Humor brings together and sets them apart.
It works best when it is fresh, original, and also as old saws, attic salt.
According to its reach you can define a people.
By its subject matter, you can know their concerns, and what is sacred by what is left out.
If nothing seems to be left out, it would seem that nothing is taken too seriously--that is, nihilism tempts.
Fortunately, though, there are plenty of things we don't joke about simply because we don't know about them. It could be the other way around, too, that we do joke about what we take seriously, and that humor is then part of our enjoyment of that thing's value.
Humor is the most natural of a language's features, and also the last one learned.
The smile, the chuckle, the wince, the roar.
--Humor creates a world.
In Terry Pratchett, literally so. The kind of world it s is makes it so nice to spend time there. This is particularly instructive for teachers who might wonder how to get their students to read books--these books teach and delight in the reading of human nature, morality, economics, language. They present categories of judgment distilled from a long and interesting life. They provide a locus for nostalgia in hindsight and mystery in the moment. They ask questions of readers as they portray possible lives.
His first impressions of The Wind in the Willows: "The moles and badgers go into each others' houses! They had hats! I thought: This is lies."
So is it the case that I want to teach these books, or is it that i want to read them? There is Signum University, presided over by the Tolkien Professor, offering work study but I suspect not a whole lot of it. He raised funds and ran across the Lord of the Rings online world as a chicken to celebrate. They'er selling T-shirts now to commemorate it. No telling where this project will end, but along the way it's evidently a little more fun than college teaching. Which is too bad, when you think about it : what is lost when you make the concession to the screen, no longer gathering the people who want to learn something in physical proximity around a green? Thinking about it means aching.
That's the name of the heroine Pratchett settled on for his last book, the story within the series that seemed to be his real legacy. Still left to read, and to be read as a whole within a larger whole--hence the ache, and without dismissing it, the laughter. For no apparent reason, his other late scoundrel-hero, Moist von Lipwig, dances atop the moving train, and Vimes, his salt of the earth and judge of the doomsday, interprets it in the light of his own dark mark, clearly a response to the facile heroes and villains of Harry Potter. In the progression of Vetinari, on the other side of the political coin, from assassin-tyrant to shovel-wielder, the same moral richness, dionysian-apollonian tragicomic outlook is developed. And Sir Terry's own struggles with Alzheimer's in the disappearance of the golden boy Carrot, heir to the throne, and the increasing difficulty Vetinari has with the crossword, and the ever-present yet lightly handled personification of Death. So we are setting places and personifying ourselves, and to dust we return.
What exactly Sir Terry endowed wth the large scholarship in South Australia is not clear to me, but if it is something to do with writing and satire rather than Alzheimer's research, that would be a powerful statement indeed! Money is a certain kind of promise, but no substitute for keeping it. Keeping the promise is the action, the creation of which the word, even if spoken in the language of money, is the symbol, reminder, inspiration, meaning. Suffering is when it is broken, not yet carried out; joy is its fulfillment, and laughter represents a certain attitude towards the prospect. Another kind of reminder, to take the words, the promises seriously, and to appreciate the fulfillment where we find it. So, Pratchett and Pullman over against Rowling (really Tolkien) and Lewis--that seems interesting! I'm reminded of the time I got an email back from Pullman's website about translating some of his speech into Spanish for the humanists--that must have been a good while ago now. And a decade at least he's been working on the book of dust, speaking at a few engagements and writing things on twitter, and not publishing his essays and articles on stories and education.
There's this other kind of writing that has taken hold of publishing since then, represented by John Green, who tapped into the base of readers of other series and gave them some real-life-seeming stories to read under the covers, in the cafeteria, in the glow of computer screens playing vlogbrothers and nerdfighters, coining words, suggesting avenues of activism-consumerism, and he got his start from reviewing such books for the publishers and libraries.
What is a library, though? It's very strange--don't people go there so they don't have to buy books? Or mostly to use the internet or get off the streets? To have a place to contain all these stories and worlds, and to convey them, at once the enticement and satisfaction of a desire to learn? To make desire safe, to ground the most radical ideas, to spend money and freely share what is bought with it, but during such limited hours, and in enforced quiet? So the garden of babel, and the library of eden.
From Heidegger and seminars at the George's new house behind downtown: Nothingness and Eternity. A creeping doubt that this represents a bridge to the kind of writing that no one outside (or perhaps within) philosophy departments reads, and that that is not different in kind than the great books--that this despair of deriving meaning or experiencing serious interest in what is called great is just what students feel encountering Homer, Shakespeare, the Bible, and certainly the modernists who led up to it. Hoping there is clearing, still, and a kind of joke.
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