A late friend, much lamented not only by me, a Hungarian and Marxist but terrific fun and mad as a hatter, was in the offices in a smart Soho side street of a certain Marxist intellectual review which need not be named.
The third-floor office was undergoing renovations. A metal window frame with three big panes of glass, two of which could be opened, had been carefully removed from the wall and propped up on the window sill. My Hungarian buddy, failing to notice this, tried to open the window and sent the whole assembly, weighing perhaps a hundredweight or anyway plenty, crashing down to the pavement below where with ill luck it could easily have killed someone. Fortunately it didn't.
People came in looking worried. The Hungarian (God I miss him) expostulated: 'I just touched it!' I can hear his voice now. A Jewish atheist, he married a Palestinian girl half his age. She was a good girl but no sane woman could cope with that guy for long. He was designed for staying up all night on drugs.
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>> A Jewish atheist
Sorry to repeat myself, but the same cat lived through the Nazi occupation of Hungary which was a bit harsh. At the end of the war Soviet troops invaded and occupied Hungary. My friend was 14 or 15 at the time, young and beardless, indistinguishable from a girl in WW2 east European winter clothing. A Russian soldier shoved him up against a wall with rape in mind - there was a lot of it about at the time -, and he had to explain that he wasn't a girl...
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Reckon I could excuse a little impracticality in someone who'd had an experience like that. But I blame the workmen who left the window precariously above a drop and where someone could so easily dislodge it.
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>> I blame the workmen who left the window precariously above a drop and where someone could so easily dislodge it.
I don't know how long they left it. Almost certainly though, they wouldn't have been able to believe that a sentient human being could fail to see that the window wasn't fastened in place and try to open it. To them it would be beyond belief.
Some people have their minds on higher things. But I wouldn't have done that WDB, and I bet you wouldn't either, however distracted we were. What we might do, if it occurred to us, would be to complain mildly that there was a risk.
My friend was a different sort of cat.
Last edited by: Armel Coussine on Sun 12 Apr 15 at 00:08
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>> A Jewish atheist
With atheist intellectual parents. The first thing my friend knew about being 'of Jewish origin' was when his parents decided to mention it as the Nazis marched into Budapest.
'Look, by the way, we think you should be aware that... '
It was a bit worrying but no worse than that. They weren't ghetto people, slipped through the net. It helps to be rich and clever.
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You'd have thought there would have been plenty of gaping windows and other hazzards to avoid in bombed and war-torn Budapest to give a good grounding in practical survival.
The thing I've noticed about supposedly impractical intellectuals is how they appear to conveniently cultivate the trait exactly in step with their abilty to get others to do the lesser menial tasks of life.
I grew up with clever intellectual friends and relations, and am not taken in by such antics.
Sorry if that's unfair to your pal, but all too true of mine.
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The thing I've noticed about supposedly impractical intellectuals is how they appear to conveniently cultivate the trait exactly in step with their abilty to get others to do the lesser menial tasks of life.>>
Nail on the Head! - There was one of our shift team that was much, much cleverer than the rest of us, should of been in a much better job than he was, but just couldn't be bothered.
One of our duties was a 2-man task, involved a lot of lifting, he would often start a conversation with whoever he was working with usually on their favored topic - he knew how to inject just enough antagonism into the conversation to get you "fired up". During this conversation he would take a chair, turn in round and sit on it "horse-fashion", and continue "winding you up".
It was only when the job was done did you realse you'd done it all while he been sat there!
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>> The thing I've noticed about supposedly impractical intellectuals is how they appear to conveniently cultivate the trait exactly in step with their abilty to get others to do the lesser menial tasks of life.
Not this guy. Like everyone else he didn't mind letting others do things for him, and you wouldn't have wanted to be his wife or girl friend. But he wasn't consistently calculating, he scorned that sort of thing.
Someone got him into a sort of council flat near the British Museum. After quite a short time the floor was covered in bits of paper with Hungarian scribbles on them, envelopes and so on. A girlfriend tried to tidy the place up but he wouldn't let her, and angrily accused her of interfering with his 'notes'. But he used paraffin heaters to keep the place at the high temperature he liked, sometimes took sleeping pills, and chain-smoked of course. I was not the only person who got worried about the risk of fire, and urged him to file his notes in a more sensible way.
The inevitable happened: he was seriously burned over a large area of his body and brain-damaged by smoke inhalation. He survived at UCH for weeks in a glass box, eyes open but unconscious. I went to see him there but there was no point. It was terrible. Turnout at his funeral was a complete list of the British hard left, plus others.
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>> I grew up with clever intellectual friends and relations, and am not taken in by
>> such antics.
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Fortunately manipulative people are usually clever enough to know who they can take advantage of and rapidly find out who not to. In general we will help if we can, but I have had to rescue Mrs ON from a couple of people who have pushed their luck.
Last edited by: Old Navy on Sun 12 Apr 15 at 12:57
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Impracticality of some intellectuals - Armel Coussine
