Mindless Matter Poem by gershon hepner

Of bathos I’m a connoisseur,
with keen awareness of absurd-
ity, but what I most prefer
to write is what has not been heard
by other ears, and other eyes
have never seen, recording what
comes to the readers as surprise
because life is what they had not
appreciated till I told
what they should surely all have known
before removing both blindfold
and earplugs all the world is shown
to them, sometimes as new as if
before it had been undiscovered
but from their lookout on my cliff
might with assistance be recovered.
Of course, although it’s true I stand
upon a cliff, I fall and shatter
what I no longer understand,
a connoisseur of mindless matter.


Inspired by a review of Alain de Botton’s “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” by Toby Lichtig in the TLS, July 3,2009:

Alain de Botton is not short of detractors. With his self-help approach to philosophy and his television fame, he is frequently accused of being lightweight, populist, smugly platitudinous. This much is perhaps to be expected of a media intellectual; but de Botton is more media friendly than most. Last year, he helped to set up the School of Life in London, which – as well as promoting his books – offers courses, seminars, events on metaphysical questions from relationship ethics to holidaymaking. He is the subject of sitcom gags. “What would de Botton do? ”, asks the neurotic Mark Corrigan during a moment of crisis in the television comedy Peep Show. In these pages, de Botton has been slated for, among other things, not merely “dumbing down” but “dumbing out”.
What de Botton’s critics tend to ignore is his literary brilliance. Label him a “social commentator” rather than a “philosopher” and the arguments against him start to fall away; relabel him a “writer” and they disintegrate entirely. With his stress on better living, he has been compared to Montaigne, but his elegant, tortuous sentences owe more to Marcel Proust, about whom de Botton wrote an early book. Philosophically, he is perhaps closer to Samuel Beckett, who also wrote a youthful monograph on Proust. De Botton is a connoisseur of bathos. Few contemporary cultural critics have such a keen eye for hubris, such a witty grasp of juxtaposition. His every observation is framed by an acute awareness of absurdity, offset by a tenderness for human folly. “The impulse to exaggerate the significance of what we are doing, far from being an intellectual error, is really life itself coursing through us”, he concludes at the end of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, before triumphantly proclaiming: “Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves”.


7/11/09