although this is true in terms of continuity of content, familiarity with the first book would at least prepare the reader for the hyperactive delivery, abundance of material, and near-complete incoherence that characterize this project. The text essentially reads like an 800-page private diary, consisting mostly of transcribed notes from the author to himself. In 2010, for instance, he attends Olivia Newton-John’s keynote speech for Integrative Health in Westchester, Pennsylvania. Rather than describe the speech (or include a transcript), Blair reproduces the thoughts he recorded while listening “as an out-of-state visitor observing the proceedings, though remaining silent except for minimal small talk with attendees”; in other words, pages of jottings that are incomprehensible to anybody on Earth except for himself. The huge majority of the book is similarly circumscribed by the author’s solipsism. Some of the pages have illustrations by the author (and plenty of typos, like “I deliberately budded in”), and almost all of them are filled with telegraphic bits and pieces of nonsense or windy, aimless prose like, “However, I believe that there is potential value at times with if a human being, after killing an animal, rather than choosing to seek to fully eat that animal, chooses to leave some portion of the remains for whichever scavenger animals might happen to come along and eat that remainder of the remains.” Readers will find precious little to latch onto here.

A bewildering assortment of thoughts and half-thoughts about dozens of subjects.