[lit-ideas] Re: Eliot (and Oregon as Suburb)
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2005 12:34:29 -0700
on 6/4/05 10:23 AM, Andreas Ramos at andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> Graduation cards hereabouts and quotation sites agree that T.S. Eliot said,
>> "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one
>> can go." I'm no Eliot expert. I'd like to know what the context for this
>> statement was.
>
> He said it to Wilma Buttermesser.
>
> The context? He was trying to get her in bed.
>
Andreas gets right to my motive; I'm thinking that if T.S.Eliot did in fact
say this, he didn't mean what graduation cards seem to think he meant. Sign
of the times--I was talking to someone about this puzzle. Came the
question, "What does it matter, whether he said it or not?" I started to
explain that to congratulate graduates with a made-up or falsely attributed
quotation undermines the values we are supposedly celebrating... but I gave
up the attempt when I saw that the climb was going to be too steep.
If Oregon ranks as a U.K. suburb, the census must be counting anglophiles
and descendants in addition to ex-pats. Absolute ex-pat density (do I sound
sufficiently sociological?) is far higher in L.A.
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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