July 03, 2006
The First Time
In response to my paeon to Veronica Mars below, PG asks:
(W)hat does Will Baude mean by this simile -- "Yes, the West Wing and Firefly are off the air, I am caught up on the Gilmore Girls and have one season left of Buffy (which I am contemplating holding in reserve, like a Jane Austen novel waiting for a divorce)." The only Austen novel that I know to have included a divorce is Mansfield Park, and it is not exactly a joyous event.
This was an allusion to a story I think I haven't yet told on this blog.
My first day of Regulation of Vice, an eye-opening class I took from Vice Squad's Jim Leitzel, he went through the syllabus and then told us there would be no homework that night, and that next class we would discuss John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty." When a brash first-year pointed out to him that reading "On Liberty" did in fact appear to constitute homework, he was suddenly reminded that not everybody in the class had already read it.
Jim was excited. "Oh my. Some of you haven't yet read 'On Liberty'? You're very lucky. You can still look forward to the experience of reading it for the first time!" This then prompted a digression about the peculiar experience of reading various books for the first time. Obviously you have to read a book first before you can read it second, and before you can engage in a long affair with it. But for many books, there's no time like the first. Jim then revealed that he had a friend who loved JAne Austen novels. She loved them so much that she had decided not to read one Austen novel. Her theory was that if she ever got divorced (she was not married) she would need to read an Austen novel for the first time to get her through it. So one (I think it was Mansfield Park) remained unread, just in case she should ever need a first-experience as an emotional crutch.
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