Author: Mark Vernon

Why people go to war is puzzling. Historians still debate the origins of the First World War, for example, no expert quite nailing the reasons that the great powers tipped the globe into industrialised catastrophe. But how to understand the energy of enmity is again pressing. Conflicts in Europe and elsewhere show that default peace… Continue reading War. What is it good for? William James and Adam Smith explain

What makes a genius? How do some artists develop a style that is, at once, utterly distinctive and yet, also, universal? And what is the meaning of that seemingly paradoxical link?William Blake provides a case in point… A new essay at Substack, this time as a guest writer for The Culturist. Do read on here. 

The standard evolutionary story of the arrival of our species depends too much on strikingly modern assumptions. Material survival, social skills, and the development of technology are the interpretative tools used to read the evidence. So in Part 1 of this alternative narrative, I developed an account that prioritises inner life and lived experience. Neanderthals… Continue reading HUMAN. The alternative evolutionary story of who we are. Part 2

Hands at the Cuevas de las Manos upon Río Pinturas. Image: Wikicommons Big history depends upon a tired premise: we are cave people trapped in a modern world. But honest, the science doesn’t stack up. There is another narrative to be told. Part 1 of a new essay is at my Substack, A Golden String:… Continue reading HUMAN. The alternative evolutionary story of who we are. Part 1

An audio version of this talk is available at my podcast, Inner Life, available via podcast feeds. Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination is now available worldwide. To celebrate, Mark Vernon and Robert Rowland Smith discuss all things Blake from angels and images, to poetry and prophecy. 

On the eve of the U.S. release of AWAKE! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, a conversation with author, Mark Vernon. What inspired you to write Awake! and focus on William Blake’s imagination as a central theme? ​Blake is widely loved but not so widely understood and, in my view, also regularly misunderstood… Continue reading Energy is the Only Life! QnA with Mark Vernon

An audio version of this talk is at my podcast, Inner Life, available via podcast feeds. I very much enjoyed speaking with Jason Whittaker, a profound lover of Blake, because we have our differences about how Blake speaks to us and, I hope, that is illuminating. We discussed Blake the visionary and mystic, and resisting… Continue reading William Blake’s spiritual analysis of our times. A conversation with Jason Whittaker and Mark Vernon

Why is the mechanical view of reality so strong? Why does billiard-ball atomism remain the default popular metaphysics? Similarly, why the pervasive hold of the equally reductive and scientifically passé idea that genes encode organisms? After all, philosophers and scientists have been stressing the error for decades and more. New essay at my Substack, A… Continue reading Poetry Fetter’d, Fetters the Human Race. William Blake and the remarkable persistence of reductive materialism

How does poetry work? What does the poetic release in us? My favourite theory comes from Owen Barfield, the great friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. He has a proposal about the magic of poesy and it has to do with the energy of words. A new essay at my Substack, A Golden String.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Thus wrote William Blake, making the doors of perception one his best known metaphors. Jim Morrison named a band after it, Aldous Huxley a book, and nowadays it is cited in contexts ranging from game theory to psychedelics.… Continue reading Cleanse the Doors of Perception! But what did William Blake mean?