Subject: Re: sufferin' suckatash (?)
From: nick flynn (nicholas.flynn1@btinternet.com)
Date: Fri Nov 24 2000 - 20:19:48 GMT
on 24/11/00 2:25 am, Scottie Bowman at rbowman@indigo.ie wrote:
>
> '... pretty low of you to expose him ...'
>
> Ah wait now, Nick. We mustn't over react.
> A modest boast that I'd once exchanged views
> with the chap seems hardly an 'exposure'.
> (Unless my very touch is itself a source of scandal.)
>
Lighten up friend, it was written with a twinkle in the eye.
> There were 'inaccuracies' in my account - partly explained
> by the fact the my brain sadly dosen't improve with age &
> that the original brief exchange took place when that same
> brain was chronically addled with drink.
Hey Scottie, maybe you should just except it, cogent thinking wasn't
for you.
>
>
> First of all, my reference to 'Ladybridge' was an honest
> misremembering of his home address in Robertsbridge -
> which you, as an afficionado, must have recognised.
>
> Second, the letter was not exactly in agreement with my own
> views but a clarification of his, as expressed in some television
> programme or other that I'd been watching & which had struck
> me as mistaken.
>
> This programme had made reference to the value of suffering.
> I can't, as I say, remember the details but it may have been about
> someone like Mother Theresa who, as you know, became a great
> focus of interest in his later life. I had written to say that while
> human growth sometimes demanded learning experiences which
> were, by their nature, painful I could not agree that suffering
> IN ITSELF was anything other than diminishing & destructive.
>
> I have now unearthed his reply - which I reproduce verbatim:
> ________________________________________
>
> Park Cottage
> Robertsbridge
> Sussex
>
> 8th August 1982
>
> Dear Robert Bowman,
>
> Thank you for your letter.
>
> No, I was not suggesting that, as you put it,
> suffering has a glory in its own right. Only that
> it is a necessary & enriching element in human life.
> If it were possible - & there are some maniacs who
> think it is - to eliminate suffering altogether this
> would not make life a more wonderful experience,
> only a more banal one.
>
> Yours sincerely,
>
> Malcolm Muggeridge
> _________________________________
>
> I was not the only one who greatly enjoyed the earlier
> Muggeridge. There was something infectious about
> that gleeful, really rather sadistic, wit as he debagged
> the gullible, the self-important, the established. But there
> was also something saddening at the sight of the old devil
> as he turned pious with one of the most widely publicised
> of conversions, those gaga encounters with mystical lights,
> that insistence - from one of the better tables at The
> Gay Huzzar - on the vanity of all human endeavour.
>
> As you very well know, not a few called him a life-long
> fraud. I don't agree with them, but there WAS
> sometimes a suspicious whiff in the air.
>
> Incidentally, I think - in the letter I quote - that he
> WAS asserting the value of suffering for its own sake.
> And I still think that's a load of balls.
>
> Scottie B.
>
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