I got a clearer view of a coastline that I've only dimly glimpsed and then only through the eyes of various conflicted characters who populate a number of Saul Bellow's novels - the unknown land being that of Wilhelm Reich. His analytic style, and particularly, the orgone accumulator he developed, mattered to Bellow for a time, cropping up in his fiction and in his real life; an article I read sometime ago had Bellow sitting in one of these wooden, metal lined boxes for hours at a time, trying to get elusive "orgone energy" before being told to run out into the woods and scream like a banshee.

Reich earlier in his career, this time in Austria, simultaneously shocked and wowed with his advocacy of something that today we take for granted because we talk about it like we do the weather - the orgasm. 

My Reichian insights owe their origins to a film I've just seen at the Austrian Cultural Forum earlier this evening. Shown in a tiny, first floor room with a disproportionately large chandelier in front of maybe thirty people. All with some interest, professional or personal, in Reich. 

The Q & A that followed was as enjoyable as the film. It felt like being in a very large Hampstead sitting room surrounded by engaging, educated, articulate Mittel Europeans, who each had some personal stake in Reich. One elderly woman, wearing a red sweater, in particular stood out: she bounced with questions, in fact it was more like a conversation she was having with the film director, which he equally enjoyed. I caught the pride in her voice when, as I expected her to do all along she said she was Viennese by birth. 

I love events like this. My intellect needs stretching every day. Evenings like this are like going to the brain gym for me.