"a slightly Pickwickian sense..." (Aldous Huxley, "Doors")
Berkeley Brett
Might someone explain to me what is meant by "a slightly Pickwickian
sense"?
Here's how Aldous Huxley uses it in "The Doors of Perception":
http://www.huxley.net/doors-of-perception/aldoushuxley-thedoorsofperception.pdf
=== begin quoted text ===
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and
in all circumstances we are
by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are
crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers
desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-
transcendence; in vain. By its very
nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in
solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights,
fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at
second hand, incommunicable. We
can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences
themselves. From family to nation,
every human group is a society of island universes. Most island
universes are sufficiently like one another
to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or
"feeling into." Thus, remembering our
own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in
analogous circumstances, can put
ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in
their places. But in certain cases
communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The
mind is its own place, and the
Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so
different from the places where
ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground
of memory to serve as a basis for
understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to
enlighten. The things and events to which
the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of
experience....
=== end quoted text ===
Thanks in advance!
--
Brett (in Berkeley, California, USA)
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Don Phillipson
news:ad57c15d-197b-4855...@s21g2000prm.googlegroups.com...
> Here's how Aldous Huxley uses it in "The Doors of Perception":
>
>
http://www.huxley.net/doors-of-perception/aldoushuxley-thedoorsofperception.pdf
>
> === begin quoted text ===
>
> . . . remembering our
> own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in
> analogous circumstances, can put
> ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in
> their places.
1. Pickwickianism usually suggests naive optimism and
general benevolence (as manifest by the Dickens character.)
The core meaning of this sentence is that (although private
feelings are communicable only by intermediate and distorting
means) we can empathize with our friends' difficulties (albeit
in a naive and general manner.)
2. This book is late Huxley, after his early science-oriented
culture had been influenced (overwhelmed?) by Californian
sentiment and occultism. (I read it 40 years ago and not
since, but do not remember its making much sense: but
then neither does mescalin.)
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
Peter Duncanson (BrE)
<roya...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Hello all.
>
>Might someone explain to me what is meant by "a slightly Pickwickian
>sense"?
>
From the OED:
Pickwickian, adj. and n.
A.1.b. Freq. humorous. Of a word, expression, etc.: not literally
meant; (sometimes) interpreted in such a way as to avoid
unpleasantness, difficulty, etc. Esp. in "in a Pickwickian sense".
It is a reference to "the name of Mr. Pickwick, the eponymous character
in Dickens's novel Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837) + -IAN
suffix".
--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)
Joe Fineman
> From the OED:
>
> Pickwickian, adj. and n.
>
> A.1.b. Freq. humorous. Of a word, expression, etc.: not
> literally meant; (sometimes) interpreted in such a way as to
> avoid unpleasantness, difficulty, etc. Esp. in "in a Pickwickian
> sense".
>
> It is a reference to "the name of Mr. Pickwick, the eponymous
> character in Dickens's novel Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
> (1837) + -IAN suffix".
One need not read far in the _Pickwick Papers_ to get a full
explanation. If one member of the club made a remark that gave
offense to another member & thus threatened the conviviality of the
company, the first member, by convention, would explain that some word
in the remark was to be taken only in a Pickwickian sense, that is, in
a sense sufficiently removed from ordinary English usage to cancel the
offense.
--
--- Joe Fineman jo...@verizon.net
||: If you can't get the blues off your mind, get your mind off :||
||: the blues. :||