cover image About Blady: A Pattern Out of Time

About Blady: A Pattern Out of Time

Laurens Van Der Post. William Morrow & Company, $23 (255pp) ISBN 978-0-688-11412-1

In this rhapsodic, self-dramatizing spiritual autobiography which often verges on the mystical, famed explorer van der Post seeks a patternsee last sentence in his life's seemingly random events. His great love of horses, especially a black-and-tan mare named Blady, inspires flights of philosophical speculation on human relationship to nature, the soul's immortality and the unhealthy devaluation of the feminine in modern life. Hopping around in time and place from fighting the Japanese in Java during WW II to watching sunsets on the Kalahari desert, he contemplates his son's experience with terminal cancer and theorizes that the origins of disease reside in the soul. His friendships with Jung and with Jungian analysts fuel his ruminations on ``the sickness of our time,'' defined here as a refusal to enlarge one's awareness. Seeking renewal, van der Post imaginatively enters the mythological realm of Zeus and Prometheus. Many transcendent moments experienced on his travels punctuate his quest. this point made in first sentence/right you are, as always. don't need, so I've cut.gs (May)