Cliche question of the day
I'm curious. Though it's a trite question, if you could spend a few hours at an intimate, leisurely dinner with any person, either historical or current, who would it be and why?
An artist? Musician? Athlete? Politician? Religious figure? Writer? Scientist? Explorer? Inventor? Ancestor? It can be anyone. Give it some thought and share it here.
Try to pick one, but if you find that impossible, give a short list and include reasons why.
(Sorry, no sexual fantasies allowed. We're talking conversation here.)
posted by The Inside Dope @ 10/22/2005
4 comments
4 Comments:
Who, living or dead, would I most like to have a conversation with?
Richard Feynman - considered by many of the world's top physicists of his time to be the smartest man they ever met. From what I have read by and about him what intrigues me most is that in his search for understanding how the world really works and what is really true he rejected the art and literature in which many people see truth about life and the human condition -- those things are just people's individual and collective ideas and notions. The confirmation you feel when you see that other people have the same idea or viewpoint does not mean that the idea is true -- there are many shared delusions. Scientific experiment and real world data, as opposed to human speculation, is the way to discover what is true. You are most likely to learn something new when you are talking to someone smarter than yourself. You can do no better than Richard Feynman.
I'm thinking Frank Zappa, for many reasons, not the least his outlook on the world and politics.
And a few notorious crooks too, like Al Capone (though I'd have to be careful not to piss him off)or maybe Clyde Barrow.
Teddy Roosevelt would be intresting, to say the least, as would FDR or Truman, or, of course, Lincoln.
And then there's Mozart, any of the Beatles, Stones, Who, U2, if for no other reason than to actually meet them and find out what it's like to be a gazillionaire rock icon.
Babe Ruth would be a hoot.
Bill Clinton would be fascinating, as would be John, Bobby, or Ted Kennedy.
And for that matter, it would intensely interesting to spend a few hours with Nixon.
Or the crewman on the whaleboat Essex which sailed from Nantucket all the way around the horn and up to the northwest pacific where they were rammed and sunk by a whale. Then they survived for months adrift, were picked up off the coast of Chile, and made it back to Nantucket. What did he do? Why he went back out on whaling boats. Now that's a guy with a few stories to tell.
I neglected to mention in the comment above a little detail that makes the story of the Essex crew even more, um, unusual.
While they were adrift, they resorted to canabalism.
A great book on the tale, which Herman Melville based "Moby Dick" upon, is "The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex" by Owen Chase.
Or you can check out the page on the Essex at PBS.
I'd also like to meet Ghengis Khan, or Alexander the Great, a guy who conquered most of the known world by the time he was 30 something.
I'd like to dine with the common people of ancient cultures, to see if modern day science got our history right. I'd like to learn how they lived, what they lived for, what their passions were, how hard was their life, what were their living conditions, etc. I'd want to dine with all those folks who didn't make the history books.
But if I can only pick one person, I'd pick my father. I want to know if he is sorry.
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