Once, years ago, I was in New Plymouth for a few days, and went into an interesting-looking record shop. I flicked through the bins and inspired, asked if they had anything by Merleau-Ponty. The guy said he didn't think they did, but he'd look up the catalogue.
I realised after a couple of minutes as he thumbed through the pages that I'd given him the wrong name.
"Sorry, my fault, I mean Carlo Ponti!" I said.
"Oh, OK," said the record store guy, and turned to the 'P' listings, but couldn't find anything, though he took ages, looking in several catalogues for me.
It wasn't till I'd got down the road I realised I'd actually meant to say Paolo Conte. But by then I didn't feel I could go back to the record shop and ask. Ever.
"Heidegger is recorded to have laughed only once, at a picnic with Ernst Jünger in the Harz Mountains. Jünger leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack."*
On reading this, not for the first time it occurred to me that staying up late to watch Monty Python in the 1970s has entirely informed my worldview.
*From Paul Johnson’s Humorists: From Hogarth to Noël Coward, reviewed by Dwight Garner in the New York Times: a "warmly appealing if slightly dotty book" which I am very much looking forward to reading. The photograph above is an entirely unrelated picture of Heidegger and his brother on a path across a field that Heidegger used to walk on a lot, and that he wrote about, at length, after his "turn".
