[lit-ideas] Re: On the possibility of mellowness in old age

  • From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2014 18:43:19 -0330

*Truth and Method*  Omg! What a self-contradictory title. The book has nothing
to say about either truth or method.  Moreover, Gad's woeful conservatism in
that book has been suitably trashed by Jurgen Habermas (The Gadamer-Habermas
Debate).

I will not mention here that Gad spent an entire dinner with my wife talking
about neo-Nazi youth in Germany. In German! To this day, I'm not quite sure as
to his motives or the exact nature of the conversation.

OK, now I'm really out'ta here.

Cheers, Walter O

P.S. If you're looking for what they call "mellow yellow", I have the malt for
you.


Quoting Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>:

> It may be that I have somewhat neglected my philosophical studies lately, but
> I am not yet prepared to be described as a representative of the unschooled
> perspective. I am reading some Kant and Russell to get back into shape, and
> Gadamer's Truth and Method is on the way. (Should have been here already, but
> you know how you can't keep women to a timetable.) Soon I'll be better armed
> to tackle the opposition.   O.K.
> 
> 
> 
> On Friday, January 24, 2014 9:33 PM, Mike Geary <gearyservice@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>  
> Glad you changed your mind. I don't want to be the only "unschooled
> perspective" here troubling deaf heaven with my bootless cries. 
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 8:43 AM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Hello Lawrence,
> >
> >
> >I have only now seen this post. Thanks for the comments. I used to be a
> great fan of the Lord of Rings; must have read it half a dozen of times from
> cover to cover when I was younger. There was hardly an obscure  name in
> Tolkien's world that I didn't know, and still probably recognize most of
> them. Of course, Tolkien, even though not writing exactly what we might
> expect to read from an Oxford professor, made great use of his linguistic,
> historical and literary knowledge in fashioning the Middle Earth.
> >
> >
> >I have changed my mind about unsubscribing, as was probably expected. I can
> be quite passionate myself about ideas, of course, but less so about
> philosophical ones. I can see though how someone who has made a career in
> philosophy, for example, might be more intense about these than I am.
> >
> >
> >O.K.
> >
> >
> >
> >On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 12:54 PM, Lawrence Helm
> <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> >Omar,
> > 
> >These 12 contributors you refer to have their favorite ideas, but there are
> others.  JRR Tolkien was as narrowly focused as anyone here, and yet . . . 
> > 
> >On page 105 of his biography of Tolkien, Carpenter refers to a time after
> Tolkien’s wife had died.  Tolkien was by that time famous and realized
> someone would write his biography.  He wrote to his son Christopher about
> Edith:  “She was (and knew she was) my Luthien.  I will say no more
> now.  But I should like ere long to have a long talk with you.  For if as
> seems probable I shall never write any ordered biography – it is against my
> nature, which expresses itself about things deepest felt in tales and myths
> – someone close in heart to me should know something about things that
> records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which
> we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal wounds that later often
> proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began – all
> of which (over and above personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable,
> or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times
>  marred our lives – and to explain how these never touched our depths nor
> dimmed the memories of our youthful love.  For ever (especially when alone)
> we still met in the woodland glade and went hand in hand many times to escape
> the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.” 
> > 
> >Carpenter discusses Tolkien’s eventful life up until 1925 when he became a
> professor at Oxford.  He is only on page 118 by that time and has to get to
> page 260 before he is done, and he seems to find the prospect daunting.  He
> writes, “And after this, you might say, nothing else really happened. 
> Tolkien came back to Oxford, was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of
> Anglo-Saxon for twenty years, was then elected Merton Professor of English
> Language and Literature, went to live in a conventional Oxford suburb where
> he spent the first part of his retirement, moved to a nondescript seaside
> resort, came back to Oxford after his wife died, and himself died a peaceful
> death at age eighty-one.  It was the ordinary unremarkable life led by
> countless other scholars; a life of academic brilliance, certainly, but only
> in a very narrow professional field that is really of little interest to
> laymen.  And that would be that – apart from the strange fact that
>  during these years when ‘nothing happened’ he wrote two books which have
> become world best-sellers, books that have captured the imagination and
> influenced the thinking of several million readers.  It is a strange
> paradox, the fact that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the work of
> an obscure Oxford professor whose specialisation was the West Midland dialect
> of Middle English, and who lived an ordinary suburban life bringing up his
> children and tending his garden.”
> > 
> >I just this past week hired a new house-keeper.  She said she preferred
> working for old people because they are mellower.  I will be 80 this coming
> October and qualify as “old,” but mellow?  I later asked Susan (who will
> be 70 this coming December) if I had become mellower, and she scoffed at the
> idea.  But what of Tolkien immersed as he was in Anglo Saxon literature and
> Hobbits?  Did he become mellow in his old age?  Carpenter visited Tolkien
> in 1967 just four years before Edith Tolkien’s death in 1971 (at 81) and
> Tolkien’s own death in 1973 at the same age.  Here are a few words
> describing how the not-at-all mellow Tolkien appeared to Carpenter:
> > 
> >“I am still nervous that there will be other and harder questions, doubly
> nervous because I cannot hear everything that he is saying.  He has a
> strange voice, deep but without resonance, entirely English but with some
> quality in it that I cannot define, as if he had come from another age or
> civilization.  Yet for much of the time he does speak clearly.  Words come
> out in eager rushes.  Whole phrases are elided or compressed in the haste of
> emphasis.  Often his hand comes up and grasps his mouth, which makes it even
> harder to hear him.  He speaks in complex sentences, scarcely hesitating –
> but then there comes a long pause in which I am surely expect to reply.
>  Reply to what?  If there was a question, I did not understand it. 
> Suddenly he resumes (never having finished his sentence) and now he reaches
> an emphatic conclusion.  As he does so, he jams his pipe between his teeth,
> speaks on through clenched jaws, and strikes a match just as the
>  full stop is reached.” 
> > 
> >Tolkien was mellower in his letter to his son, but when Carpenter questioned
> him about his writings, he became very intense.  And while none of us can be
> intense all the time surely we need to be intense in our thinking and talking
> (or writing) about subjects important to us.  And if we have come to
> conclusions about our subjects we are probably going to discuss or defend
> them with a good deal of intensity.  We aren’t mellow in the sense of
> being neutral.  We worked hard to arrive at them.  There is no
> unsubscribing from this Hotel California.
> > 
> >Lawrence
> > 
> >From:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> On Behalf Of Omar Kusturica
> >Sent: Monday, January 20, 2014 10:03 PM
> >To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> >Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: A Modest Proposal
> > 
> >And what the hell are the unsubscribing instructions from this Hotel
> California list
> > 
> >On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 6:45 AM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> >Well, but I was only asking questions and trying to stimulate discussion. If
> that is not permissible, I'll move on, but I will not admit to any
> imputations based on not reading my posts.
> > 
> >O.K.
> > 
> >
> >

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