JUNE 26, 2020 – I have four nieces who are stand-outs. One is also a stand-up—Erica Rhodes, comedienne-extraordinaire. Based in L.A., she’s performing this week—live and via Zoom—at the Acme Comedy Club in Minneapolis.
In her routine she pokes fun at uncertainties about Covid-19, saying, “No one knows anything anymore!” Her comedic statement reminds me of “epistemology” and, in turn, a story my friend Andy told me on a drive up to the lake.
Andy also lives in the Twin Cities, and at the time we and others were establishing a conservancy to protect lands adjacent to our respective properties. We had to make a quick, mid-week trip for an organizational meeting and decided to drive up together the night before to discuss issues informally ahead of the group session.
Prior to that drive we hadn’t known much about each other.
Once we’d cleared the outer limits of the metro area and mundane conversation, I asked Andy some background questions—“Where’dja grow up? Go to school? . . . and so on. Among other things: his parents had been WWII-era Latvian refugees; his mother, a renowned linguist; he’d majored in English at Yale.
The disclosure prompted brief talk about literature generally. Given my deficiencies in that regard, I could maintain such a conversation for only so long. Just before my limit, Andy saved me with an anecdote.
“By the way,” Andy said, “my choice of major was the result of a heated argument the night before we had to declare. Upon reaching campus I’d wanted to major in philosophy. I figured that philosophy held the keys to understanding everything else in life. That was a naive construct, but I was young, and when you’re young you’re dumb because you think you’re smart.
“My roommate, meanwhile, wanted to major in English. His take was that all truth is to be found in literature, and if other fields can be repositories of truth, none is as entertaining as literature. ‘How would you rather discover truth . . .’ he’d ask ‘. . . by reading Shakespeare or plodding through Wittgenstein?’
“So, anyway, the night before we had to choose our majors, my roommate and I had a vociferous argument that took us well past midnight. Philosophy vs. English; English vs. Philosophy. Each of us was so obstinate and so infatuated with our own arguments, the more we shouted, the more entrenched we became. It was like the Western Front in 1916.
“The next day we barely spoke to each other. In a demonstrative huff, he went off to class in one direction, and I stormed off to class in a different direction. Later in the day, we signed up for our majors. It wasn’t until that evening that we each discovered the true force of our arguments from the heated debate the night before.
“As it turned out, my roommate had decided to declare as a philosophy major. And I? I’d declared English.
“Then we laughed as hard as any Chaucerian character could laugh!”
Erica’s right after all: truth is in humor.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
