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Sticking with Mallory, for better or for worse, as he goes from riches to rags while London devolves into a catastrophic chaos. It would be clever to see if the severe stink was directly the result of an early advent of engine computing, but way too many pages were given over to his sexual escapades with Hetty, very loosely connected to whatshername Gerard who must be featured in a more cohesive story somewhere else.

A shorter chapter (as far as endnotes go, barely there) yet some profound connections between measuring the immeasurable through the magic of poetry. Amato veers toward the autobiographical fallacy of equating Prospero with the playwright yet there is also a sense that poetry has the magical powers to name the unknown, giving humans our being. Heidegger of course has plenty to say about how poets enchant with spells.

The mystery of monads is the topic of the remaining chapters, a concept both philosophically elegant and scientifically boundary-pushing if it were a bit easier to grasp instead of being so Lovecraftian unknowable. As much as I want to follow the logic that led Leibniz to put such a stake in monads as evidence of the mind of God, it will require more than a few very short chapters to know the mirrors of the universe.

Why Heidegger is a question left on the backburner for the time being in order to answer the more pressing question, what is the world to do with Shakespeare? His omnipresence in the English language is investigated, interrogated and even interpreted as being a song for the whole world to sing. A Midsummer Night’s Dream works as a way into Heidegger’s philosophy based upon an unshakespearized literary world.

“The best of all possible worlds” is an idea too intriguing to be written off as Voltaire does, and even reading Candide during my undergraduate made me aware of the complexities of defining the best. Much of Leibniz’s argument is the infallible wisdom of God to choose the best for each sentient being, but on a cosmic average that allows if one human (or fawn or earthworm) wants better, someone else gets it.

“The best of all possible worlds” is an idea too intriguing to be written off as Voltaire does, and even reading Candide during my undergraduate made me aware of the complexities of defining the best. Much of Leibniz’s argument is the infallible wisdom of God to choose the best for each sentient being, but on a cosmic average that allows if one human (or fawn or earthworm) wants better, someone else gets it.

Jung gets plenty of time at the podium explaining papers written by his grad students with only a few interjections from unnamed “Participants” who may or may not have been in the room during seminars. At first I was hoping to hear more from the Prof, but now I wanted more direct reporting from each paper’s author. Yet perhaps this is just another layer of the unconscious collectively formed by him.

Heidegger starts out with a question and Amato has many, most of them being rhetorical, concerning technology. Possible answers include art as “a world elsewhere” as Caius Martius Coriolanus seeks, but the pharmakon of technology still left unanswered. Unanswerable? No. But like Amato’s singular interpretation of Coriolanus’ defeat by his mother’s moving speech, there are plenty of wrong answers to find in this book.

It appears that the authors (including the editor herself) took the overarching question and added the possessive pronoun ‘my’ in the middle – not so surprising as theatre artists will write from what they know. But it limits the general sense of ‘theatre now’ if it is all about ‘me then’ – plus there is that teetotalling attitude towards technology that has started to become a bit grating, as if a stage has no tech.

As the dream interpreters become more modern, the sense mystery is less present, much like the line from Stoppard’s (1967) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead about seeing a unicorn: “the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience” (p. 21) so Freud’s famous Interpretation seem noteworthy.

Other couples start to illustrate the much more positive route that married couples can go, but for Tom and Louise it keeps them stuck in the trenches (the pub across the street from Kenyon, actually) sniping at each other for minor misunderstandings. Tom is determined to move on, but like his predecessor Rob, only seems capable of jumping from one rock to another with the faint glimmer of the rock’n’roll dream life.

Part story of wonders at the dawn of the Enlightenment, part cautionary tale of who’s got your back and who will stab you, Leibniz’s life was full of travel, brilliant ideas and missed opportunities. His characteristica universalis would have been better than the Internet (at least as things stand now) and can be beautifully summed up by his statement about some philosophers solving issues at their abacuses.

Good to see, especially in connection to my own research, that Brecht’s theories are still informing Canadian theatre ‘now,’ despite being one of the few places the exiled playwright did not visit on his trek around the northern hemisphere. As if a contestation of the alleged claim of Portuguese explorers who avoided colonizing the empty North because “ça nada,” theatre-makers across the country rebuke that there is.

A curious, unexpected addition to the Hornbyverse yet fits in easily with the Robs, Wills and Duncans who are the Brit puer aeternus populating his novels. In Tom’s case, the novel turn is that Louise is the unfaithful spouse who is not entirely to blame with their differing opinions on Brexit. At least the unnamed couple who visit therapist Kenyon before them seem to be on the mend or at least getting some.

The last two chapters suddenly switch to a take-down of other theorists whose old-key philosophy on arts didn’t meet the Langer standard, but the appendix is another story altogether. She adds reflections on cinema, gathered by her colleagues, that accurately predict the appeal of virtual reality as the “dream mode” or virtual present that unfolds past and future, but would not be an actual thing for several decades.

Worries that there wouldn’t be enough story to spread out over this alternate past have been replaced with dread that there is now too much, crammed into a never ending chapter that follow self-made Mallory to his undoing. Somehow it connects to the murder of Mick and Lady Ada’s nefarious double-life, but it doesn’t look like Sybil will be seen anytime soon, unless she is the one sending threatening notes to Mallory.

Fascinating just to see who was in the room with Professor Jung as they analyzed ancient dream interpretations and compared them to the relatively new psychological practice developed for this course. Makes me more curious about the dreams of average people who did not conquer nations or were alchemists for the courts of the ruling class. Each of the paper presentations relates the lofty visions down to the everyday.

Fascinating just to see who was in the room with Professor Jung as they analyzed ancient dream interpretations and compared them to the relatively new psychological practice developed for this course. Makes me more curious about the dreams of average people who did not conquer nations or were alchemists for the courts of the ruling class. Each of the paper presentations relates the lofty visions down to the everyday.

Amazing to discover the two great forms of art have little to do with literature, but as a poetic display of virtual future, drama breaks away from static words on a page (or other completed “works” of art) as the audience anticipates the happy or tragic end. For the comic rhythm Langer really gets into the biological analogies, appropriately enough for the procreation-themed plays, yet tragic’s destiny is ineffable.

Leapfrogging one decade of personality development to the next from early schooling to young adults and mid-life marriage, the lectures Jung gave also chart what should have been a maturing period for most of Europe between the wars, but went off in many terrifying odd directions. Many today would raise eyebrows over Jung’s attitude towards homosexuals, thankfully not as sinister as in the soon-to-be warring nations.

A bit worried, by the end of the first ‘iteration’ and the start of the second, that the whole book would be steampunkish vignettes of disposable characters while the prototype AI known as ‘Engines’ kept clacking away at the real story. Mallory’s rise in fortune and his involvement with journalist/spy Oliphant at least demonstrates that all the stories so far will be continuous and connected, prompting other worries.

With Langer’s exploration of literary arts, from lyric to epic and novel to non-fiction, she runs the risk of having her pages ripped out by the students of John Keating’s class before they emblematically stand on top of their desks. Using words discursively to explain how artistically they can be formulated takes something away from their impact and yet helps her instill the idea of a virtual world created in words.

As amusing as it seems to read Jung’s assessment of children’s mental development in such outdated terms: backwards, slowcoaches, stupid, psychopathic, etc., his insights would have laid the groundwork for a more neurological understanding of their condition: Asperger, autistic, dyslexic and the like. More importantly is his empathy towards all learners from firsthand observation to know how each child is growing up.

One of the most impressive things about Jung is how wholehearted he approaches his topics, in this case slightly outside his psychoanalytic field with child psychology and education, and comes up with insightful observations about children’s language, dreams and understanding of the world. Not only these, but views on automatonization of schools and true lifelong learning, in lectures and foreword for another’s book.

A high point in steampunk literature, nearly thirty years later merely a sputtering genre, this narrative takes it time to get going. Sybil seems stuck on the Gibsonian Street while her partner Mick has all the earmarks of a mirrorshaded hustler. Some world-building business thrown in about Sam Houston trying to retake Texas and other spot-the-celebrity mid-nineteenth century personalities like a kino-addicted Keats.

With a well-reasoned analogy set between music and virtual time, Langer looks at the next step in describing art forms philosophically, dance. It turns out to be a giant leap away from all the arts previously discussed and will not find its match in literary and dramatic forms to follow, but the virtual power described here is something more elemental and mystical to human experience that escapes even Isadora Duncan.

It seems like de Montaigne fancies himself a bon vivant whose philosophical pursuits have been recorded with the right amount of mot juste, yet the last three essays in this collection speak increasingly erratic to the point where he teeters upon becoming like the classic Abe Simpson meme, old man yells at cloud, with him listing off all the ailments he somehow survived by adhering to the Roman way.

Admittedly not a theologian, Jung’s interest in unpacking the archetypes held over from the Old Testament and their influence on a psychological understanding of the New has a historical moment to respond to: the Papal Bull in 1950 known as the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. But this Catholic matter is the top of an iceberg with pagan, Eastern and alchemical meanings all supporting Jung’s thesis on the symbol of Job.

It should be no surprise by now that this stereotype-filled story devolves into ‘the greatest generation’ nonsense by having characters make claims about how badass they were during global conflicts the United States haphazardly stumbled into, as if veterans of WWII and Vietnam were expected to make it this far into a silly novel about skateboarding couriers, samurai hackers and that damned Rat Thing deus ex machina.

Jung runs with the theory that John in the Gospels, Epistles and Revelation are all the same, borderline psychotic author, he looks ahead to what meaning his warning portend. Frightfully, much of how the end of times comes across on the page looks like the Piscean aeon, where atomic bombs and climate change take on an eerie numinous quality, but here Jung hopes that it is just one more step towards humanity learning.