Thinkers

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The Thinker - Rodin


There was an interview with Claerwen James, daughter of the late and oh, so great Clive James in yesterday's Observer Review. I haven't finished it yet, but what I did read reminded me of what I so admire about her father. That her voice, even in print is so like his, gives me hope for the future.

Erudition is much more than simply having ready access to a grab-bag of classical quotations. Quotation is not synonymous with understanding. It's unfortunate that those who seek to re-establish the old pecking order in this country don't grasp this simple truth. Blather is blather, either in Latin or Ancient Greek.

Clive James was an erudite man; he had what could somewhat understatedly be called an enquiring mind. He simply was genuinely interested in the world and what it had to offer, not for material gain alone, but for how it fed his mind. In return, he gave us some of the very best writing and some of the most scurrilously entertaining TV imaginable.

I first discovered him on a BBC2 programme in the late sixties. The show pre-dated Up Sunday and I have no recollection of its title and can't find any record of it anywhere, but it was an absolute gem. No start titles, no end titles; it came and it went; a wonderful, random series of unconnected fragments of music, poetry, performance art and Clive James.

My dad was a similarly erudite man; lesser in formal education, but not certainly not lesser in intellect. The commonality between them embodied in the inquisitiveness that marks the real thinker out from the intellectual passenger, a genuine user of the mind rather than a parrot who quotes blindly from antiquity to impress.

Like Clive James, my dad gave insight to those of us listening and like most of us, he had feet of clay; a measure of man, not of the man.

Comments

  1. Helen Palmer29 September 2020 at 12:48

    I do miss Grandad and his stories about war time, Helena Street, sitting on a Shire Horse which was like sitting on the shed roof, the night the gear box fell out the car and Nan had to hold it up to get home, the day the wind nearly 'corpsed' him walking back from the shops, the day I was born and how he 'wet the baby's head' in the pub.....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. sideways29 September 2020 at 13:49

      I know, me too. It's difficult to believe it's nearly eight years since he went.

      Delete

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