Jan Zwicky, Once upon a Time in the West: Essays on the Politics of Thought and Imagination (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023).

I lived for a couple of years in the young 1970s in northern Norway and Switzerland. I spent time in Norway with the mountain Sami—this was a period when Arne Naess (Norwegian mountaineer, Spinoza scholar and founder of deep ecology with Delores LaChapelle) worked closely with the Sami to oppose the large dam projects. Naess lived in Austria from 1933-1935 and was involved, when there, with the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein. When I was in Switzerland, I took in the Swiss mountaineering tradition and soaked myself in the writings of Renaissance scholar Jacob Burckhardt (complicated history with Nietzsche), Hesse and Heidegger. I have been fortunate to spent time at Heidegger’s Hut in southern Germany  (Todtnauberg) and Nietzsche’s home in Sils Maria. I mention this the simple reason that each of these thinkers were focused and preoccupied with the dilemma of the West and its seeming deterioration and decline, its lemming-like stampede to a cliff’s edge, its hyper and unanalyzed addiction to the vita activa and its opposition to the vita contemplativa—such are the legitimate and focused concerns of Jan Zwicky’s recent probes and beauty of a book, Once upon a Time in the West, “Once”, “Time” and West” the target, the suggestive and classical fairy tale sequence not to miss.    

Once upon a Time in the West is divided into 14 reflective and meditative chapters, the personal and philosophical woven together on a finely textured tapestry of thought and insight. The initial chapter, “Auden as Philosopher: How Poets Think” is the golden key that walks the attentive reader into this bounty of a book, two ways of seeing and the consequences for the West of taking one path or the other: “Auden’s Poetic Epistemology” versus “The Epistemology of Baconian Science.” Bacon was somewhat more sophisticated than his detractors make him out to be but the ‘novum organum,” when pushed too far, conceals much what Zwicky’s read of Auden-Coleridge unconceals—this is a chapter worthy of multiple slow reads.