The Peripatetic Philosopher acknowledges:

DEVLIN

A Psychological Novel

I appreciate those who have taken the time to note my effort to complete this work begun so long ago.

DEVLIN is a different kind of novel, and one I could not have written when I was younger, which however is when most compelling novels are written.

At university, I was asked by my sophomore literature professor, while taking a required course, to leave science and devote myself to literature. He wanted to recommend me for the University of Iowa's internationally known humanities program.

Like my many readers, who have had similar if not exactly the same options presented to them, I chose to stay in science as I saw it as my ticket out of poverty.

Life, as Schopenhauer has pointed out, is composed of a consistent order as though written by a novelist. Events that seemed incidental or of little moment, turn out to be indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot.

Who composed that plot? Schopenhauer asks rhetorically, and answers, it is a product of one's dreams, aspects of our unconscious of which we are unaware. It is in this subtext of life of which the whole of life is composed by the will within.

Were I not to have gone the route of science, and not have had a career in corporate society, I would have unlikely met Beautiful Betty to whom I've been married to for 32 years. Nor would I have had the luxury to write as I desired in my advanced years. The source of all my writing is representative of my own life and experience in many theaters and careers across this increasingly small planet called "earth."

People write to me about how one becomes a writer, hoping to be given some inspirational suggestion to launch them on such a career. They envision celebrity and wealth, recognition and influence, notoriety and fame. I never answer such requests because such people are not acquainted with the "God within," and look for short cuts to the most demanding profession I have ever entertained.

If one is truly interested in writing, real writing, the kind of career Schopenhauer espouses, one will write out of one's own knowledge and experience. One will be writing about what one knows, and not be worrying about readers. If one has this courage, and it can be construed as such, one will be tapping the reservoir within that must first connect with oneself before one can expect to be connected in any meaningful way with anyone else.

More people are writing and publishing today than ever before but one wonders if they are writing first for self-understanding, which all the writers of consequence have been doing forever, or are they writing for confirmation of their own worth.

Novelist and short story writer, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., once said that his wife could have been a better novelist than he was if she would have simply stayed away from writing courses. 

Just as an athlete has music in his soul of which he exploits unconsciously with his fantastic movements, a writer has similar music within if he would but allow it to surface and play havoc with convention which is always out of tune with the times.

JRF

BOOK’S DESCRIPTION:

The year is 1968, a year that severed the moral certainty of the past from the future shattering traditional anchors and reliable reference points.  Seamus, “Dirk” Devlin, a young Irish American chemical engineer of provincial roots, finds himself in South Africa to facilitate the formation of a new chemical conglomerate in the era of Afrikaner apartheid, a policy beyond his bucolic grasp.   

A quarter century past WWII, the United States staggers into the future, its security once nestled comfortably between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, is now challenged by a hegemony for which it has no history, but which it embraces with characteristic hubris.  

Devlin personifies this high jinx, armed with his technology, but culturally programmed for another time and a different world.  Finding himself self-estranged on the world stage, he enters a society equally out of step with the times.  The psychosexual tension that unfolds introduces him to a self that he did not know existed.  This psychological novel introduces the reader to Devlin’s world, a world that still holds the modern mind hostage.

BOOK’S AUTHOR:

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. is an industrial/organization psychologist who has written a score of books in the genre of social psychology.  He has previously written “In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel.”  DEVLIN is a 50 year promise to himself that he would write such a book one day.