The Most Dangerous Game
<p>Asked by the <em>New York Times</em> in 2023 what books he avoids, novelist Aleksandar Hemon <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/books/review/aleksandar-hemon-by-the-book-interview.html?searchResultPosition=5" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">replied</a> with lettered-class <em>oblige</em>: “No advice books, least of all self-help manuals…”</p>
<p>The moment a category is pinned on something — a person, a type of literature, a politics — its relationships and parameters are fixed. In his new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Games-Life-How-Play/dp/1722506245" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">S</a><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Games-Life-How-Play/dp/1722506245" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"><em>even Games of Life and How to Play</em></a>, scholar of esotericism Richard Smoley brings a sledgehammer to that party.</p>
<p>At risk of further labeling, I think it is fair to say that Smoley, perhaps today’s most penetrating interpreter of Western esoteric tradition, has produced an <em>anti-self help </em>book. Since the esoteric tradition of which Smoley is a leading scholar posits that life exists on a sliding scale of polarities (“as above, so below”), it is a given that opposition completes.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:700/1*cxMC3N3DzoeMn0_mWtzDZw.jpeg" style="height:1123px; width:700px" /></p>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Games-Life-How-Play/dp/1722506245" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Seven Games of Life and How to Play</a> by Richard Smoley (G&D Media, 2023)</p>
<p>In1616, the late-Renaissance alchemist Michael Maier (1568–1622) published an allegorical work called <em>Lusus Serius</em>, Latin for a “serious game.” This is Smoley’s view of life: not as a series of problems to be solved, boxes to be checked, emotions to be resolved, or even a “self” to be actualized; but as a deadly serious drama from which none of us, barring extreme countervailing measures, is free to sit out.</p>
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