A Few Thoughts About Nots

 

 

The Not Things

In the Time of the Great Plague of 2020 many critics of our government are critical not of what has been done, but of what should have been done and was not. “For what was there none cared a jot; but all were wroth with what was not.”

Our leader, Bozo the Clown should have seen it coming, should have done something to stop the plague. But Bozo did nothing. “Why blame me,” says Bozo. “Name me one President in American history who ever saw a plague coming.”

 Bozo’s response to Covid-19: “It is what it is.”

 “Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition.”

Monty Python

 

Meeting Not to Drink

Hoping to please the old man when they once met, the young writer Ivan Bunin told Tolstoy, “The sobriety societies are doing great things these days.” The old man snorted. “You mean when people get together not to drink? There’s something fake and unnatural about that. When people get together they naturally are going to drink. Getting together not to drink won’t do.”

                                             Ivan Bunin, The Liberation of Tolstoy

 

Thoughts for the Pro Lifers and Pro Choicers: If You Are Not, Are You Not Unhappy?

In Anna Karenina Dolly and Anna discuss the issue of contraception. Anna says, “What is reason given to me for if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy creatures into the world? . . . I should always feel I had wronged these unhappy children . . . If they are not [if they don’t exist], at any rate they are not unhappy.” The original reads, “Если их нет, то они не несчастны по крайней мере, а если они несчастны, то я одна в этом виновата.” Literally: “If they are not, then they are at least not unhappy, but if they are unhappy, then I alone am to blame for that.”

 

Non-Events With Consequences

You use contraceptives. Your lovely baby girl—little Rachel with the curly ringlets and bright blue eyes—is never born. Consequently, you are lonely, sad, disillusioned with life. Meanwhile, Rachel is not unhappy, because she is not.

You miss an important phone call. The bell on the phone downstairs does not ring anymore. It started doing it (not) just this week.

In Anna Karenina Sergei Ivanovich wants to propose to Varenka and she wants him to. But they each are of two minds about this. Something deep inside each of them does not want the proposal to happen. In a scene in which they are out together gathering mushrooms, Sergei almost proposes, then does not. It almost happens, then does not. Later “the grownups sat by the balcony and talked as though nothing had happened, though they all, especially Sergei Ivanovich and Varenka, were very well aware that there had happened an event which, though negative, was of very great importance.” Or to put it in other words: a non-event of great importance had not happened.

[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie: Here We Be. Where Be We?]