And the very next posting at Savage Minds (just up from my RSS reader) provoked me to printing out for leisured enjoyment Clifford Geertz' A Life of Learning (the Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 1999). It ends thus:
...as either White remarked to Thurber or Thurber remarked to White, the claw of the old seapuss gets us all in the end.(thanks to Alex Golub for that one) Posted by oook at October 19, 2006 03:27 PMI am, as I imagine you can tell from what I've been saying, and the speed at which I have been saying it, not terribly good at waiting, and I will probably turn out not to handle it at all well. As my friends and co-conspirators age and depart what Stevens called "this vast inelegance," and I, myself, stiffen and grow uncited, I shall surely be tempted to intervene and set things right yet once more. But that, doubtless, will prove unavailing, and quite possibly comic. Nothing so ill-befits a scholarly life as the struggle not to leave it, and—Frost, this time, not Hopkins—"no memory of having starred/can keep the end from being hard." But for the moment, I am pleased to have been given this chance to contrive my own fable and plead my own case before the necrologists get at me. No one should take what I have been doing here as anything more than that.