Mystical Experiences of Arthur Koestler (1954) | Hacker News Reader

Mystical Experiences of Arthur Koestler (1954)

bodysoulandspirit.net

His book "The Act of Creation" is also very good. Somewhat related to prison experiences, John Leray invented sheaves while in a prison camp:

> Jean Leray (November 7, 1906–November 10, 1998) was confined to an officers’ prison camp (“Oflag”) in Austria for the whole of World War II. There he took up algebraic topology, and the result was a spectacular flowering of highly original ideas, ideas which have, through the usual metamorphism of history, shaped the course of mathematics in the sixty years since then.

It seems that solitude is generally conducive to creative activity for those that are somewhat positively oriented towards such activity.

by drastically restricting freedom, and with a serious fear of your life in hand each day, certain kinds of inner climbing become vivid and accessible. be kind with this knowledge

It's not about fear. It's about having long stretches of time to just think without distractions.

https://web.archive.org/web/20021027041844/http://bodysoulan...

Just a note before we overly romanticize Koestler, he convinced his wife to die in a suicide pact. He was ill, but his wife was not.

I have trouble with this because I really liked Darkness at Noon, but if I have to wrestle with cognitive dissonance so do y'all.

I think Darkness at Noon by Koestler is the best book about how system breaks man and forces into submission. The ending of 1984 is rather pale in comparison.

There are also a few books by Russian authors on that topic, but Koestler’s work is just better at capturing the essence of the system.

This is as good a place as any to mention that Koestler's long-lost original German manuscript titled "Sonnenfinsternis" was discovered in 2015 by a doctoral student digging through the archives of Zurich library. "Darkness at Noon" as known until then was a hastily completed translation into the English by Koestler's lover Daphne Hardy, available German versions being, in turn, back-translations from the English.

Both the German original and a new English translation have since been published.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18188912 (HN 2018)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon

Interesting! Perhaps it's the romantic in me, but a hasty translation by a lover (subsequently smuggled through Europe) does seem fascinating. Would you recommend the new translation over the old one? The article you linked does seem to imply that the new translation is at least more accurate:

> Daphne Hardy, the translator of the Urtext, had never before translated a book into English. She was just 21 years old and was forced to work under tremendous time pressure. She was familiar with neither the practices of the Soviet and National Socialist secret police nor the mechanisms of totalitarian states, thus she replaced Bolshevik terminology with British legal concepts and terms, which lent the system a milder and more civilized manifestation.

Unfortunately, I haven't read the new translation! (I was thrilled to learn of the discovery only weeks after finishing Hardy, but the whole thing receded from my attention in the three years it took for the new volumes to actually become available. I've taken this opportunity to finally order the German text.)

A 2019 LA Review of Books article [0] gives Hardy quite some credit and concludes about the new translation by Boehm:

> Despite aspects that makes this a less-than-authoritative edition, the translation itself shines. It is a smooth, gripping read, and contains passages inserted after Hardy’s translation was made, which now appear in English for the first time. New details, such as the exact song sung by Rubashov’s neighbor in prison, add freshness. Boehm corrects the chapter titles from Hardy’s “The First Hearing,” “The Second Hearing,” and so forth to “The First Interrogation,” which makes more sense in context.

[0] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/logic-alone-all-love-lai... (previously on HN but with no comments)

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