Weltanschauungskunst für alle Weltanschauer
The germ of the present essay dates back to my encounter, at least ten years ago and possibly even more than fifteen, with a book called Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen by Larry McMurtry. The book then caught my eye not only on account of its admittedly eye-catching title (a title guaranteed to keep a particularly tenacious hold on my eye in particular in the light of the metaphysical aura of primality accruing to the proprietary name Dairy Queen chez moi, an aura descanted on in “Proprietary Names: the
The germ proved to have instead been a live one, and began germinating, not many years later, meaning about ten years ago, when I started noticing quite a few other people quoting “The Storyteller,” and noticing that each and every one of these quoters was drawing the same erroneous conclusion therefrom that McMurtry had drawn from it. These quoters-cum-errers ( sic on e for o , natch) hailed from most if not quite all walks of intellectual life; some of them were airport novelists or persons of airport-nov