Re: What exactly is désinvolture?

[Gary Kern <gkern@alumni.Princeton.EDU>]

John M Stroup wrote:
> 
> My great-uncle Henry sold all he had, constructed with his own hands--in
> a clearing in a remote wooded area of southern Missouri--a
> cabin made from old lumber and flattened oil cans and with an earthen
> floor, and lived in it for thirty years until it burned down.
> He raised most of his food himself, or caught it; he never admitted to
> having any money from the sale of the farm, and certainly did not put it
> into a bank account.  After the fire, treated for exposure, he died on
> account of the noise from a vacuum cleaner in the rooming house the
> relatives put him into.  Earlier, to requests that he give up and move
> into a house trailer [?Wohnwagen?]  with relatives, having been told that
> he couldn't live
> this way and that nobody could, he replied:  "Well, Bert, I guess I can.
> The Indians did."
> 
*******************
That's désinvolture all right, but not to be recommended.  It requires
this addition:  Sample some of the poison from time to time so as not to
be too vulnerable to it.  So watch a little TV, then courageously turn
it off.  Listen to enough rap so as to be able to identify it, then
close the door or cover your ears and curse as loudly as you can.

Schopenhauer wrote the best essay on noise, but it needs to be updated.
The morons cracking whips in the street in his day are nothing compared
to the boneheads with boom boxes in our own, nor even to the genital
music you are forced to hear while having your teeth drilled.  I told my
dentist I preferred the root canal to the torture of listening to "you
gimme such good luvin' all through da night."  Noise is the very essence
of mass man, he can't live without it, else he would hear the void. 
Your great uncle Henry was a man after my own heart.

GK