Slow Learner-relevant

[Joseph Tracy]

I agree with Ian that there is significant variation in attitudes toward death and that there are different personal reasons for that difference. But this primal fear and how we manage it can obviously have more than personal implications.  It is hard these days not to think about the power of fear to generate and even to shape a large-scale public change in attitudes,  and in what people are willing to accept. To accept the validity of fear from one direction can easily obscure even more valid fears concerning justice and values or basic personal freedoms. Below is a statement by Matt Taibbi that he wrote concerning the ultimate rejection of a recent move to impose an information czar into the department of homeland security. The pubic reaction was very strong and for now the idea has been canned, which is an encouraging development.  I thought this sentence was particularly telling and accurate. 
 
"I have a theory about what happened to America in this regard. After 9/11, people were scared, and they fell for a succession of propaganda campaigns convincing them that the hole in Fortress America, the chink in our national armor, was our system of democratic rights."

> On Mar 25, 2023, at 11:34 AM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Out of a few decades of inquiry into locarate.l 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
>> 
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l