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The Book of Laurence - 11 -
- 11 -
your dog.
20
Don’t waste your time arguing your friends
out of largely
irrelevant foolishness.
21
Let your kids make
lots of small mistakes, but please don’t treat them as
friends and equals. You do know better—if not Larry is not
for you.
IX.
It is important to appreciate the beautiful, but it is more
important not to be eaten.
22
Look, I’m not a particularly
deep-thinking God so pick up Goethe, Tagore, Heidegger
or Schopenhauer
for more substance.
23
You can even try
Sören Kierkegaard or Michel Foucault.
I myself prefer
listening to Dave Brubeck’s
Rondo a la Turque, Charlie
Parker’s Salt Peanuts
or anything by Pat Metheny than
struggling with the heavies like
Derrida
or say
Hegel or
Buber.
I really admire Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections;
each one is chunk-size yet meaty and reflects an examined
life:
20
I include even those nasty little yappy Pekinese dogs that Queen Victoria lamentably
introduced to the West. I’ll understand if you do very occasionally kick one though. I
often want to.
21
If they want to eat soggy white bread every day for breakfast that is likely their loss
only, but you should warn them that too much Ginseng or Tylenol can respectively
destroy their bladders or their livers.
22
I borrowed this with out attribution. I know that’s wrong---I’m a God, I’m not perfect.
If you contact me on the web, I’ll give you the attribution.
23
I’m a pretty pro-Western-style Deity. Hey, it’s 2006 not 759 or 1427. Read a Bloom,
either Harold, or Alan, it doesn’t matter. You’ll see why. And to keep your mind running,
chuck in a little Ralph Waldo Emerson, Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad, David Wallace
Foster, Alice Munroe, Marcel Proust (a little I said), Saul Bellows, John Rawls, Steve Jones,
E.O. Wilson, Zadie Smith, or that other good-looking Indian broad who wrote about God
and small things. Drop into the Tate, the MOMA or the Louvre--avoid the Mona Lisa,
almost nobody really cared about her until after that guy Duchamp had too many pernots
with me one night in 1919 and the next day painted her with a moustache.
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