Was John Lennon quoting Schopenhauer when he said:Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans1.According to the character Philip, a "philosophical therapist" in Irvin D. Yalom's novel, The Schopenhauer Cure, quite a few others have "quoted" Schopenhauer:
And not only Thomas Mann but many other great minds acknowledged their debt to Arthur Schopenhauer. Tolstoy called Schopenhauer the "genius par excellence among men." To Richard Wagner he was a "gift from Heaven." Nietzsche said his life was never the same after purchasing a tattered volume of Schopenhauer in a used-book store in Leipzig and, as he put it, "letting the dynamic, dismal genius work on my mind." Schopenhauer forever changed the intellectual map of the Western World, and without him we would have had a very different and weaker Freud, Nietzsche, Hardy, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Ibsen, Conrad. [p. 50]The Schopenhauer quotation [on p. 91 of The Schopenhauer Cure] that reminded me of John Lennon's famous statement was:
When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim [for the intervening time, temporarily]. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip by unappreciated and unenjoyed was just their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death.Lennon's is easier to take and more memorable, isn't it? Without that final sentence.
"Well, what else?" [Nikolai] said [to his minister of war].According to the translator's introduction, Tolstoy realized that "his depiction...of Nicholas I...made publication of Hadji Murat under the conditions of Russian censorship quite unthinkable." Though Philip Roth was able to publish his satire of Richard Nixon (Our Gang) during Nixon's term of office and any number of writers have already satirized Bush in print, I wonder who might be writing something about Bush (and about our political inertia) so troublingly unflattering that it can't be published yet, even in America.
"A courier from the Caucasus," said Chernyshov, and began to report what Vorontsov had written about Hadji Murat surrendering.
"You don't say!" said Nikolai. "A good start."
"Evidently the plan devised by Your Majesty is beginning to bear fruit," said Chernyshov.
This praise of his strategic capabilities was especially pleasing to Nikolai, for although he took pride in his strategic capabilities, deep down in his heart he was conscious that he had none. And now he wanted to hear himself praised in greater detail.
"How do you see it?"
"The way I see it is that if we had long been following Your Majesty's plan, gradually, albeit slowly moving forward, cutting down the forests, destroying reserves, then the Caucasus would have been subdued long ago. I put Hadji Murat's surrender down to this alone. He realises that they can hold out no longer."
"That's right," said Nikolai.
Despite the fact that the plan for slow movement into enemy territory by means of the felling of forests and the destruction of provisions was the plan of Yermolov and Velyaminov, and the complete opposite of Nikolai's plan, whereby it was necessary to seize Shamil's residence at once and sack that nest of brigands, and whereby the Dargo expedition of 1845 had been undertaken, costing the lives of so many men—despite this, Nikolai ascribed the plan for slow movement, the systematic felling of forests, and the destruction of provisions to himself as well. It would have seemed that in order to believe that the plan for slow movement...was his plan, it was necessary to conceal the fact that he had absolutely insisted on the completely contradictory military undertaking of 1845. But he did not conceal this, and was proud both of that plan...and of the plan for slow movement forward, despite the fact that these two plans were clearly contradictory to one another. The constant clear, vile blatancy of the flattery of those around him had brought him to the point where he no longer saw his contradictions, no longer adapted his actions and words to reality, to logic, or even to simple good sense, but was absolutely certain that all his instructions, no matter how senseless, unjust, and mutually incompatible, became entirely sensible, just, and mutually compatible simply because it was he that gave them. [pp. 74-75]– translated by Hugh Aplin
