Chapter Fourteen

The Life of Alan Watts - New York to California 1951-57

 

The chilly farmhouse in Millbrook, New York was, according to Watts,   “one of those archaic rural structures whose rooms are sever closetless boxes with small window frames decaying from much painting”. The only room warm enough to live in was the kitchen, where Watts cooked and wrote.

Watts had started a new book, drawing on his own difficult experience – ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ published in 1951. In many ways this is Watts’ greatest book, as well as being one of his shortest.   Only 136 pages long, its genius lies in its brevity, its ability to express profound truths in the simplest and most direct terms.  It is, in this sense, almost poetry, although it has no  overt intention of being ‘lyrical.’

Watts opens the book with a prologue detailing what he calls ‘the backwards law’

“When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it – which immediately calls to an ancient and much neglected saying, ‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it’.”

He goes on to point out that insecurity, at a time when human life is peculiarly insecure and uncertain, is actually the result of trying to be secure, and that…’salvation and sanity consists in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves”.

What sounds like a apologia for fatalism quickly develops into something much more nuanced and subtle, but, which he suggests, is frustratingly difficult to grasp  - he describes these ideas as sounding ‘like something from Alice Through the Looking Glass’ of which, he says, 

“this book is a sort of philosophical equivalent. For the reader will frequently find himself in a topsy-turvy world in which the normal order of things seems to be completely reversed and common sense turned inside out and upside down”

By this time, Alan Watts was drinking heavily, although it was questionable that he was an alcoholic at this time. He wrote obliquely of his own dilemma in the ‘Wisdom of Uncertainty’…