Slow Learner-relevant

[Ian Livingston]

Out of a few decades of inquiry into local attitudes toward death, I must
voice some doubt in regard to the assertion that everyone must feel such an
attitude, except, I'll suppose, possibly in extremis. It is my experience
that there are many people who have little or no such "feeling". Most of my
observation derives largely from working in jobs where the absence of such
feelings is of high importance. When people do dangerous work, any attitude
toward death may be crippling, because production outweighs personal
feelings, and feelings about death are a distraction. As one foreman
frequently put it, "D-u-m-be brave, boyos!" as he led the charge into the
most dangerous of tasks. This is only to propose that there are exceptions
to the rule.
My actual inquiry into the topic as such began with a study of
commonalities among the religions that arose in the zone between the
Fertile Crescent and Egypt in the earliest writings I could find and
document at the small university I attended at the time. That was the
middle '80s. Computers were a rumor in our area and it was a while, yet,
before I saw one. I am not an authority, but I am someone who took a bit of
time to look into attitudes toward death while living in conscious defiance
of it, ergo, I exempt myself from the many of my coworkers who never gave
death much, if any, thought, much less feeling, save in brief moments
following the potentially crippling injury of a coworker who might never
return to the job. Some folks just don't have time for death. Is that a
felt attitude?
I suppose, Mark, I can agree with your statement if the ellipsis at the end
implies "eventually."

On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 4:57 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks to Michael focusing on TRP's words
> about works having an attitude to death--or not,
> Something in the most recent NYR of Books struck me.
>
> Remember Edward Mendelsohn, Scholar of Literature, Teacher, writer
> who edited a book of essays on TRP? and written more?
>
> Who also thinks Virginia Woolf a great modernist writer and has written on
> her
> (and maybe done a book or two, I'm not looking anything up, Chatbot).
>
> [misc. I read more Woolf because of him esp stuff that might have
> influenced
> TRP a little, even thinking I had found a sampling or two of TRPs]
>
> Anyway, in a letter to the NYR of Books about a review of another book on
> *Ulysses/*Joyce
> he takes issue with a guy's comments on dead people in Ulysses. He says
> they all die naturally
> --but one, older in time who goes via suicide-- and says no one in*
> Ulysses* is
> actually presented
> as aware of---having "an attitude toward"?--death, their own.
>
> He contrasts that with Septimus in* Mrs. Dalloway* and Woolf's real
> embodiment of such an attitude
> which everyone feels, has to feel....
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>