[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[Music]
Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient
e-thorized upon a table.
Let us go through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights
in one night she pothels, and saw dust restaurants with oyster shells, streets that
follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question.
Oh, do not ask, what is it?
Let us go and make our visit.
Let's go then, Jerry, but no turning around this time.
This time we're going to cut through the fog, grab her by those arms, arms that are
bracelet-ed and white and bare, but in the lamplight down with light brown hair, and say
what we mean, and mean what we say.
Sit up in your bed mama and eat up all your chocolates.
Otherwise known as the love song of entitled opinions, to all our die-hard fans, all six or seven of you.
It's actually quite impossible for us to know how many of you there really are out there,
unless you take the time to write us.
There's no telling who's really tuning in.
Is there anybody out there?
Anybody at all?
Just not if you can hear me.
Well, how about that? Listen to all those nods.
This is what you might call our wrap-up session for the season, and title opinions will be going off air.
After this show, we're going to start up again next January.
Last year at this time, it wasn't clear exactly when we were going to start up again,
and I received a lot of emails over the summer, and in the fall asking when we were going to be back.
Some of you said that your psychic health depends upon our returning on air, and it just wasn't clear when we were going to come back,
but now I'm going to stay unambiguously that we intend to start up in January.
The fall, we will be gathering our harvest as it were, be back on air at the beginning of the winter quarter,
Stanford quarter time.
So, I would like to thank my guests today who gave us 14 very intense hours of conversation over the past nine weeks,
from Easter until the summer solstice, and I don't know how to say this without sounding self-congratulatory,
but by all accounts, it's been an outstanding season for entitled opinions.
Starting with our three-hour show on Dante's Divine Comedy with Rachel Jacobs, followed by my interview with Stanford President John Hennessy,
then Joshua Ober talking about ancient Athenian democracy, then poet and philosopher Troy Jollomor followed by a two-part
show on Hana Arrent with Karen Feldman.
We also did a broad-ranging show on the underside of the Enlightenment with PSNKAMO, followed in turn by a take-no-prisoners two-part show on Sigmund Freud with
Kadi Tini Duvazi, then another soaring two-hour show on Kurt Vile with musicologist Stephen Hinton, and finally an over-the-top conversation about Heidegger and poetry with Andrew Mitchell.
You're not going to get the likes of this anywhere else, my friends, and I'm presuming that if you're tuning into this season finale, you know that already.
The Master Chefs of France all agree on one thing.
90% of great cuisine depends on the quality of your ingredients. Only 10% depends on what the chef does with them.
That's how I feel as host of this show actually. My main job is to choose the right ingredients that is to say the right guests and the rest will take care of itself.
I don't care if my guests are famous, obscure, young or old. They have to know how to talk about what they know in a way that makes it worth your while to listen to them.
I don't have any guests with me in the studio today, though, because I thought that I would do my own love song of J. Alfred Proofrock as it were, and monologue about various issues that came up over the course of the past nine weeks.
I'm not going to have very much to say about the love song of J. Alfred Proofrock during the next hour, by the way, but if you're curious about what I might have said about that poem under other circumstances, please look for a little coded to this show on a show.
On a separate podcast, it may or may not exist at the moment it doesn't, but who knows? By tomorrow it might.
It was a particular delight for me to start out the second season with a prolonged conversation about Dante with Professor Rachel J. Cough.
I want to say this about my relationship to this poem called The Divine Comedy.
Along with Rachel J. Cough, I read Dante's not as a medieval poet, but rather as my contemporary.
I'm not sure how many people who teach Dante read him as a contemporary, but I think I was introduced to him above all by the high modernists, Elliot and Pound above all.
I believe that poets, active poets, have always read Dante as someone who speaks in their own time and perhaps even paves away for the future.
I'm actually not in favor of a very common practice these days in the teaching of Dante, which is to try to familiarize the Divine Comedy by representing it in terms that come from our everyday life and our everyday experience.
So, for example, Sandal Burke has a very famous illustration of The Divine Comedy where Dante and Beatrice are cast in contemporary urban environments and habitats.
The whole story is retold as it were from the point of view of people who are like you and me.
I'm rather in favor of the other approach of defamiliarizing our world by seeing our world through the lens of Dante rather than the other way around.
You get some surprising insights. I believe that.
If you just look at the key matter of the Inferno, look at the architectonic of sins and you start asking yourself some fundamental questions about America, contemporary America.
I mean, what are all these sins after all? Lust, gluttony, avorous, anger and sloth, heresy, violence, fraud.
If you had to put contemporary American society in one of these circles, which one would you choose?
Probably lust. We are certainly one of the most sex-obsessed societies in history.
Certainly a lot of our democratic heroes would be in the circle of lust.
But not only them, a lot of televangelists too, anyone who goes to the movies or watches television would think that lust is the kind of arch-by-saver era.
Online, you can actually fill out a questionnaire of some 30-40 questions and find out where you would end up in Dante's Inferno.
I think 90% of the people who actually fill in that questionnaire online end up in the circle of lust believe it or not.
Easy to believe.
But let's look at a few of the others, gluttony.
Gluttony is a sin that has become unfamiliar to us. It would seem.
I mean, how many of you out there know someone who is truly gluttonous?
In other words, someone who becomes unrecognizable when he or she starts gorging.
That's how Dante represents the gluttonous. In Inferno 6, his friend Chaco is unrecognizable to him.
So much has he been transfigured by this vice of gluttony.
It's easier for us to think that gluttony is something that doesn't pertain to us.
But again, the question here is about this society as a whole.
And I would venture to remark that gluttony may well be a more pertinent sin of contemporary society than lust.
Over consumption, after all, is the American way of life.
It is a divine right of every average American citizen to over consume.
It seems like every American in any sort of environment, whether it's on the street, in a room, in a classroom,
always has a bottle or a bar of something going into his or her mouth.
I think that if Dante could land in our midst, he might well say, "This is the empire of gluttony."
And certainly our economy, bloated as it is, dependent as it is on over consumption, could certainly be under this rubric.
But then again, one just goes down the list further and further down.
Averus, greed.
Well, that's very related to gluttony. I don't have to say much more about that, but I will say a word about it in a minute.
Rather, let's talk a minute about anger.
How many of you tune into daytime radio shows, the Rush Limbaugh kinds of shows, or cable news TV shows?
Anger, my friends, seems to be our operative MO over these days everywhere in politics, in social relations, in our own relations with one another.
Sloth.
One good thing about being a Catholic, I was speaking about this with my friend, Marjorie Pearloff, who was not a Catholic, but who was reading the portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce, where Stephan Dettlest goes to confess to the priest.
And he confesses various things like Sloth. I have been slothful of late father.
Why is that my son?
Father, I have been envious.
Envious. I have shown anger towards my friends and family.
We were talking with Marjorie about what kind of therapeutic purposes served by admitting just to oneself, if nothing else to oneself, that things like envy,
Sloth and anger are failings and shortcomings in one's character.
Not many of us do that much anymore, but think of Sloth, and you start looking into a mirror all of a sudden.
Well, violence? Where do we fit with regard to violence?
Violence against others? Violence against self? In other words, the suicides?
The violence against God? We're going to talk about those in a minute.
Healthy dose of that. Fraud.
Fraud has a lot of subdivisions as well. You want to talk about seduction, flattery, false profits, hypocrisy,
feverie, counselors of fraud in war? Can you believe that?
Counselors of fraud in war. There's a whole sub-circle in Dante's seventh circle of the violent for false counselors in war.
Counterfeiters. And then the ninth circle that of treachery.
Against relatives, against party or city, against guests, against lords and benefactors.
The point being that Dante's in favor is never going to age, it's never going to become obsolete.
Not because it has a vision of universal human nature. No, but because the sources of all these sins,
which Dante describes to pride, envy, and greed, are given much fewer reign in the forms of government that we live in in Western democracies than they do in other forms of democracies.
And that's why Dante, I mean his politics seem very Byzantine and medieval to us today because he thought that only an emperor could save us from these failings and institute a social political order that would save us from the worst of all moral failings, which for Dante was greed.
What he called "cupidity." He thought that only an emperor who was in principle in possession of everything could rise above "cupidity."
Be immune to the lures of greed and excessive desire and therefore make the proper political judgments to keep society in check.
For him, the emperor's main function, political function was to restrain "cupidity" and greed.
We have very different understanding of what government is for these days.
In our late capitalist, terminable, terminal capitalist societies where we think that government's exist, what for?
Ultimately, to promote, manage, and administer the vice of greed and "cupidity."
Far from restraining "cupidity," we conceive of government as its proper administration and its enhancement.
This is not only for our Western democracies, it's the same in other parts of the world. China, it's no different, it seems nowhere as any different.
Where is the emperor who will come down or come up, rise up from the people or down from someplace else to restrain "cupidity?"
When I teach the divine comedy or when I reread the divine comedy, I always feel I have this uncanny sense of looking into a kind of defamiliarizing mirror in which I get a view of the kind of world we live in that is not readily available from other sources.
I received an interesting letter from a friend of mine, Francie Alston, who lives in New York. She has been listening to the show. She's one of those handful of very devoted fans of this show.
She was very taken by the Hanaharet programs and listened to them several times and got more and more intrigued by this woman, whom she had had certain mistakes and assumptions about.
But then she goes on to speak about Freud and I'm quoting her, the only subject about which I have any knowledge, not all is writings but better than half, and experience my 6-7 years on the couch.
And Francie says your guest was marvelously well read, especially considering her field is not psychology, which by the way is mostly psychometrics today, just as psychiatry is pharmacology.
The only thinkers and theory builders are the analysts who are still trying to figure out how we got so screwed up and what can be done about it.
Their work is certainly curtailed today for the simple reason that insurance refuses to cover an open-ended therapy.
This has nothing to do with a lack of cure, there is no cure for schizophrenia, but there are drugs that control hallucinations.
Doctors today want to earn a living, patients today refuse to pay out of pocket, so doctors rationalize their disinterest in any treatment that's not reimbursed.
In my day we expected to pay dearly to know thyself, and in the process lose unwanted symptoms.
I'm a case study of how well it works.
Psychoanalysis that is.
Before I read on in Francie's letter to me, a quick connection between psychoanalysis or let's say therapy in Dante.
I think I mentioned in one of the Dante shows that in Dante's time there was no prozac, there was no psychoanalysis.
There was nonetheless a very real and intense need on that part to find a therapy or a cure to what amounted to a state of spiritual paralysis in Cantawan of the Inferno.
He had to find his way out of a deep hole that we otherwise would associate with clinical depression.
And therapy took a very different form for him than it would for us.
But to go more to the point of what Francie is saying here, I think that there's a few issues that bear reiteration.
That psychology has become psychometrics today.
I think that's profoundly true that if it cannot be measured, then somehow it has no reality.
And I've spoken to psychiatrists who's that they don't necessarily want to deny the existence of the unconscious,
or necessarily deny that thought takes place.
But the fact that one has no scientific access to something like thinking because it takes place presumably inside a head or the unconscious,
it means that such phenomena, psychic phenomena, spiritual phenomena cannot be measured, and if they cannot be measured,
therefore no science of them is possible.
So psychology is reduced to psychometrics, just as psychiatry has become pharmacology.
I'm sure their psychiatrist will take issue with that.
But by and large, I think it is true that there are no thinkers and theory builders out there anymore,
except those psychoanalysts who doggedly are still trying to hang on and figure out how we got so screwed up.
And I think that it's also a crucial point that Francie makes that insurance companies play a huge role in the so-called demise of psychoanalysis.
For that simple reason that open-ended therapy,
just simply will not work when you're trying to get insurance coverage for psychoanalysis.
Very perceptive to remark that it has nothing to do with a lack of cure.
Oftentimes you'll hear that psychoanalysis does not have any therapeutic measurable outcomes that it cannot cure schizophrenia.
But neither does psychiatry and pharmacology cure schizophrenia.
At most they control hallucinations through the proper administration of drugs.
So finally, there's this other issue about how in Francie's day, now Francie isn't a woman I would say in her late 60s.
Still in her day, people were expected to pay their doctors out of pocket and their psychoanalysts.
But we live in a very different world, kind of world that I've been evoking there under the rubric of those various circles of hell, Dante,
where we don't expect to pay for such treatments.
And therefore, psychoanalysis falls by the wayside, largely for reasons that have nothing to do with the internal consistencies of the theory or other such issues.
Now, those of you who heard those two, that two-part show I did on psychoanalysis with Kettie Penie Duvaz, you will know that I'm no big apologist for it.
But I do believe that Freud was one of the most honest thinkers of the 20th century, and that he had a way of pronouncing truths about the human condition that are very uncomfortable that we're still very uncomfortable with.
And I don't mean sexuality and infantile sexuality, edible complexes, those things that may have shocked a bourgeois public in a Victorian-like society of Vienna at the time no longer shock us.
But the fact is that Freud was anything but a flatter of human nature.
And it seems that these days we will only listen to those who somehow flatter us.
Those who speak from the circle of fraud.
Those who keep insisting that the purpose of human existence is to find fulfillment and realize one's bliss, and find the means to perpetuate an interminable happiness.
The honesty was a Freud was to say that the purpose of psychoanalysis was to turn a pathological misery into an ordinary unhappiness, and that ordinary unhappiness is good enough for human existence.
Because things, as Andrew Mitchell was saying on the Heidegger program, can always get far worse than they actually are.
And this is what's very scary.
That our barbarism is always just one step away from us.
Now, we talked with Catitini about the seduction theory and Freud and how he had originally committed himself to the notion that it was what we'd call sexual abuse in childhood that led to traumas.
Here is Francie writing to me, saying that when I was a girl, Francie grew up in New Orleans, by the way.
When I was a girl, the favorite topic in showers after Jim was, which man in our family had done what sexual activity with us in the previous 24 hours.
And we all had plenty to share.
But this was not the source of neurosis in any of us, though neurosis we had.
I think because it was so universal and so shared that it was a condition of growing up in a family that one endured.
My mother, who was a good friend of Francie, has always said that Francie tends to exaggerate.
Now, I don't know if this is an exaggeration or not, but even if she's exaggerating a great deal.
Even if only half of this is true, it still raises very fundamental questions for us.
When I was a girl, the favorite topic in showers after Jim was, which man in our family had done what sexual activity with us in the previous 24 hours?
Perhaps we will, we don't live in the South, don't know. Can't imagine that that is true.
I'm not qualified to judge on that, but what I find interesting theoretically over Francie says that this was not the source of neurosis in any of us.
And that therefore, I'm assuming by implication Freud's seduction theory was misguided.
Francie is in child psychology, and she hears a lot of children telling her how difficult their parents are, and she sympathizes.
She says, everyone's parents are difficult.
The main thing you have to accept is the main thing you have to accept, put behind yourself and move on.
Much has been written on therapy, analysis, terminable and interminable, and it boils down to the patient's willingness to give up victimhood,
and accept oneself and one's life, and the imperfections therein.
That seems so simple and yet it's very difficult to accept oneself and one's life and the imperfections therein.
In order to do that one has to have a concept of human existence, which corresponds to the truth and which is not spun by fraudulent counselors.
If the psychoanalysts, I'm quoting again, can find enough ego there to work with, psychoanalysis can be hugely successful as those of us so blessed a test.
Freud always said that neurology would one day confirm his theories, and it didn't lead.
There is a psychoanalysts, Antonio Damazio, who is also a neurologist in measuring brain changes, etc.
Psychoanalysts provokes responses like that of atheists to religion.
Reading atheists' writing is amusing. They don't simply deny God's existence, they rant and rave angrily.
Christopher Hitchens' new book is hilarious. He's furious.
When I defend psychoanalytic treatment, the response is never, "Oh, really? It's more often you must be kidding."
I'd like to say a word about the atheists.
I think Francis is referring to a whole slew of books that are been published in the last year or two.
The God delusion by doggings, breaking the spell, Daniel Dennett.
God is not great how religion poisons everything by Christopher Hitchens.
There's also God, the failed hypothesis by Victor Stegner, and one of the classics here,
"Letter to a Christian nation." That's not a recent book, but nevertheless Sam Harris is "Letter to a Christian nation,"
which is in the founding scripture for some of these atheists.
I think that it's true that when you read these atheists in these books,
you find that there's a tone there which is very hard to account for.
There's a rage and an anger at work there that one doesn't know how to account for,
except by maybe going back again to someone like Dante.
Or someone like John Batista Vico, an 18th century Italian theorist who had a whole theory of how
human society originated out of the forests, which were populated by these nomadic, isolated giants,
these primitive creatures of gigantic stature, who gradually threw a terror of divinity,
started forming the first human families, which then led to the first human groupings,
larger groupings to villages, and finally to cities and academies and metropolises.
And Jean Batista Vico says,
"That this idea of God, which dawned in the mind of these primitive giants one day,
through their exposure to the lightning and thunder, the struck over their heads.
By making them God-fearing was the source of their poetic morality,
the morality by which they organize themselves in human societies.
From this nature of beginning of human institutions arose, the eternal property that minds to make good use of the knowledge of God must humble themselves.
Just as, on the other hand, arrogance,
"Supa'rbia, will lead them to atheism, for atheists become giants in spirit."
Ready to say with Horus, Keilum Ipsum Petimu Stultizia, heaven itself we assail in our folly.
Dante has such a giant in the divine comedy,
and when I try to make sense of docking's dinnit,
and the kind of rage with which they carry on in their denial of the existence of God,
and their mockery of anyone who might have any sort of belief in God,
I am open to arguments in favor of atheists.
I may well be an atheist myself.
What I don't understand is this "Supa'rbia" toad,
this kind of tone with which the atheists try to make their case.
Apart from the fact that there are very shoddy arguments for the most part that are used by these atheists when they are taking on the so-called God hypothesis.
But here is Dante in the circle of the violent against God.
Dante and Virgil are walking along the rim of this field of sand,
desiccated sterile sand on which a rain of fire is falling.
Dante sees someone there who seems not to be affected by this punishment.
He says, "Master," speaking to Virgil,
"who overcame all things, save the hard demons who came out against us at the gate.
Who is that great one who seems not to mind the fire and lies their scornful and frowning so that the rain does not seem to ripen him?"
And he himself, when he perceived that I was questioning my leader about him, cried out,
"As I was alive, so am I dead. Though Jove tire out his smith, from whom he wrathful took the sharp thunderbolt that struck me on the last day.
And though he weary, the others turn after turn at the Black Forge in Mongebele calling, "Good Vulcan, help, help."
As he did at the Battle of Flagra, and strike me with all his force, he could not have happy vengeance thereby."
Then my leader spoke more forcefully than I had heard him ever speak before.
"Oh, Capaneo, since your pride is not extinguished, you are punished more. No punishment other than your rage would be suffering of a measure with your fury."
Then he turned back to me with a better look saying.
"This was one of the seven kings who be caged thieves, and he had, and still seems to have, God in disdain and respects him but little.
But as I said, his spite is the ornament his breath deserves."
This is Capaneo's, then one of the great...well, the call one of the seven against thieves.
He was known to Dante through Staceyus' poem called "The Thabired," has a very prominent place in Book Ten.
He's portrayed as a gigantic, enormously proud warrior.
He's a blasphemer of the gods, praying only to his own right hand, comparable to the centars and cyclops.
He's the first to surmount the walls of thieves, and he sustains its earthly little challenges, and its little gods like bakus and Hercules.
And, "distaining these lesser gods, he challenges Jupiter himself and Jupiter strikes him with a thunderbolt."
I take Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and the others to be the sons and grandsons of Capaneos, the great giant Dante's Inferno.
So that's my answer to you, Francie, about what it is in the rant and rave of the atheists.
I think it is "Superbia" at bottom, a lack of humility and excessive pride, and a form of disdain of one's fellow man.
I think that one can be atheistic in more elegant ways in that.
And since I'm reading from letters here, I mentioned last week that I received a communication from Colonel Keith Essen,
and I should tell our listeners that Colonel Essen was the nursing director at Walter Reed Hospital,
and up until very recently, and he's now involved with health policy issues at the Office of Transformation.
So you can imagine what he has seen and heard in the last few years there at Walter Reed in Philadelphia.
Anyway, he wrote me last week and said about the honor-arrent shows that I must say the discussion on "arrent hit home" on this torture issue.
Once torture, however refrained and bureaucratized newspeak becomes policy, the second and third order effects lead to Abu Ghraib.
I just reread the Gonzalez memo dated 25th of January 2002, and Secretary of State Powell's response dated 26th January 2002.
Powell was ignored, we got Abu Ghraib.
Apparently, some people do not do nuance.
That's quite interesting.
As I pondered the implications of this program, I could not help but think of the infamous torture memo.
I could not help but wonder about the thoughtlessness and bureaucratic vacuity of policy that spawned the preconditions of Abu Ghraib.
Fabulous program, I'm not sure if I was hallucinating, but during the Republican candidate debate moderated by Wolf Blisser, was it only McCain out of that gaggle that repudiated torture?
As one of my colleagues put it, I'm astonished but not surprised.
Colonel Essen.
Yeah, that's a heavy one.
I know that our honor-arrent show raised that connection between evil thoughtlessness and it makes it all the more compelling a figure of Satan at the bottom of Dante's Inferno, where Dante, almost in anticipation of honor-arrent,
once to make the very figure of evil look as stupid as possible and refuses him to dignify Satan with any speech.
But there are a lot of issues that were raised in the honor-arrent show, including the debate I had, but there were about the acting into nature.
Some of you wanted to hear more about that.
I don't have a whole lot more to add in this particular forum except to say that unlike my guest, I don't believe that what is taking place today in biotechnology, cloning, stem cell research, nanotechnology, etc., is of the same order as Botox.
One could have said in the 1930s in Germany that anti-Semitism had a long history, there had been plenty of poggroms and massacres before, that this is just the most recent and particular virulent expression of a very old syndrome, and the people who would have said that were would have been wrong.
It was something new and unprecedented altogether, and I continue to believe that what's taking place in biotechnology is of an order of newness and with potential consequences for humanity and the earth that we're not in a position to foresee or to calculate.
After all, the phrase that honor-arrent uses is acting into nature. The word action has very specific meaning in her vocabulary as we discussed.
It's what human beings do when they get together and act into history. It's not work.
It's what forges and shapes nature, changes nature perhaps, but acting into nature is going beyond the boundaries of work.
So thank you, Colonel Lesson, for that communication. So where are we going to go now?
Robicam. Oh, I know that voice. Hello, Margit. How is it this year? How is your rid of sea? How's the adora?
We were so happy you came to visit us. Next time I'll have to stay longer.
Now don't be in a hurry to get here. We like you right where you are. I'm KZSU so we can listen to entitled opinions.
So the show's still a big hit with you all. Oh, the best. The second season was each penny.
This is my last show for a while. You know that. We know, but time happens differently for us than for you.
For us, your bird monologue was not a year ago. It's still ringing in our ears.
The bird monologue. Oh, the best.
I'm glad to hear you say that some people around here didn't get it at all. Don't worry about them. They don't know what it means to fly, but they will soon enough.
Margit, a friend and colleague of mine, Dick Royard, has just recently joined you. Look after him, please.
We'll cheer him up. Now, Robicam, play that song again with you. The one about Indian Summer.
Indian Summer. I think I know the one you mean. It moves us so we live for Indian Summer around here.
Well, this one's for you, Margit. Tell Hana, it's for her too.
I love you. The best.
The best. The best.
I love you. The best.
♪ Better than all ♪
♪ The relevance ♪
♪ That died of me ♪
♪ Yamter's song ♪
♪
You know, it's all my colleagues. I'm sure think I'm crazy.
Every time I speak to Margit, but that's all right.
I won't be the only one who's lost his mind in this profession.
Frederick Nietzsche, that's a lofty precedent to have.
January 6, 1889.
Just a day after Nietzsche collapsed mentally,
embracing a horse in the streets of Turin.
He wrote to the famous professor Jacob Burkhardt, Renaissance,
his story, and he said, "Dear professor, in the end, I would much rather be a
"bazzle professor than God."
Nietzsche had been a "bazzle professor" for a few years before his illness
forced him to early retirement.
In the end, I would much rather have been a "bazzle professor than God,"
but I have not dared push my private egoism so far as to desist for its sake
from the creation of the world.
You see, one must make sacrifices, however, and wherever one lives.
And then he goes on saying, "I'm sentenced to while away the next eternity
"with bad jokes. I have my writing here, which really does not leave anything to be desired."
The post-office is five steps away, so I mail my letters myself
to play the great Fouyot-d'on and the con-mourn and so forth.
Then he goes on saying, "Do not take the product case too hard. I am proud of him.
I am also father-prado. I dare say I am less-sips too, and I wanted to give my
"proregions whom I love a new notion."
That of a decent criminal. I am also a "shum-beach," also a decent criminal.
What is disagreeable and offends my modesty is that at bottom, I am every name in history.
This letter is a jewel. I go everywhere in my students' coat
and they are slapped someone on the shoulder and say, "See I am a contente,
"sondio, eo, ofato, questa karikatuda."
But then in the margins of this letter, there is a little postscript,
which gives away the fact that Nietzsche was perfectly lucid in a certain respect when he wrote it,
where he says, "You may make any use of this letter which will not degrade me in the eyes of those at Basel."
The super-ego of the university. You may make any use of this letter which will not degrade me in the eyes of those at Basel.
So I am going to tell David Lamas, "He can make any use of this program that does not degrade me in the eyes of my colleagues."
If it means taking a modded of the podcast, we will have to take her.
That is a funny boundary line between madness and lucidity.
That letter reminds me of another very brief letter written by John Claire.
The peasant poet, English peasant poet, who never really learned to read and write properly,
mostly self-taught, wrote the most astonishing poetry of the 19th century in English in my view.
He went mad early on, spent the last several decades of his life in Sainas, Salem.
Towards the end of his life, while he was in that asylum, he received a letter from some sympathetic stranger who liked his poetry,
who was inquiring about his health.
His response to that letter is, "Like Nietzsche's utterly lucid and utterly mad at the same time."
Here's what he writes, March 8, 1860.
"Dear Sir, I am in a madhouse and quite forget your name or who you are. You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell of.
And why I am shut up, I don't know, I have nothing to say, so I conclude your respectfully John Claire."
I remember hearing Angus Fletcher, a remarkable literary critic, talk about this letter when I was a graduate student.
He says, "You read that and you think this guy is completely loony.
But then you look at it a second time and it's perfectly rational. It has the total rational frame of the letter. Has a date. Dear Sir, communication. Yours respectfully John Claire. I mean, what's mad about that?"
"You even read what he says, perfectly logical. I am in a madhouse and quite forget your name or who you are. You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell of.
And why I am shut up, I don't know, I have nothing to say, so I conclude your respectfully John Claire."
Well, that's not where I want to conclude today. I'd rather conclude with thanking again the listeners of entitled opinions, the guests who've been on in this second season.
And above all, the person who makes the shows happen. From the technical point of view, David Lummis, a lot of you know exactly who he is by now. He's been with the show from the very start.
And I want to congratulate David for having received a very prestigious fellowship at our Humanity Center next year where he's going to remove himself in order to finish a dissertation on
Bocaccia, Dante, and other things Italian related to the medieval and Renaissance period.
And when we do come back next year, it will most likely be with another assistant because I'm not cruel enough to try to coax him into giving up all that valuable time of his
to do the hard work that's gone into it. Anyway, David, are you online there? Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Good. Thank you.
Well, I wanted to, you know, bring the season to an end with really heartfelt thanks for everything you've done.
And I know that I speak for a lot of people, the ones who received the emails weekly, the ones who listen to the podcasts, the ones who access us through our webpage, and then the guests whose bios you've put up there and so forth.
So, I mean, I've said enough times for it to become boring now, but of course, without you, the show doesn't happen. Thank you for effort. It's been a great ride.
Yeah. Are you looking forward to the summer? I am. I'm looking forward to removing myself a little bit and getting some writing done. Yeah.
And next year, hopefully, I know that you're going to have a really good group of people at the Humanity Center. Yeah, they look like a fabulous group of people. Yeah.
And all those lunches try to keep you, you know, you're waiting to check that all of a sudden. Yeah.
So, this is it for entitled opinions. It's been Robert Harrison, a monologue with you. And thanks again, David. We're going to leave you with a song that will carry us all over to the month of January. Bye-bye.
[Music]
Well, it's a strange old game, you learn to slow.
[Music]