Topical Guide 195
Mark Dorset
Families: Types of
Humor: Feeble Attempts at
[W]isecracking was one of those constants of the Peters household that persisted beyond the adventures, and was therefore one of the truly valuable aspects of the books and of life in the Peters family. There was little wisecracking in my family, and I came to think that there would be a good deal more fun and immeasurably more panache if only there were more wisecracking. The Peterses’ wisecracking seemed to be one of the few things that I might translate from Larry’s life into mine.
“Peter,” said my father one morning while I was musing along the foregoing lines, “would you bring me an ashtray?”
“Ash and ye shall reshieve,” I said.
My father gave me a pained look, and I came quickly to the conclusion that there are, essentially, two kinds of families, wisecracking families and nonwisecracking families, and that it had been my unfortunate lot to be born into one of the latter.Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Fantasy, Fantasies, Fantasizing
Imaginary Places: Qualities of
[T]hese books were in one respect truly masterly pieces of work: they provided a context for the fantasies of adolescent boys, a context so reassuring that the timidity and fear that ordinarily attended those fantasies nearly disappeared when they were entertained within it. One’s parents and other adults, who seemed at times to be regarding one with lancet eyes, eyes that penetrated straight to that abscess where one’s guilty urges maturated, did not go to Kittiwake Island.
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
We have agreed, have we not, that everything that makes man a great, as opposed to a merely sentient creature, is fanciful when tested by what people call common sense? That common sense often means no more than yesterday’s opinions? That every great advance began in the realm of the fanciful? That fantasy is the mother not merely of art, but of science as well? I am sure that when the very first primitives began to think that they were individuals and not creatures of a herd and wholly bound by the ways of the herd, they seemed fanciful to their hairy, low-browed brothers.
Dr. J. von Haller in Robertson Davies’s The Manticore
There must be something we can call a sense of possibility. Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The consequences of so creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, regrettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood.
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (translated by Sophie Wilkins)
See also: Fantasy Land; Rarotonga; Arcadia; Shangri-La TG 46
At cocktail time:
[more to come on Tuesday, February 15, 2022]
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