[BRIEF NOTE] Why Doris Lessing is cool

[rfmcdonald]

Thanks to charlemagne77 for providing the link to Doris Lessing's reaction when journalists beseiged her outside of her home and told her that she was the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Her agent was afraid that Lessing, out shopping, might have accidentally learned the news while she was out in town.

Doris Lessing pulled up in a black cab where a media horde was waiting Thursday in front of her leafy north London home. Reporters opened the door and told her she had won the Nobel Prize for literature, to which she responded: "Oh Christ! ... I couldn't care less."

Lessing later said she thought the cameras were there to film a television program. Vegetables peeked out from blue plastic bags she carried out of the cab.

"This has been going on for 30 years," she said, as reporters helped her with the bags.

"I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot, OK?" Lessing said, making her way through the crowd. "It's a royal flush."

"I'm sure you'd like some uplifting remarks," she added with a smile.

My favourite Lessing title is her 1985 Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, the Anansi press compendium of her 1985 CBC Massey Lectures. This excerpt neatly communicates what she saw as humanity's central problem, a sort of unthinking reflexiveness; this superb review explains how she hopes that individual humans can move beyond simple reflex with the help of the modern sciences of mind and group behaviour. Not incidentally, the ability to make use of humour--in all of its forms--matters quite a lot in her schema.