Engraved on the wall outside the Scottish Parliament are the words “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” Attributed to Alasdair Gray, Scotland’s national treasure, this perfectly exemplifies Gray’s humility, his awareness that his status is a shared one.
This goes some way to explain the title of Gray’s essay collection, Of Me and Others. “I thought this book would turn out to be a ragbag of interesting scraps,” he writes in the foreword, “I now think it has the unity of a struggle for a confident culture, a struggle shared with a few who became good friends and thousands I have never met.” This essay collection is all at once an intellectual autobiography of Scotland’s greatest living writer; a conversation with writers and painters who influenced and have been influenced by him, and a cultural and political manifesto-as-collage.
A cult figure all over the world and across generations, Gray engages with figures both known in North America, such as R.D. Laing, Anthony Burgess and Will Self, and largely unknown; Susan Boyd, Joan Ure, and Philip Hobsbaum. What emerges is a portrait not just of himself, but of a radically democratic vision of society, profoundly concerned not just with self-expression but of care for one’s fellow citizens.
