MacCruiskeen wrote:This reminds me of something Alan Garner once said in an interview. He was asked why he had left Oxford a year early without a degree, despite having been an exceptionally gifted student who had originally aspired to become Professor of Greek:Alan Garner wrote:"I didn't want to spend all my days being witty and cruel."
Decades earlier, D.H. Lawrence and Wittgenstein had also been repelled by the intellectual-social style of Oxford. It's hard to imagine three more different people, but it's not hard to see what they have in common: a deep aversion to superficial smartness, to male ego, to blank will and to an ingrained feeling of entitlement; and also, not unrelatedly, a stubborn sense of what has to be called the religious, or at least the numinous.
Wow Mac. That's great. I so love Alan Garner*, you know. The whole interview was a treat. Thanks a million, Mac!
I liked the voice thing too! I love to rumble and hum and sing in my gravelly bass voice, coming from deep in my diaphragm.
I think I'm off topic now, but I don't have anything more to say about Hitchens. Someone should start a thread on Alan Garner, who I believe is still alive, now 77 years old: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Garner
ps Hey Mac, I hope you enjoyed your salmon.
* And I learnt a great deal from Wittgenstein. D H Lawrence, not so much.
