Disillusion is a process, rather than a discrete event. Unlike, say, baptism, it proceeds in stages: like Pooh’s head as he is being dragged
bump,
bump,
bump,
bump,
down the funny stairs.
One of the sharper impacts occurred in 1980, when I (as ever, behind the times) first learned that, among the young and hip, “Let’s Have Lunch” (a phrasing that already dates it, w.r.t. the later, harder and harsher, yuppie passphrase “Let’s Do Lunch”) did not now signify (as Tarski might have supposed),
<Let’s / have / lunch>,
but rather:
“Go your own way; have a nice life. I’ll probably never see you again. If by chance I do, that’s okay; if I don’t, that’s totally okay too.”
~
As mentioned: So soon as do you, older and wiser and stricken in years, imagine that you have been finally disabused -- just then does Fate sandbag you with a rubber chicken.
Now in the past few months, I have been occasionally receiving terse, thoughtful-sounding comments about some of my essays, either via e-mail or on the blog: more precisely, promisory notes for future commentary. “Interesting. I’ll have to think more about this and then respond.” It’s nice to have feedback; even nicer to have feedback that has been mulled over and not just blurted out. And since one of these correspondents was Noam Chomsky, I rather got my hopes up. Indeed, if the blog had just the right two faithful attentive readers, I would happily keep penning essays, dispensing with the busy-work of the blog, and sending them out to
N. Chomsky, c/o MIT
W. Quine, c/o Paradise.
In no instance, however, have these well-sounding and perhaps even well-meaning foretastes ever been followed up.
And so I send out my thoughts, packeted into bottles over the Interwebs: yet hear back nothing but their own echo -- unless that be itself an illusion, being really the Microwave Background Radiation -- from out the dark and depths of the vast unpeopled void …
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