From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Apr 08 2002 - 21:38:20 MDT
>From the first chapter of his biography, a pleasingly extropian touch:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/i/ignatieff-berlin.html
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It is often said that his equanimity, together with his liberalism, are the
products of privilege. He has had a lucky and privileged life -- parents
who adored him, an exile that did not scar him, election to All Souls at
twenty-three, marriage to a gifted, supportive and wealthy woman -- these
have enabled him to make manifest what is often frustrated in others. But
make it manifest he did, when others might have thrown their advantages
away. There is in his temperament some impalpable source of health and
well-being. He is well in his skin, at home in the world, at ease even with
the advancing prospect of his own death. This cool, even cold serenity
seems mysterious, unapproachable, unavailable to me; and in all our
afternoons together, it is this that I most wish to understand. To be an
intellectual is often to be unhappy: his happiness is an achievement worth
seeking to explain.
`Do you wish you could live for ever?' he once asked me. His mother
lived until she was ninety-four. I told him the idea filled me with horror.
He heard me out, then said, `All of my friends think the same. But I do
not. I wish it would continue indefinitely. Why not?' Albert Einstein met
him once and remarked afterwards that he seemed like `a kind of spectator
in God's big but mostly not very attractive theatre'. He has never tired of
life's theatre and he imagines himself watching its lighted stage for ever.
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