2017 Jan 1st

Today’s blog will be different, and so will tomorrow’s blog. We meet Doctor Guru a short-tempered character with an opinion about everything. Dr. Guru first appeared in “More of the same,” a collection of memoir essays I did a few years ago. To celebrate the New Year I thought a little non-political humor would be an agreeable change.

Doctor Guru

Writer: Dr Guru can you tell me the meaning of the phrase, “He puts his pants on one leg at a time?” Isn’t that something everyone does?

Dr Guru: Oh my goodness gracious me! Indeed not. There are three methods of putting on your pants: The least skilled, and the means used by most people, is to put them on one leg at a time. Some particularly athletic people can hold their pants open at the waist and leap into the air landing with their feet in the appropriate pants leg. Sometimes the novice will get the feet in the wrong pants leg, or both feet in the same pants leg and then hospitalization may be required. A final method, not well understood by the layman, is to pull the pants on over one’s head. That final method has never been photographed and may be apocryphal. I’d suggest that you sick with the first method.

Writer: Dr Guru is it possible for time to stand still? Can time be stopped?

Dr Guru: Indeed it can! Time is measured by the sequence of events; if events stop so does time. If your watch stops so does time.

Writer: But when my watch stops time doesn’t stop.

Dr Guru: It certainly does…for your watch. You haven’t stopped, but your watch has, ergo (That’s Latin; it means therefore. All us intellectuals use Latin.) time hasn’t stopped for you but it has stopped for your watch. Once you get its innards moving again, time will start moving for it too. Of course the same kind of thing can happen to you. If you go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night you’ll have no idea how much time has passed, unless you look at a watch. While you were asleep time, and the events associated with it, have stopped for you. You reorient yourself to time by looking at a watch for which events have proceeded apace. Time didn’t stop for your watch.

Writer: That is amazing, Dr Guru. So when you die time must stop for you because you are no longer aware of any movement?

Dr Guru: Exactly! In that case time stands still.

Writer: I’ve noticed that philosophers and poets often say the same things ordinary people say, but philosopher’s words are widely quoted while ordinary people saying the same things are ignored. Why is that?

Dr Guru: It’s true of course. Philosophers are paid a lot of money to write things; it follows that those things are important and memorable. Money determines the importance of things. Ordinary people can write something with the identical meaning and their efforts will be ignored. For example, Thomas Hobbes, a famous political philosopher writing hundreds of years ago said, “Life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Suppose an ordinary man said, “Life’s a bitch and then you die.” That’s the same meaning, but no one will remember who said it. Proper phrasing is important; so is being a dead philosopher!

Writer: Dr. Guru, in the same vein, why are dead people more famous than live people? Everyone can name dead composers, or famous dead generals, or famous dead philosophers. It’s much harder to name famous living ones.

Dr Guru: That’s very true. One theory is that the ghosts of these dead composers, Beethoven, Brahms, and others, have exerted their influence on current composers to make them produce junk. As you know there is a fad for very loud sound. Increasing a composition’s volume disguises the junk so the audience doesn’t notice the absence of melody and counterpoint. Loudness is a wonderful support for mediocre musicians in other ways; it produces eventual loss of hearing in their audiences who then become even less critical. Dancing about on the concert stage also helps distract the listeners from the music. You will rarely see the Chicago symphony dancing around the podium, unless there is a fire backstage.

Continued tomorrow.