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....Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.
- quoted in Remembered Yesterdays, Robert Underwood Johnson
To me his prose is unreadable -- like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 18 January 1909
I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
- -Letter to Joseph Twichell, 13 September 1898
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.............Mark Twain Quotations
http://twainquotes.com/Austen_Jane.html
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Of course Mark Twain is talking through his funny hat as usual just to provoke, which is his profession.
I have rarely taken the trouble of beginning a blog with a hilarious quote only to differ with it heartily. Mark Twain said worse things about Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose Autocrat of the Breakfast Table I read 5 times in 5 decades at regular intervals; and blackmailed Edwin Taylor of MIT to gift a copy to me if he wants me to send him the 30-page Manuscript of a Paper of mine on his Spacetime Software. He told me that he scouted for it all over the Harvard Square and at last could get a 150-year-old-well-preserved- gilt-edged copy in a Used Books Stall. I wanted to get it re-bound the other day, but my Binder-Friend advised me against it since the papers have gone too brittle for fiddling with them.
When that Paper appeared in AJP and (naturally) delighted him, he offered to send me Holmes's Poet at the Breakfast Table but I wisely declined it politely for fear it wouldn't stand up to his Prima Donna so to say, since I had made that mistake with Jane Austen. I am sure I am a crank since NONE of the dozen book-lovers (including Edwin) on whom I tried the Autocrat could wade beyond the first three pages, although they love to read the Quotes of this most-quoted author (at least in Readers Digest).
In my late teens I read Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice thrice in three years and still think of it the most romantic novel ever written (that was imitated by later tuppence romances). At IIT KGP I bought and read (with difficulty) her Emma and Sense & Sensibility which turned out to be poor followups. I promptly exchanged them with a rare copy of the Autocrat in the Faculty Club Library. I think Harper Lee was wise in not writing any more novels after her To Kill a Mocking Bird.
Fortunately for me Pride & Prejudice was not a prescribed book for exams; but it was for my fair elder cousin in whose hands I found it at 14. The book had a lovely color picture of a Man and a Woman dressed up in the Pre-Victorian fashion. and scowling at each other. My cousin pointed her cute finger at each of them and said: "This is Pride and This is Prejudice". I thought it a lovely way of introducing a book to a young fool who had to look up 'prejudice' in his Uncle's COD at once.
I may be a fool to read that book 3 times but, if that were so, Benjamin Disraeli, the First Jewish British PM who integrated India and the Suez into the Hallowed British Empire must be a fool 6 times over, since he is reputed to have read it 17 times.
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Although etymologically prejudice is just : 'pre-judgment' (or 'premature judgment') it has mostly a negative connotation: judge a person or thing hastily as undesirable if not avoidable, to say the least.
I have so far never had occasion to pre-judge people 'good' and discover later that I was too hasty in my judgment. You may call me a cynic, somewhat rightly, but the truth is that I have always been a withdrawn and unenthusiastic friend...almost never sought another's friendship...the few friends I have were the first to form an opinion of me (mostly negative) and correct it later on. This excludes most of my students and younger colleagues with whom I have always had cordial relations due to age-gulf that precludes any unhealthy sense of competition.
The prime example of Pride & Prejudice in my professional relations is no doubt with my Ph D Guide SDM. When he insulted me in public the first time I ever sat in a Grand Viva, I was almost in tears and walked out of the Hall in a huff wondering how anyone could behave so obnoxiously.
Only to discover later that he was not allergic to me but to Electronics; and that was his typical off-hand way of reacting to a situation in which he finds himself uncomfortable.
On my second one-on-one session with him (forced on me by HNB) I dropped my prejudice instantly since I discovered that this guy is DIFFERENT. And I stuck to him for five years and more not only because I wanted to do a good Ph D but also because he was INTERESTING.
Very unlike DB who found him a GOD from the word GO because both of them excelled in Math (and detested Electronics) unlike me who was the other way round.
But SDM was as keen as a child to learn the basics of Electronics from me as I was to learn (to his dismay) that the Determinant of an Orthogonal Matrix is Unity, a thing that every Class XII student knows nowadays. Oh, well! I too was aghast that any Professor of Physics from Calcutta University due to retire in 2 years never heard of a Pot or a Pentode not to talk of the routine Thryratron. Wisdom quickly dawned on both of us that we both were maverick in different ways...and that welded us.
After his retirement SDM was delighted with the many reprints I used to send him of my Papers in Teaching Journals, declaring that he never could understand Newton's Rings and avoided that Lab, or that he slept for 12 hours on my Flickering Bulb Paradox in Relativity (on the mathematical aspects of which he was the undoubted Maestro) and had to look at the hint in its Solution; and he then wrote it in cold blood that "Such a Paper can be written by one who is not only a Master of Relativity but also EMT"; just because it mentions the word Transmission Lines which, for him, was as foreign as Electronics {;-}.
A Charming Man intellectually and I treasured our differences and celebrated them in my Homage to him which was composed overnight in silent tears that such a person would perhaps never grace IIT KGP if not the Earth...just a grown-up KID!
A classic case of Professional Pride & Prejudice on both sides...
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