Freundinnen haben mir zum letzten Geburtstag vor der Vergreisung/ dem dann doch mal Erwachsen werden einen Philip Roth geschenkt. Philip gab mir auf S.35 meiner Paperbackausgabe am Sonntag folgendes über Menschen und ihre Wahrnehmung der Mitmenschen mit in die Woche:
„You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance that is ludricous, so ill-euqipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? […] The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway, It’s about getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful consideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you.“
Mr Roth könnte jetzt auf den restlichen Trillionen Seiten nur noch bladibladibla schreiben: Das Lesen hat sich schon gelohnt.
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