John,
Yes, you are right. I too have known English majors who did not seem
very interested in their subject. It was notoriously thought that
English was an easy major if all you wanted was a degree. One fellow,
Alex D., whom I've mentioned before, a longshoreman whom after
graduating told me that he intended to remain a longshoreman had little
interest in English literature. He was interested in Communist
literature. He had a guru on the docks, another longshoreman who advised
him to get a degree. I never understood why. If his guru expected big
things from Alex, that expectation, along with most other
American-communist expectations, was to prove a failure. Alex would
regularly get into accidents while drunk and escape jail-time with the
help of a clever lawyer. In one memorable incident, Alex was on a dark
mountain road when he ran out of gas. He got out of his car, staggered
back down the road and lay down some place dead drunk. A woman came
driving up the road, struck Alex's car and was killed. An outraged
district attorney charged Alex with vehicular manslaughter, but as
Alex's lawyer argued, one can not be convicted of this crime unless one
is driving, and Alex was clearly not-driving at the time of the
accident. The fact that he was drunk was irrelevant.
Alex and I eventually got into an argument about something. He took a
swing at me, while drunk, and of course missed. I twisted his arm
behind his back, turned him over to his outraged wife (outraged because
she agreed with Alex about whatever it was we were arguing about) and
urged her to take him home. My next door neighbor at the time, a
fireman who occasionally worked as a longshoreman later told me that
Alex warned him never to get into a fight with me because I was an
extremely good fighter.
My career as a fighter, however, was not anything I could boast about,
but I did have a few successes. After our mother divorced my father,
she got a job as a checker in the Foodman Grocery store; so after school
my sister and I took a bus to the "Extended Day Care," where the women
in charge drank coffee inside while we in the yard outside did pretty
much whatever we wanted. One kid was an aggressive bully. One day he
picked a fight with my sister. On the one hand my sister and I never
got along that well, but on the other I didn't want this kid to beat her
up; so I pulled him off and he and I began to fight. In the course of
our fight he caught his finger on the barbed wire fence surrounding our
play-ground. The EDC women came out, called an ambulance and sent him
off to the hospital. His parents apparently thought the EDC a dangerous
place; so he never returned. In a letter to my sister a few years ago I
reminded her of that incident. Even though we never got along well when
we were small there was this one time I stuck up for her. She though
wouldn't give me that. She said I pulled him off of her because I liked
to fight. Well . . . I did sort of like to fight . . . so I didn't
argue with her.
Lawrence
On 5/10/2021 10:43 PM, John McCreery wrote:
Nice, very nice, indeed.
That said, on the dying soon after retiring front, literature vs engineering may not be as important as total commitment to a job that makes post-retirement life seem meaningless. I think of Kazuhiko Kimoto, the Senior Creative Director who hired me and was my boss for many years at Hakuhodo, Japan’s second largest advertising agency. Kimoto, with a degree in American Literature from Tokyo University, spent every day, Sundays included at the office. His life was work, whiskey, cigarettes, and occasional games of Go. He was said to have a family, but we never got to see them. He died within three months after retiring in his sixties.
Lots of varied interests, physical activity and a long happy marriage…I was the fat kid, total anti-athlete when I was younger. Now my day begins with yoga, qigong, and kettlebell. In other respects, hanging in as 77 approaches, I see a lot more similarities between us than when we were on political opposite sides during the Iraq War.
Stay safe. Stay well. Give us more to read before you go.
John McCreery
On May 11, 2021 11:53 +0900, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, wrote:
In the May 7, 2021 issue of /The/ /Times Literary Supplement/ is a review by Hal Jensen of /The Midlife Mind, Literature and the art of Ageing/ by Ben Hutchinson. Hutchinson recommends the reading of literature as an aid to help one endure ageing. The specifics of what he recommends seem to be the reading (with the help of Hutchinson's advice) some of the authors included in any "Great Books" program.
Jensen writes ". . . Hutchinson settles into his main workout routines. These consist of chapters on Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Goethe, the Victorians (George Eliot and Henry James), T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir. For each, Hutchinson begins with a biographical-critical-historical survey of the author, with a close look at how they wrote about -- or out of -- those nebulous and crisis-ridden middle years."
Further down Hutchinson writes, "Each chapter ends with a look at a literary legacy and asks what lessons these writers can provide for our journey through the middle, Dante teaches us how to start again while still in transit, Goethe shows the value of restless curiosity, Eliot demonstrates the potency -- and necessary difficulty -- of late changes in belief, and Beauvoir the benefits of gender awareness when ageing. . . Still, I can't help wishing he had left out the 'Lessons' altogether. They sound glib and patronizing . . ."
Hutchinson's audience would seem to be those in his age group, i.e., people in their 40s, who have not encountered the classics, and are worried about growing older. Jensen makes short work of Hutchinson and concludes, "I respect Hutchinson's desire to help, but I have probably learned more about time and mortality from working on my allotment than from any amount of reading. When it comes to dealing with middle age -- and I say this well aware of my audience -- books are not enough."
I had a long career in engineering but along the way anticipated that when those with degrees in Engineering retired with no clearly-thought-out plans, I would be able to retire to the pleasures of reading.
One might object that formal engineers might have adequate plans for retirement as well. My own observation has been that many, maybe even most, don't, or at least didn't (I retired in 1998). I recall an engineer, Jim C., who was pointed out to us as having the perfect engineering work-ethic. He had no outside interests. Engineering was his whole life. About a week after his retirement, he unexpectedly died.
An engineer I knew much better, Ray L., spent weekends and vacations building his retirement home in Northern California. I was shocked when he died unexpectedly before he had a chance to enjoy his new home.
These, and others, were cautionary examples, but perhaps anyone who is educated in what was in the past considered to be a "trade," is at risk, mentally and perhaps physically, when attempting to prepare for retirement -- at least more so than in a Liberal Arts major.*
I did take to heart the examples of people I worked with. Among other things, I had a list of authors I didn't get a chance to read while I was in school, and worked my way through that during lunch periods, weekends, etc. for several years. To respond to Jensen (although I don't know what his "allotment" is), I did have a lot of physical interests. I was a free-diver (managing to keep my freezer full of fish during many years) and a hiker (even to the guiding of small groups up into the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains). But I anticipated that in my old age I would do less diving and hiking and more reading and so congratulated myself that unlike Jim C. and Ray L. I was educated well enough to (in retirement) engage in elaborate, self-devised reading programs with relative competence (joining Jensen in feeling no need of Hutchinson's "lessons."
Lawrence
*How does one with an English major become a competent enough engineer to have a modestly successful career and a better than average retirement benefit? I can take no credit for that. I feared I would never graduate from college if I majored in a subject I wasn't interested in. And so I refused to worry about getting a job until after I graduated. Then I went through an employment agency who reviewed my qualifications and sent me to Douglas Aircraft which at the time was being criticized by the Air Force for sending them poorly written engineering documentation. The chief engineer ordered Douglas administrators to find recent college graduates capable of understanding engineering who could also write.
