I wait in 4/4 time
Dec. 30th, 2005 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enthusiastickSo I'm going to add another (theoretically) weekly feature to my blog for a while and see how it works out. Fridays are now officially Heinlein Fridays here at the journal of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pooka_madness. Every week I'll post a quotation, mostly from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long. I'll add in my own two cents and then open up the floor for discussion. If things go well I may even eventually get to the really juicy (and highly contentious) notions, like the famous "time enough" aphorism.
The thing is, I read a lot of Heinlein at a formative age. And I was pretty enamored of it. Time Enough For Love and Strange In A Strange Land informed a lot of my philosophical and theological thinking. It would be years before late-night discussions about weighty subjects like the meaning of life became particularly frequent in my life. As a result a lot of Heinlein's notions went pretty much unchallenged for the better part of my adolescence. The old coot warped my thinking fairly severely as a result, and I find that even now I'm inclined to agree with rather a lot of what he writes.
This week's quote, to kick us off in style:
The absolute worst thing you can do in this situation is hint. Because once you've got me wondering, then my curiosity will become insatiable. And bad for both of us, because I'll likely hound you until you 'fess up to the gory details. And the thing is, as I said, I was almost certainly happier not knowing. Oh sure, I'll almost certainly feed you some line about how nothing you can say about the past is going to change the way I feel about you. But that's absolutely not true, and unless I'm drunk or otherwise operating below peak mental capacity I probably know that it isn't.
In this particular case, ignorance is actually bliss.
Dicuss.
pooka_madness. Every week I'll post a quotation, mostly from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long. I'll add in my own two cents and then open up the floor for discussion. If things go well I may even eventually get to the really juicy (and highly contentious) notions, like the famous "time enough" aphorism.The thing is, I read a lot of Heinlein at a formative age. And I was pretty enamored of it. Time Enough For Love and Strange In A Strange Land informed a lot of my philosophical and theological thinking. It would be years before late-night discussions about weighty subjects like the meaning of life became particularly frequent in my life. As a result a lot of Heinlein's notions went pretty much unchallenged for the better part of my adolescence. The old coot warped my thinking fairly severely as a result, and I find that even now I'm inclined to agree with rather a lot of what he writes.
This week's quote, to kick us off in style:
"Dear, don't bore him with trivia or burden him with your past mistakes. The happiest way to deal with a man is never to tell him anything he does not need to know."Hoo boy. Well, abstracting from the condescending-to-the-point-of-misogynistic tone of this particular quote, I must say that truer words have rarely been spoken. When it comes to a woman's checkered past, I usually don't want to know. Not if I'm romantically interested in the girl in question, and if we're bothering to have the sort of conversations in which these things come up, then generally I'm interested. Oh, I might think I want to know, but the truth of the matter is I don't. I'm happier not knowing.
The absolute worst thing you can do in this situation is hint. Because once you've got me wondering, then my curiosity will become insatiable. And bad for both of us, because I'll likely hound you until you 'fess up to the gory details. And the thing is, as I said, I was almost certainly happier not knowing. Oh sure, I'll almost certainly feed you some line about how nothing you can say about the past is going to change the way I feel about you. But that's absolutely not true, and unless I'm drunk or otherwise operating below peak mental capacity I probably know that it isn't.
In this particular case, ignorance is actually bliss.
Dicuss.
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Date: 2005-12-30 10:49 pm (UTC)Mine were the Heinlein books I read so often as a child. In fact, they were the very same two books you mentioned. I had fun a few years back when I picked up Time Enough For Love for the first time in a very long time, reread it and got to have a lot of "Huh... So that's where that comes from." moments.