Dissecting the Era of Virgins and Satyrs

[Dave Monroe]

Well, as I'm not the only one who's cited Peter Gay
onlist, from Dinita Smith, "Dissecting the Era of
Virgins and Satyrs," New York Times, Saturday,
November 10, 2001 ...

"'All generalizations are wrong,' said Peter Gay.
'That's why I find being an historian so interesting.'
 Mr. Gay, 78 now, emeritus professor of history at
Yale, author of 25 books ...

[...]

"For Mr. Gay, in fact, nothing is simple, as he has
shown in his books on Freud, Mozart, the
Enlightenment and more....

"Then there is Mr. Gay's five-volume study, 'The
Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud' (Oxford
University Press and Norton, 1984-1997), which took
apart clichés about the bourgeoisie of that time. The
bourgeois image of prudence, chastity, sobriety, he
wrote, is far from true....

"Next week, Mr. Gay will publish 'Schnitzler's
Century' (Norton). In many ways, it is a summary of
his five-volume study of the bourgeoisie, but it is
also a continuation. The book is based on the Viennese
writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), who portrayed
the sexual anxieties of his age in works including
'The Round Dance' (which David Hare adapted in his
1998 play 'The Blue Room') and 'Dream Novella,' the
basis for the 1999  movie 'Eyes Wide Shut.' Schnitzler
was a meticulous chronicler of his sex life, and his
diaries, in which he listed the number of orgasms he
had with each mistress, proved a gold mine, Mr. Gay
said. From 1887 to 1889, for instance, Schnitzler
recounted that he had made love 583 times with his
mistress, Anna Heeger. Freud, who was Schnitzler's
contemporary, once called Schnitzler his double in his
avid investigations of the human soul.

[...]

"He has at least two more books in the works, he says,
one on modernism and the other on 'the liberal
temperament — what makes a person a liberal.'

"'To have a liberal temperament is a kind of
psychological boon,' Mr. Gay says. 'To be able to
understand that someone you disagree with is not just
a terrible creature but somebody with whom you
disagree.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/arts/10GAY.html?todaysheadlines

Hm.  A certain ambiguity about that last line. "Not
REALLY just a terrible creature but RATHER somebody
with whom you MERELY disagree" or "not just a terrible
creature but somebody with whom you disagree AS WELL"?
 That perhaps unintentional not-quite-disavowal of the
presumption of "terrible creaturehood" seems markedly
illiberal, but ... but I THINK he means the former
interpolation.  Anyway, always well worth reading ...

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