A professor of mine at Chicago once opined (I think I've recounted this elsewhere, actually) that the purpose of a liberal education was to enable one to make clever or witty or learnéd or allusive or some such sort of conversation as that at cocktail parties. I hypothesize that the reading of Markson's recent work might serve a similar purpose. At any rate. Here are two quotations, taken from Markson, Reader's Block, p 146, and from Sepp Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence, p 97, respectively. I pass over in silence the anecdote concerning Sophocles and treating the same subject which one finds in Plato as being too well known to need reproduction.
Tertullian has it that Democritus deliberately blinded himself in old age by staring into the sun. So as not to suffer the sight of beautiful women he could no longer possess.
I want my students to live or at least to imagine that moment of admiration (and perhaps also of the despair of an aging man) that gets a hold of me when I see the beautiful body of a young woman standing next to me in front of one of the computers that give access to our library catalogue—a moment, by the way, that is not all that different from the joy that I feel when the quarterback of my favorite college team in American football (Stanford Cardinal of course) stretches out his perfectly sculpted arms to celebrate a touchdown pass.
As an exercise, consider what the possible purpose—and what the actual effects—of the addendum in the second quotation might be.
going blind was pretty easy it seems in old days, according to
many
just contract lues and let it become tertiary
and it might be, it had some unforeseen adverse effect to induce geniality
Posted by: prst | January 09, 2008 at 08:34 AM