But there are times and places when you need to go to the weird, the demonic, the counterparadigmatic, the demented. We have Halloween for a reason.
All my adult life I have read relatively mainstream books, which for me might be Paul Johnson, Jacques Barzun, etc.
[I think I actually missed commenting on his death; “From Dawn to Decadence” influenced me a lot, and I count myself a fan. I was down in San Antonio a while back, and actually briefly entertained fantasies of meeting him, but of course it was impractical. I would far rather have met him than any rock star or actor living or dead. The person living I would most like to meet is Doris Lessing.]
But I have long had a habit of making perhaps every 20th book something massively contrary to dominant paradigms. One good example is Graham Hancock’s “Fingerprints of the Gods”, or a book on UFO’s, or ghosts, or Atlantis, or the Illuminati.
What you do when you incorporate these types of things is stretch your mind. If you think of perception as a sort of internal mirroring of what is actually in front of you, you can only reflect things for which you have a reactive surface, for which your mind is prepared. And since we can’t know how things REALLY are, it is in my view a good practice to stretch your mind from time to time.
OK, two wild ideas: what if Lanza was trying to PREVENT the murder? What if somehow he knew it was going to happen, but got there too late?
Second: what if “Fast and Furious” had as its actual INTENTION providing guns to Mexican gangsters, so that they in turn could serve as enforcers or assassins as needed?
Thinking is fun if you put no limits on it. For me, to say something is POSSIBLE is almost never to say I believe it. Most of the time, if I don’t have to render a judgement, I don’t. I keep a lot of things in the “could be/insufficient evidence” category. I have no need to be right all the time. I deal well with ambiguity, and will say that we all live with it. Some people are just too stupid to realize it.