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

Three “little Siegfrieds”

 

Siegfried Dean as a pup

12 years later
all still beloved

By Moristotle

[Originally published on December 18, 2009.]

[The woman] who sold us our beloved Siegfried back in March [2009] has announced the availability of three more “beautiful Cream/White puppies.”

Paris Journal: Dimanche du musée libre

Free-museum Sunday

By Moristotle

A number of websites announce that admission to Paris’s museums is “free the first Sunday of the month.” This can’t be literally true. The website My Parisian Life: Your City Guide to Life in Paris has a section titled, “List of all the free museums on 1st Sundays in Paris.” And the list distinguishes the 16 museums free “on the 1st Sunday of every month” from the one free only from March through October and the seven free only from November through March. And, somehow, the total of only 24 museums in Paris doesn’t seem like a big enough number...Maybe I should google “Paris museums that are never free on first Sunday.”

Three “little Siegfrieds”

Karen, who sold us our beloved Siegfried back in March, has announced the availability of three more “beautiful Cream/White puppies”:

My daughter said, "Aw, don't you want another? Just ask DeAnn how much more fun it is with two! I copied her so she could see the photos. She sent a picture of their two [Wolfie and Beauregard] in her Christmas card."
    I replied, "They are sooooo cute, and we love the 60-pound version also, but two, big Siegfrieds? You've got to be kidding!"
    Then DeAnn suggested that we purchase one of the little Siegfrieds and name him Roy.
    That wasn't the first time that my wife and I had heard that one. She decided she had to set the record straight:

Siegfried is a reference to Wagner, not to Las Vegas. We'd have to name the dog Wotan or Siegmund; for a female, Brünnhilde or Sieglinde.

She even got out her set of DVDs of "Der Ring des Nibelungen," to check the spellings.
    This might be a good time of year to watch that....

...while you're busy making other plans

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.

But we need that sentence, to be reminded not to let our lives just slip by unappreciated while we're busy making other plans.
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1. He might have said this in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine about 1970. At any rate, a citation in a Google hit list included both the part of the quotation I searched on and a reference to Rolling Stone.