the blessings of ignorance

    Jim is a great man for the 'if you haven't tried, don't knock it'
    or the 'familiarity breeds respect' position.

    But I'm not so sure.

    When, in my adolescence, I first fell in love with Hemingway
    & read 'Death in the Afternoon' I became obsessed with the corrida.
    In due course, I'd read all the available texts & acquired a fair grasp
    of the history, the technical terms, the tragic principles & so on.
    I eventually attended the real thing - about a dozen of them -
    & was thrilled. By suppressing, as Ernie prescribed, certain
    instinctive reactions of disgust & sympathy I was able to appreciate
    - you can't imagine how deeply - the whole moving metaphor
    of mortality, courage, the way things are, etc, etc, etc.

    But then, don't ask my how, the sun rose & I saw in its unforgiving
    light just what a mindless, obscenely cruel load of bullshit, supported
    by self-deluding tourist trash & native canaille, the whole shebang
    actually was.

    In this instance, knowledge had blinded me to the obvious.

    Is it possible a more 'respectful reading' (as John so frequently
    recommends) of Mein Kampf would shed the kind of light I've
    so far missed on the justification for Auschwitz? And how it is,
    I wonder, that in my day in Trinity the Regius Professors of Divinity
    & Theology, alongwith their various lecturers & clerical hangers-on,
    were just about the most unappealing, uncharitable, mutually paranoid,
    vicious bunch of poison dwarves I ever encountered in my life?

    I accept that Practice makes Perfect. I wonder, though, about Study.

    Scottie B.

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Received on Tue Jan 7 04:36:26 2003