Slow Learner-relevant

[Ian Livingston]

In other words, I align with Joyce.

On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 8:34 AM Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>>
>