Subject: knockers
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Mon Dec 18 2000 - 06:07:41 GMT
'... I shall await your wisdom,' writes the doe-eyed Cecilia.
(And Tim, privately & less sarcastically.)
I'm sorry that my gnomic pronouncements should be taken
quite so seriously. But there you go, it must be the way I tell 'em.
(My wife long ago acquired a way of breaking the entranced
silence to which my remarks so often reduce the assembled
multitude. 'Ah,' she says, a bitter smile playing around her lovely
mouth, 'the Fuhrer speaks.')
My comment could well be a memory trace of something
Anna Freud once said to me over the coffee & bagels (sure,
I can drop names when so inclined): 'A sense of humour,
you know, may be the greatest ego-strength of all.'
At the time I was mildly surprised. I was quite young & had
always feared that an inclination to laugh betrayed an essential
triviality of mind. (I should have known better, of course.
Her dad loved jokes & even wrote a book about them.) And
somewhere (I can never find it when I want it), E.Hemingway
writes something to the effect that while we may all be growing
in the earth he has noticed they grow strongest & best where
the soil has been fertilised with jokes.
The more I've thought about it, though, the more I feel Anna
was right.
I suppose one could propound all kinds of theoretical reasons
why this should be. For example, a sense of one's own ridiculousness
(& thereby one's relative importance or unimportance in the face
of eternity) makes one less vulnerable to many considerations.
It makes for the flexible strength of the bamboo as opposed
to the all too brittle strength of the grimly determined.
But I'm afraid my predeliction for the self-mockers arises simply
from what one has found as one went along. The two things
just seemed to go together. Those who were light hearted by
nature, & above all light hearted about themselves, were more
often the same ones who actually turned up on the night & who
were still around when the morning came.
Scottie B.
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Jan 02 2001 - 18:02:57 GMT