No Time to Spare - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Ursula K. Le Guin (ч. notes)

Footnotes

1

From Darwin’s autobiography: “I will give proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! It ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.”

2

Quotations pulled from Mohsin Hamid’s “Bookends” column, printed in the New York Times Book Review on October 15, 2013.

3

In the 1920s, on a great Peruvian hacienda with a private bullring, my parents watched matadors-in-training fight cows. The full ritual was performed, except that injury to the animal was avoided, and it did not end in a kill. It was the best training, my parents were told: after las vacas bravas, bulls were easy. An angry bull goes for the red flag; an angry cow goes for the matador.

4

Welcome responses to this blog post on Book View Café soon gave me both the sentence I wrote and a possible source of the misquotation. In the 1974 essay “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” (reprinted in the collection The Language of the Night), I wrote: “I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.” Nothing about “creativity” whatever. I was just hitting at the notion that maturity is mere loss or betrayal of childhood. The misquote may have first appeared on the Internet in 1999, in a huge and generally useful collection of quotations compiled by Professor Julian F. Fleron. When I wrote him, he was distressed to learn that it was a misquote, and most amiably removed it at once. But a false attribution on the Internet is like box elder beetles, the miserable little things just keep breeding and tweeting and crawling out of the woodwork. I checked just now (July 2016): Goodreads and AIGA continue to attribute the “creative adult” misquote to me. It has also taken on an independent existence, and is even referred to by one source as “the well-known saying.” Oh well!