Three beers + free time =
Today was my last day at work, and after returning my borrowed textbooks, backing up my files, saying my goodbyes, reconfiguring my email account—after shedding all of the trappings of office life that I had so unexpectedly come to enjoy—I had 20 minutes or so to kill.
So I found myself on the Guardian website, reading Gordon Brown’s eulogy to Robin Cook, the former British foreign secretary who died last week, at 59, while hiking in the Scottish Highlands. Despite my often rampant Anglophilia (though really, of course, Cook was a Scot), I knew next to nothing about him until he died—only that he had quit the Blair government over the invasion of Iraq.
But rhetoric, and particularly the eulogy, have always affected me deeply, despite my well known lack of publicly-displayed emotions. I’ve read whole books about the Gettysburg Address, and Derrida’s collection of eulogies for all the intellectual co-conspirators who died before he...and that funeral oration of Pericles, way back in high school? Middle school? Brown’s address was repetitive, politically self-serving, hardly literate, indicative of how far New Labour has fallen...and yet I found it touching and evocative. I searched for American comparisons—Gordon Brown as a sort of Al Gore, the perpetually thwarted lady-in-waiting, Cook himself a mix of elfin Robert Reich and principled, tragically short-lived Paul Wellstone—
And I ended up thinking about myself—how's that for self-serving—finding similarities, however tenuous. Horse-racing enthusiast, proponent of intervention in Kosovo but not Iraq, educated in English literature, the Scottish Presbyterianism I’m (only) five generations removed from...but most of all, shy, as one of his advisors wrote today:
One of the keys to understanding this became apparent to me several years ago when Robin confided that he often found it difficult to overcome his own natural shyness in dealings with others. This translated into a certain awkwardness that was too easily mistaken for aloofness or arrogance. It is certainly true that he had immense intellectual self-confidence, yet he always seemed to doubt his ability to inspire affection and respect in others.
And it seems he must have shared my love of furious contradiction, and my fear that I will receive a religious burial:
But Mr Cook, like the late Scottish first minister, Donald Dewar, might reasonably be described as a ‘Presbyterian atheist,’ Bishop Holloway added. He would surely have enjoyed the irony of a church funeral in much the same way that he would have enjoyed singing the Red Flag at a New Labour rally, he said.
Unlike the novel I’m reading now, its overwhelming intellect directed at a fascination with death, this kind of thing is cozy, not-so-ironically life-affirming, even as it brushes over political problems and obscures personal failings...exactly the kind of thing I should really start doing if I want to avoid being thought aloof or arrogant until my own unwanted church funeral.
So I found myself on the Guardian website, reading Gordon Brown’s eulogy to Robin Cook, the former British foreign secretary who died last week, at 59, while hiking in the Scottish Highlands. Despite my often rampant Anglophilia (though really, of course, Cook was a Scot), I knew next to nothing about him until he died—only that he had quit the Blair government over the invasion of Iraq.
But rhetoric, and particularly the eulogy, have always affected me deeply, despite my well known lack of publicly-displayed emotions. I’ve read whole books about the Gettysburg Address, and Derrida’s collection of eulogies for all the intellectual co-conspirators who died before he...and that funeral oration of Pericles, way back in high school? Middle school? Brown’s address was repetitive, politically self-serving, hardly literate, indicative of how far New Labour has fallen...and yet I found it touching and evocative. I searched for American comparisons—Gordon Brown as a sort of Al Gore, the perpetually thwarted lady-in-waiting, Cook himself a mix of elfin Robert Reich and principled, tragically short-lived Paul Wellstone—
And I ended up thinking about myself—how's that for self-serving—finding similarities, however tenuous. Horse-racing enthusiast, proponent of intervention in Kosovo but not Iraq, educated in English literature, the Scottish Presbyterianism I’m (only) five generations removed from...but most of all, shy, as one of his advisors wrote today:
One of the keys to understanding this became apparent to me several years ago when Robin confided that he often found it difficult to overcome his own natural shyness in dealings with others. This translated into a certain awkwardness that was too easily mistaken for aloofness or arrogance. It is certainly true that he had immense intellectual self-confidence, yet he always seemed to doubt his ability to inspire affection and respect in others.
And it seems he must have shared my love of furious contradiction, and my fear that I will receive a religious burial:
But Mr Cook, like the late Scottish first minister, Donald Dewar, might reasonably be described as a ‘Presbyterian atheist,’ Bishop Holloway added. He would surely have enjoyed the irony of a church funeral in much the same way that he would have enjoyed singing the Red Flag at a New Labour rally, he said.
Unlike the novel I’m reading now, its overwhelming intellect directed at a fascination with death, this kind of thing is cozy, not-so-ironically life-affirming, even as it brushes over political problems and obscures personal failings...exactly the kind of thing I should really start doing if I want to avoid being thought aloof or arrogant until my own unwanted church funeral.
posted by ch at 11:42 PM
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