While you’re busy making other plans

Renewed from December 15, 2009

By Moristotle

Was John Lennon quoting Schopenhauer when he said:

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.¹

​In memoriam Professor Errol E. Harris

Renewed from November 1, 2009

By Moristotle

With somewhat of a shock, I discovered a few minutes ago that the man who said the most flattering thing that I can remember anyone’s ever saying to me died only five months ago. Born the same month as my mother (February 1908), Professor Errol E. Harris died this past June, at age one hundred and one! (My mother died in 2005, not long before her ninety-seventh birthday.)

Illustrated limerick

I removed the contents of a cardboard box in the garage this morning, the same one I'd peaked into in September 2009, hoping to finally say good-bye to most of the mementos, some of which I've held onto for almost sixty years. Right, there was a "class prophecy" I'd written and apparently delivered at my elementary school graduation, which would have been May or June 1954. Liberty School, out in the country west of Petaluma, California. Into the recycle bin.
    There were my note cards for my speech two years later, upon graduating as valedictorian (apparently) from Central [junior high] School in Tulare, California:

[Card 1] Tonight in unison, you have heard the graduating class recite the theme of the graduation, The American's Creed.
    Adopted by our government in 1918, The American's Creed was written by Wm. Tyler Page.
    Being a list of the things people believe, it is a statement to keep in mind and never forget....
    [Card 14] ...Communism flourishes in places of poverty and ignorance. If we keep our country's standards high, communism will have less chance of gaining control in the United States. We should help other countries in education and their home life.
    We also are fighting a never-ending battle against disease and the forces of nature....
    [Card 15] The United States is here today. But look what happened to Rome, to Greece, Assyria, and Babylon, one-time world powers. Where are they today?....
    [Card 16] We know all of our educational facilities are the result of tax payers' generous offering, the long-working [sic] hours of the unpaid school board, the never-finished job of our teachers, and the painstaking love and sacrifice of our parents. We feel greatly indebted to these people for their sincerity and perserverance [sic] in fulfilling their duties.
    I hope that you, graduates, feel as I do that we are obligated to these people to do something in return. I hope that you feel that you should strive to become the peace-makers of tomorrow.
    Do you "therefore believe it is your duty to your country to love it; to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to [Card 17] respect its flag; and to defend it against all enemies"?

Well-indoctrinated eighth-grader. Recycled.
    And, of course, there were high school papers (in English, physics, and civics), and papers from college (including "The Necessary Angel," about which I'd written in 2009 and which I put into the recycle bin this morning), and papers from graduate school (including one in the philosophy of science, December 14, 1966, on whose title page Professor Errol Harris had written, "Refreshingly original; genuine philosophizing," and which I set aside to read again).
  There were two or three dozen photographs, a couple of sketchy journals from the 'sixties, and a few items of correspondence, including a letter from my grandmother Ada Voss, postmarked Hector, Arkansas and dated May 24,1964, the month I graduated from Yale, and addressed to me at 414 Yale Station, New Haven, Conn 06520:

Helo, dear good sweeat prety Marsie was i. glad to get your good letter bless your good heart to thank you thout of your Mama Voss bless you how i do wish you hear whitte me to night i get so lonely hear buy my self [my namesake grandfather, Morris Voss, had died in June 1960, right after I graduated from high school] but i stay busey most all time got a prety garden 8 head cattle mare one dog 3 cats quiet a few chickens so you i stay busey most all time but isent a day are night i dont thank of my good Marsie see we can thank of the Pass but we dont now the feauture wish you hear an [over] spend the sumer with me i would bee so glad i shure dont  no much news i havent eaven been to Russellville since the 29 lase Sept do you have the fim of me you tuck of me in the yard if you do i like to have it so whin you have time rite me  a gain i love you so much will sa good night till we meeat bey xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx i do love you Mama Voss rite me a gain can see you in mind pulling your little read wagion me you picking to matoes picking cucumbers on Porter Sandra place [my father worked for Porter Sanders, who provided a house on his farm outside Farmersville, not far from Tulare; my first experience with school was at Outside Creek Elementary School in Farmersville; I believe that was its name] We shur had a good time xxxxxx

I kept a few of these items.
    I also kept one copy (I found two) of a typescript of a sixty-thousand-word novel I'd written in 1974, a parody of Watergate titled The Unmaking of the President: A Bicentennial Celebration—it was going to be published in 1976, you see. It'll probably be discouraging reading, but two and a fraction pages of handwritten notes from David Obst (who had been Woodward and Bernstein's agent for All the President's Men) contained mostly commending comments, so why not take a look?

But most enjoyably, there were school projects, report cards, and home work of my son and daughter—all of it from San Jose, California, before we moved to North Carolina (in 1983).
    "Emmett Kelly," by Geoff Dean, Allen School, Sixth Grade, on which Mr. Cabral had written in red ink: "Date."
    "Ecuador," by Geoff Dean, Allen School, May 9, 1980, Mr. Howseman-Cabral, Grade Six.
    "The Human Ear," by Geoff Dean, on which his teacher had written "A+. Excellent, well written and illustrated."
    "Tobacco," by Jennifer Dean, May 9, 1980, Allen School, 4th grade, on which Mr. Miyugishima had penned, "Excellent report. I especially like your 'Tobacco Facts,' which is the 'heart' of your report. Glossary is also great."
    And a Time Magazine prophecy by Geoff.

I found a faded, wrinkled, blue-lined sheet on which my son had illustrated a delightful limerick that I guess he must have written about 1980, around age twelve—going by the drawing's similarity to one he did for a usability campaign I was involved in at IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory at about that time.
    "Limerick," by Geoff Dean:

A girl on the flying trapeze,
Going through her performance with ease,
    Was suddenly frozen.
    Her partner had chosen
A terrible moment to sneeze.

Death, too, is what happens....

Death, too, is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

In memoriam Professor Stephen Gardner

Yesterday I asked a professional colleague whether she were looking forward to our association's next annual meeting. "Have you talked with Stephen yet whether he'll accompany you again?" And she replied:

Stephen died November 10th. He had a fall at home while he was alone and it caused a brain bleed that was left unchecked until I got home at 6 p.m. He never regained consciousness. Although he received brain surgery, his brain stem was damaged. Brain stems cannot be repaired. We removed life support and he moved on to the next phase of existence at 2 a.m.
    I still find it unbelievable. I’m spending Christmas with his mother, who is 95 years old and devastated to lose her only son. He was 61.
    You can see his obit (I guess you still can) at shellhousefuneralhome.com. [Yes, you still can: go there and search obituaries on "gardner."]
    So, I’m not really looking forward to much or anything right now.
    But, I’ll be there.

I, too, am planning to be there.

In memoriam Professor John E. Smith

A few minutes later yesterday I received an email from the assistant to the Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Yale University:

Hi Morris,
    Just thought you should know the sad news that John Smith passed away on December 7. He was 88, visiting his daughter in Washington, and it happened very quickly. We are planning a small funeral tomorrow [i.e., today] with a burial in the Grove Street Cemetery, but a large memorial service probably in March. Sorry to be the bearer of this news.
    Love from both to both,
    Pat

Pat became John Smith's secretary during my junior year at Yale, while I was his bursary student in the department. The first "both" refers to her and her husband Alan, who were very kind to me, sort of my big siblings away from my childhood home in California, the second "both" to me and my wife, who took Pat and Alan to lunch in New Haven in the summer of 1976.
    The last time I saw her or Professor Smith was at another lunch in New Haven, in June 1989, when I bought meals for them and a classmate (another of John Smith's bursary students), on the occasion of our 25th Yale Class Reunion.
    As I recorded on November 1, my last correspondence with Dr. Smith was to bear to him the news (unwittingly) of the death of his good friend, Professor Errol E. Harris.
    Professor Smith's obituary appears in The New York Times. I have walked by the Grove Street Cemetery many times.
    John Edwin Smith may have been making other plans when he died. I had certainly been making other plans, considering whether to ask him about something I was reading in Yalom's novel, The Schopenhauer Cure:

JES, do you agree with the opinion that Schopenhauer was a greater philosopher than Fichte and Hegel?

In memoriam a young person

And yesterday, too, as reported in The Durham Herald-Sun this morning:

Chapel Hill—...a UNC Chapel Hill freshman hospitalized at UNC Hospitals since November 20 with swine flu, has died.
    Hospital spokesman..., contacted late Wednesday night, could provide no further details, except to confirm the death.
    [The] 18-year-old dramatic arts major from Rhode Island had been on life support before she died, apparently from complications of the H1N1 virus.
    [Her] illness had garnered national attention, and thousands of well wishers had been following her ordeal on a Facebook page titled "Prayers for Lillian."

Who's busier making other plans than a college freshman?

Missing the bus stop....

But it was this morning that this codicil to Lennon came to me. It came to me on my quarter-mile walk back from getting off the bus to the stop that I'd missed because I'd been...busy making other plans.

Remembering Louis Wilson Jr.

At work yesterday, I told someone that I had been surprised recently to learn that her boss had worked for the State of North Carolina for thirty years. "I didn't think he could possibly be that old," I told her. She urged me to tell her boss that. "He'd be so glad to hear it!"
    Her saying that reminded me of an old friend who had told me one of those little things that you can never forget because you were so glad (or somehow struck) to hear it.
    The occasion was a writer-editor conference that Louis and I were having. I was conducting a two-week "new writer training" program for IBM, at a hotel in Carmel, California overlooking the Pacific Ocean. (This was in the early 1980's, during what my predecessor trainer referred to the other day with some longing as "Information Development's Golden Age.")
    Louis and the other eight or ten new writers had completed a writing assignment, and I had now edited all of the submissions and was conducting a conference with each student. The idea was to demonstrate the process they'd follow for each real writing assignment back at work.
    In one regard, Louis's work was distinctly superior to everyone else's in the program. He alone had designed the presentation as a series of two-page layouts, the content skillfully chunked to serve both the reader and the subject matter.
    But in another regard, the writing quality of individual sentences, he was clearly in need of instruction in grammar, usage, and style.
    And I told him both of these things.
    His first remark was the memorable utterance. He smiled in the disarming way he had (I seem to remember a gold front tooth, but after more than twenty-five years I'm not absolutely sure) and said, "Morris, you have the ability to tell a person he can go to hell so that he enjoys hearing it."
    I am sure that he used the phrase "go to hell" although of course there was nothing in what I'd told him remotely along that line, but writers are notoriously sensitive about criticism, so I had to assume that it must have seemed to Louis that that was what I was telling him by the grammar-usage-style part of my feedback.
    Anyway, as soon as I got back to my computer at work, I googled on "louis wilson chiropractor," and googlishly fast I found the following announcement, on the website of the Sedona Red Rock News:

Louis Wilson Jr.
March 29, 1934 — March 29, 2009

Louis Wilson Jr., Sedona, died Sunday, March 29, on his 75th birthday.
    After 20 years with IBM and 20 years as a chiropractor, Wilson retired to Sedona in 2005.
    Survivors are...and six grandchildren.
    Friends are invited to a memorial service at the Latter Day Saints church, Sedona, Thursday, April 16, at 11 a.m.

    I had had no idea that Louis was that much older than I, or older than I at all. I did the math: he must have joined IBM about the same year I did, or even a year earlier. If I was told this at the time, or told what he had done at IBM for the preceding sixteen years, I have no recollection of it.
    I of course knew that he left to become a chiropractor; he may have been taking courses in it already. I learned of this from a conversation in the parking lot where we worked. Louis was getting into his Mercedes Benz, dressed as usual in expensive-looking suit and tie. He told me that day what his philosophy was, something like "Drive the car now that you see yourself driving in the future, wear the clothes...." This seems to have been one of those New Age lessons to help make the future happen. And it seems to have worked for Louis.
    His office in the Santa Teresa Laboratory of IBM was a delight to visit. He had one or two vintage lamps, a colorful, thick wool area carpet, and several African artifacts, including a ceremonial mask and a stone sculptured head reminiscent of an image of Nefertiti. Louis had style!
    He was also fearless. I picture Louis, at an annual office holiday party, standing in a doorway underneath some mistletoe in order to bring about the opportunity of kissing our third-level manager, if she happened to come along. She did, and he took advantage. "Louis Wilson, you do not do that!" she commanded, too late. To Louis (and to me too), it was a wonderful lark.
    I visited him and his wife a few years later, on a trip back to California from North Carolina. I seem to recall that his office was in some rooms of their stately older home.
    It would have been nice to see or at least talk on the phone with Louis one more time before one of us died, but, like John E. Smith in the case of his being predeceased by his old friend Errol E. Harris, that was not to be.
    Louis and I had already had our last conversation.

In memoriam Professor Errol E. Harris

With somewhat of a shock, I discovered a few minutes ago that the man who said the most flattering thing that I can remember anyone's ever saying to me died only five months ago. Born the same month as my mother (February 1908), Professor Errol E. Harris died this past June, at age one hundred and one! (My mother died in 2005, not long before her ninety-seventh birthday.)
    Here's the opening paragraph of Wikipedia's entry on Errol Harris:

Errol Eustace Harris (February 19, 1908 – June 21, 2009) was a contemporary South African philosopher. His work focused on developing a systematic and coherent account of the logic, metaphysics, and epistemology implicit in contemporary understanding of the world. Harris held that, in conjunction with empirical science, the Western philosophical tradition, in its commitment to the ideal of reason, contains the resources necessary to accomplish this end. He celebrated his 100th birthday in 2008.

My reading this year has been curiously interconnected. In Frank Harris's memoir, My Life and Loves, I read a good deal of his dealings with Cecil Rhodes, whose money founded the university in South Africa from which Professor Harris earned his bachelor's degree. Then, in the course of reading Antonio Damasio's Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, I learned that Professor Harris had himself written books on Spinoza: Salvation from Despair, A Reappraisal of Spinoza's Philosophy (1973), Spinoza's Philosophy, an Outline (1992), and The Substance of Spinoza (1995). These books are of course now on my reading list.
    When I googled Harris, not remotely imagining that he could still survive, I was actually trying to find out how I might contact his son for information about his father. I talked with the son at Berkshire School in Massachusetts in 1964 or 1965. The chess team of which he was a member had come to Berkshire School for a match. This was before I ever heard of Errol Harris. His son told me that his father was a professor of philosophy (at the time at the University of Kansas).
    Anyway, after that year teaching (mainly geometry) at Berkshire School, a semester as a "divinity student" at New College in the University of Edinburgh (when I still believed that such studies had a subject matter), and a semester teaching (English and driver education) in the high school in California from which I'd graduated, I found myself (with my new wife) in Evanston, Illinois, me to begin a doctoral degree program in philosophy at Northwestern University and her to begin the arduous task of being a graduate student's wife.
    Professor Harris was new there too that fall semester of 1966, and I took his course in the philosophy of science. At the end of the semester, when we met to discuss a paper I'd submitted (I wonder whether it, too, is in that box in my garage?), he said to me, "Mr. Dean, like Hume, you don't clothe your thoughts in wool." I felt terrible; I had only a few minutes before told him of my and my wife's decision that I was dropping out of the doctoral program, and we were returning to California.

The proximate cause, or occasion, of my looking up Professor Harris today was that I had just mentioned someone else at Northwestern to yet another person in my philosophical past, namely Professor John E. Smith (now emeritus at Yale University), with whom I got in touch this week after seeing his letter to the editor of today's New York Times Book Review, "When Dusk Is Only Dusk." Professor Smith was the chairman of the philosophy department at Yale when I was there, and I was a bursary student in his office. He wrote a letter of recommendation for my application for admission to Northwestern.
    I "postscripted" him the paragraph from Wikipedia and asked whether he knew Harris. He answered that:

We were good friends for many years, he contributed to my Festschrift, The Recovery of Philosophy In America, and we took part together in numerous philosophical symposia, etc. He wrote an excellent book on Hegel's Logic. I lost touch with him after I retired and did not know where he was. I did not know that he had passed away; the 101 does not surprise me.

How extraordinary! And what a kind and distinguished man Professor Smith is too. I am delighted, honored to be in touch with him.