Re: Before the Law

    I'm reprimanded for making comments about personalities.
    But this discussion IS foundering on the personal attitude
    of one of the contributors.

    We have, after all, had several definitions of 'deconstruction'
    (or 'deconstructions', as we've been taught to say): two from
    the on-line dictionary, Giles Coren's jokey quotation yesterday
    &, John tells us, two of his own - though, in honesty, I didn't
    recognise them as such at the time nor do I remember them now.

    But he has made his position very clear. He won't compromise
    his standards to pander to what he sees as our lazy desire for glib,
    parlour-friendly sound-bites on philosophical topics. Fair enough.
    That's John & that's how he intends to play his golf. His strength
    is as the strength of ten. Because his heart is pure.

    It's certainly a very different attitude from that of the teachers
    for whom I feel the greatest personal gratitude. They were,
    to a man, great simplifiers. They made their subject inviting, not
    through a false chumminess nor with pyrotechnical demonstrations
    nor by pretending it was accessible to any old eejit - but (evidently)
    placing themselves in the position of a newcomer, refining their
    propositions in plain language & laying them in as a man would lay
    bricks, building a wall he was in no particular hurry to finish.

    The examplar was Ernest Walton who won the Nobel prize
    (with John Cockroft) for splitting an atomic nucleus by artificial
    means. He was professor of physics at Trinity when I went there
    to study medicine in 1946. By that time, he was doing almost no
    teaching but, as I learned much later, he insisted on taking the first
    year morons like myself & giving them a grounding in the elements
    of physics & mechanics.

    As I say, nothing flashy, nothing hilarious, nothing ingratiating.
    Just clarity, set out simply, patiently & with very little comment.
    But he turned at least one arty-farty snob who felt permanently
    deterred by maths & the 'hard' sciences into an engaged, no longer
    terrified, enthusiast.

    Shame I've read nothing on this list that seems likely to turn me
    into a late-blooming colloquiast (?)

    Scottie B.

-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Sun Mar 9 05:05:21 2003