Clover Adams on knowledge and perception

“How true it is that the mind sees what it has means of seeing. I get so little, while the others about me are so intelligent and cultivated about everything that appeals to them.” Quoted from Clover Adams correspondence in The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics and the Opening of Old Japan by Christopher Benfey (Random House, 2003) p.120. (Clover, who was designated by no less than Henry James as a “Voltaire in petticoats”, was given to depressiveness that became increasingly menacing. She maintained the correspondence from which the quote is taken during a trip with Henry along the Nile in 1872.

Death and transmogrification

I listened today to Selected Shorts. It retailed the story of a dying businessman and his family's well-organized efforts to deal with his impending death of old age as matter-of-factly as a to-do list. This leads me to think that if you want a lot of grief, die early. When you die young (or relatively so) you are mourned for the unfulfilled hopes of the grieving, the what-might-have-been, and so are likely to be remembered longer (and, unless you have been a rat, more deeply cherished.)