Retrospective on Homo Aestheticus

Abstract

Although I've been asked to revisit Homo Aestheticus, my second book, I will begin by describing the laborious and uneven emergence of its predecessor, What Is Art For?, which was published four years earlier, in 1988.I began writing it when I was a housewife in Sri Lanka, in the middle 1970s.I had some ideas and wanted to see where they would go.Writing was a way of finding out.And write I did, over and over, over years and miles.I added to the book in 1977-78 in Oxford, where I had a six-month fellowship to do nothing but read in the Bodleian Library.Later versions ensued in 1978-79 in Nigeria, and in Papua New Guinea between 1982-84.Finding a publisher took more than five years.These were pre-email days, necessitating intercontinental airmail letters that took as long as three weeks each way to reach their destination.And publishers are not known for prompt replies.I found myself waiting as impatiently for the mailman each day as Radha and other women in Indian miniature paintings waited for their lover.Most publishers whom I queried did not even want to see the book.One editor looked at the manuscript and asked me to cut it by about a third.I obliged, but she could not obtain strong enough recommendations from readers and, after eighteen months of hope and dread, turned it down.Devastated, I put the careworn pages away for a

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