Post by ermete22 on May 21, 2008 17:55:42 GMT -5
Stuart Collingwood strangely wrote in his Lewis Carroll’s biography:
“One cannot read this little volume without feeling that the shadow of some disappointment lay over Lewis Carroll's life. Such I believe to have been the case.” And, more far:
“But those who loved him would not wish to lift the veil from these dead sanctities, nor would any purpose be served by so doing.”
An obvious question: why should one be so foolish or naïve to believe that a man can live a full life without any disappointment at all? So the information passed by Collingwood is at least strange; maybe he was not a professional biographer, but can you imagine a biographer starting by the information that the man whose life he intends describing had some problem during his existence?
Of course he had, as everybody of us. Why he wanted to pass such pleonastic information? The second sentence barely states that the family will keep secret such disappointments.
If Stuart Collingwood’s will really was to keep the secret about such “disappointments” he would have simply not cited them.
My personal feeling, if you consider the words by Stuart Collingwood as they are, and how absurd they are, makes me read his words as something like “to whom is concerned, the family will keep the secrets”.
Of course if the family behaviour about Carroll’s diary and documents was not what it was, the above analysis could be pure fantasy, but their behaviour was so strange and arbitrary to make the above considerations almost reasonable.
Do the disappointments were philosophical, religious or we must still accept the implicit hypothesis that the disappointments were sexual, sentimental or similar? Shall we go along accepting the idea that the family was composed by just strange, psychoanalytically perturbed persons and that Carroll was affected by psychological problems himself? Of course also psychologically perturbed persons may have their philosophy, and in some sense all of us have their problems. But I do not agree on the idea that Carroll’s philosophy and thought were just bright reactions to his unfortunate psychological problems; I am convinced since some years that, on the contrary some traits of Carroll’s behaviour were the consequence of his efforts in the search for truth by all the tools available. I don’t think that Alan Turing invented computers BECAUSE he was homosexual; his discoveries are gigantic by themselves and how he died is simply a shame for the authorities.
Are we discussing a philosophy that is, in some sense, an epiphenomenon of Carroll’s psychological problems? Were the words by Stuart Collingwood something like “to whom is concerned”?
Carlo