WARNING:_ WAY_ OFF TOPIC!!!! On Tue, 2 Dec 1997, Horace Greeley wrote: > When reading Freud, one is always well > advised to remember that his cigar, > was a cigar. Sorry, Horace, I gotta disagree. What's important is that while Freud SAID his cigar was just a cigar, and maybe even BELIEVED that it was just a cigar, as one of his colleagues pointed out, when you create a universe bounded on all sides by bagels and cigars, a cigar can never again be "just" a cigar, nor a bagel, "just" a bagel. Jung goes on to tell us that Freud's father always smoked BIGGER cigars and was often heard to remind his son of the famous words of that well-known existentialist philosopher, Jimmy Durante, who once said that "The piano player who smokes the biggest cigars always gets the girls". Modern, post-Freudian piano technicians attribute the somewhat strange ideas and theories expressed in CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS to Freud's inability to escape from the shadow of his father's presence and also to Frued's proclivity to using CA glue without adequate ventilation. Nevertheless it still makes fine reading because when brilliant minds miss the mark, sometimes they make brilliant mistakes, which are, in themselves, still more interesting and instructive than those made by mere mortals like ourselves. So it was with Freud. I have always thought that Freud would have nade an excellent speed-stringer in a piano factory, because he would have undoubtedly visualized each pin to be his father as he visciously pounded it home into the pinblock--at least that's the way _I've_ always done it! :) Perhaps, in that not-too-distant future, when they come in the dead of night to take the two of us away, we can request adjoining padded cells. That way, in addition to discussing pianos and philosophy, we can also play chess and consider an idea once expressed by turn-of- the-century (WHAT ELSE?!!) World chess champion, Emanuel Lasker, when he said, "I have spent the last half of my life trying to forget everything I learned during the first half of my life, in the hopes that I might thereby be able to exchange knowledge for wisdom." Not bad for an old German dude, with a droopy mustach, who liked to smoke cigars, huh?! Regards, Les Smith lessmith@buffnet.net
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