The following link leads to a short, sweet and humble autobiographical summary of the life-to-date of Douglas Harper (the earnestness of its form, as an aside, made me want to face-palm at Gregory Ulmer’s “mystory” theory). Harper is the founder of etymonline.org, writer of several books on Pennsylvania’s Civil War history, and a lover of literature. He would, I gather from his proclaimed love of the romantic and especially Stendhal’s De l’Amour, forgive the sappiness… (“full of sap,” Late O.E. sæpig, from sæp (see sap (n.1)). Figurative sense of “foolishly sentimental” (1660s)) …when I express that his bio taught me more about how to live, love, fail, and read, than a large fraction of the philosophy I’ve labored through in recent memory.
On that note allow me to capriciously interject with one of Beckett’s finest ruminations:
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (Westward Ho, 1983)
But back to the point.
Coincidentally or not, the other day’s New York Times Travel section featured a cover story on Madeira, the “Pearl of The Atlantic” and a cynosure of gorgeosity, off the coast of Portugal. The article’s endnote said that the author, Henry Alford, had recently published “How to Live: A Search for Wisdom From Old People” (well thank you Douglas and Henry!) Where my scholarly research has taken me, entertaining the idea of fate (posed technically as anthropocentric teleology) is considered a heresy or a naivety, but since I live candidly I will remark that a Portugese pearl of my own (the kind of gal who tells me I need to read Jose Saramago’s Gospel According to Jesus Christ if we’re to be together, and I goddamn will) recently taught me some lessons on life and love, and it’s precisely these coincidences that give us that frisson, the goosebumps, which make the temptation of believing in such naivetes unshakable from our being.
Here is the passage on love from Harper’s bio which inspired me to make that remark:
Kant knew that philosophy thrived when it was deemed trivial by priests and bankers and social reformers and prime ministers. If those people had thought philosophy important, they would have sought to control it or repress it or buy it or pervert it. The quest for truth can only occur in the autonomy known by the scorned and neglected. Yeats knew the same thing about poetry when he wrote “Adam’s Curse.” In a modern, commercial society, unless poets and philosophers are deemed dreamers and fools, no human thought will be free.
He is, I admit, a man’s poet, with all the folly and foolish nobility that implies. Lately I’ve been reading the later Yeats: “The Winding Stair and Other Poems.” I see these poems that I’ve known since I was 18 with fresh poignancy and power. I had read then, but never felt till now, his bitterness at leaving youth just when he’d finally mastered its arts. The powers I feel now: to please a young woman’s heart, to lead her to the well of her sensual self and clear the rushes and clarify the water so that she may drink deeply and long — all these attained powers arrive at the same time I begin to find gray hairs and my hip hurts.
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