This question arose from my comment yesterday that I’d like to dine with Shakespeare, and it’s a question that’s comes up occasionally in magazines and on the Internet. But I’d like to see what readers think, and of course that means that I have to give my own answers to prime the pump.
First, the question:
If you could have dinner with three people, but it would take the form of three dinners several days apart, with only ONE guest per dinner, who would you choose (and why would you choose them?)
I’ve avoided having three or more people at a single meal, for that would not only be confusing, but prevent you from having a good chat with any one of them. Another stipulation: you have to be able to speak the language or one of the languages of your subject. No translators allowed!
If you want to name up to five people (still only one per meal), be my guest, and pardon the pun.
My choices, which are not very creative (and I haven’t pondered them for long), but still . . . .
a. Charles Darwin. I’d simply want to see the man and hear his voice, but also ask him some questions (about that letter from Wallace, for instance) as well as filling him in on what’s new on evolution. (See my OUP “letter to Darwin” for an idea of what I’d like to tell him.)
b. William Shakespeare. This would be to clear up a number of questions that scholars have about the man, and before dining with him I’d have to do extensive preparations, like reading some of his famous plays that I’ve never read, and, most important, consulting with scholars to see what they’d like to know. This dinner would be more for the sake of literary history than my own personal enjoyment. I’d also be worried about being able to understand his Elizabethan accent!
c. George Orwell (Eric Blair). This was a tossup between Orwell and James Joyce, but in the end I decided that since I hadn’t read Finnegan’s Wake—and couldn’t understand it if I did—I might not have much to say to Joyce. Further, I imagine Orwell would be much more genial and less arrogant than Joyce, though that’s just a speculation. I’d like to have a nice English meal and knock back a few pints with Orwell, and get his take on the current political situation, not only in the world but also about Regressive Leftism.
Since I’ve thought about these answers only in the 15 minutes it took to write this post, I’m sure that I’m missing someone that I’d want to talk to (Isak Dinisen [Karen Blixen] is one woman I’d like to meet, and then there’s Samuel Johnson, Oscar Wilde and other great conversationalists).
So, as an oyster shucker in the Acme Oyster Bar in New Orleans once told me after presenting me with a dozen freshly-shucked bivalves, and was angling for his tip: “Here’s yours. Where’s mine?”
After writing down my choices, it appears I have a theme. Which is getting historical figure opinions on how their ideas turned out.
Galileo. “Look what we did with what you started…thoughts?”
Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, can’t decide between them. Jefferson because of who he is and his thoughts on religion. Madison because he (not singlehandedly, but in large part) wrote the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and much of the Federalist papers. I’d love to get either one of their perspectives on America v.2017.
Mozart. I expect the vast majority of old composers would think current music is just basically terrible noise (and they wouldn’t be too far off in that estimate). But I bet Mozart would get it, and be inspired by it. So my ‘conversation’ with Mozart would probably consist of me playing a track, seeing how he riffs on it to create something better, rinse and repeat.
About Galileo: There’s a bit in the _Dialogue_, I think, where the characters digress to talk about books and how wonderful they are in letting you hear from people of distant times and places. I always get the impression he’s “writing for the ages” there and that he thought, long term, everything would go right with his particular problems.
I’m late to the dinner party, as I was working all day, but I can’t believe that none of my choices have yet been mentioned (apologies to whomever if one or more has).
First, Ernest Hemingway, and I’d want to find out everything about every character in The Sun Also, not to mention everything else he ever wrote, including my favorite Nick story, A Way You’ll Never Be.
Second, my contemporary, and my choice for the finest wordsmith alive, Thomas Pynchon. He had me hooked at the screaming, and I’m still hooked, but with so many questions!
My final guest would be the woman I consider the most intriguing ever–Mae West. Actually, the dinner wouldn’t be at my place, but up at hers. Seriously: she was so far ahead of her time that no one else is even close.
So you and Tom and Papa are gonna come up and see her sometime? 🙂
Late to the party, but I would love to talk to:
Abraham Lincoln (yes, I’m a copycat)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Mary Baker Eddy. It wouldn’t be as much of a dinner as a shouting match and possibly bitch-slapping marathon, though.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton rewrote the Bible (or at least supervised it) and published it as “The Woman’s Bible.” – taking out the sexist crap.
Abraham Lincoln, to settle the debate on whether he really was against slavery (of course he was, but I’d want to get that on video – I can have my cell phone running right?)
Thomas Jefferson also rewrote the Bible, so I would want to talk to him about that. He took out all the supernatural stuff.
Eleanor Roosevelt – I want to know why someone of such privilege seemingly had so much compassion for others. Or did she?
Okay that’s my five and why.
Clodia: Sister of Publius Clodius Pulcher, lover of Catullus, enemy of Cicero. I’d love to have a drink at the salax taberna and get a real understanding of life in Rome at the end of the Republic. By all accounts, she was witty, well read and politically astute. My Latin is rusty, but, if she is truly gracious, I’m sure we’d get through.
Darwin: I suppose anyone reading this, um, bl…site would think of Darwin. I often fantasize about showing him a modern biology textbook so that he could see how the ideas that he so carefully formulated now form the basis for understanding much of modern biological science. I would, of course, carefully block out his date of death.
As for the third, I think Alan Turing. I’d love to discuss the development of his ideas about computability (related to Goedel’s incompleteness theorem), what being at Bletchley Park was like and to share with him that hes is now considered a scientific pioneer and a hero.
All of these are excellent choices – some of which I might have picked – but some who haven’t been mentioned:
1) First would be to invite myself to two dinners and a meeting that already happened, as a fly on the wall or whatever:
1a) In 1920, FDR (pre-polio) had dinner with Herbert Hoover to encourage him to run for President as a Democrat. At that time, HH was the great humanitarian and his political persuasion wasn’t known. Something seems to have happened at that dinner that was never recorded so far as I’m aware, but it seems likely that this was the seed for their enmity.
1b, c) In 1938 he was feted at various locations on a trip across Europe, where he was honored for his work averting famine in Europe during/aftermath of WWI. Traveling across Germany, a reception with Hitler was requested, which HH reluctantly acceded to. Hermann Goering also hosted him at his country estate Carinhall. What went on at these two meetings? It’s unclear if he was ever debriefed on these encounters, and descriptions of them lack detail.
2) Linnaeus, to try to understand what made him tick. Was it fundamentally an obsession for organization? I know enough Swedish that we ought to be able to make ourselves understood.
3) Leif Ericsson – to hear about the voyages from Greenland to Vinland, how many ships perished along the way that were lost to history and so forth. What did they encounter once in Newfoundland? I’d like to think, anyway, that with my Swedish I could understand enough of his Old Norse that we could have at least some amount of conversation.
4) Jefferson and TR have already been mentioned, so Gifford Pinchot (TR’s first Chief, Forest Service) who, between discontinuous terms as Governor of Pennsylvania, made a trip to the Galapagos, and how that influenced him.
5) Charlie Schwab, either at about the time he became president of Carnegie Steel (1897) or after he brokered the deal between Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan for the former to sell out to the latter to form US Steel (1900). If the former, I’ll have his dining room ready and waiting.
HATSHEPSUT, first female pharaoh of Egypt! I want to know how she pulled that off…she must’ve had great charisma to overcome the objections of all the priests and historians. They didn’t know how to manage a female pharaoh…there wasn’t even a word for “the pharaoh SHE.”
And then, since we’re just playing here…I’d love to chat with Elizabeth 1. It wasn’t easy for her, either.
David Douglas – to hear his tales of botanizing in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.
Rachel Carson – because she, in a very real sense, is responsible for the modern environmental movement.
Aldo Leopold – “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” What does he really mean by this?
I remember Steve Allen had a TV series, Meeting of Minds, where a handful of historic figures from different times got together to chat. The dialogues were scripted to contrast their different philosophical views. As I remember it was pretty boring. It sounded like a history textbook to me. But that’s not necessarily the fault of the historic figures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gH5Nbdmdg4
In its place we now have Epic Rap Battles of History: https://www.youtube.com/user/ERB
My favorite is William Shakespeare vs. Dr. Seuss!
There’s also “Drunk History.”
Isaac Newton
David Hume
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
Alfred the Great
Is your Old English up to a conversation?!
The language detail seems ridiculously restrictive. No Plato, Caesar, Cleopatra, Jesus or Galileo. I could just about get by with Hitler, but would likely not understand much of the detail
So…
Sir Christopher Lee
Sir Isaac Newton
Elizabeth I
Francis Galton – I suspect he would be full of ideas & willing to test them.
John Ray, the father of Natural History in Britain…
Francis Bacon, father of modern science not the crap modern artist…
As with several others, I would go first with David Hume. Very original thinker and famous for his wit and congeniality. Secondly, I would go with Benedict Spinoza. He mounted the first rational attack on religion. What I really want to know from him is whether or not his Ethics was written as a satire or not. My third selection would be Hypatia of Alexandria. I’m fascinated by the popularity of Neoplatonism in the late Classical era, and out like to find out why from a female scholar at a time when female scholars were very rare. Something tells me that she would be quite the character.
Abraham Lincoln. I’d especially like to ask him about his melancholy; also about his deep love of English verse; finally about his personally evolving views concerning racial equality.
Jane Addams. I’d envision a long, leisurely conversation centered on the concept of ‘Americanization’ of new immigrants: what they had to let go (native language in favor of American English? Tribalism and religion?), and what they could retrain and nurture from the ‘old countries’ that would both better their prospects in the U.S. and enrich their adopted culture.
Emily Dickinson. Poetry and poetics. Hers and others’. Long into the night, drinking whatever was on offer.
A very Anglo-centric list Jerry! (Even your backups!).
I’d go Hitchens, Hemingway and Darwin, but to be honest I’d like them all round the same table with me pretty much sitting back in awe.
Although that list will probably completely change in oh, the next three minutes.
We used to play the “philosophy dinner party” game at socials in the McGill philosophy department. 20 people somehow understood to be philosophers, all at once and universal translators allowed.
As for this one, to just mix it up a little (though I must say Goedel and Turing and a few of those guys sounded interesting too):
1) Faraday
2) Boyle
3) Diderot (as an excuse to learn more about him)
The first two because I’d like to hear more about their motivations and why the worked as a scientist. (Note that they are two “greats” who were religious and yet very idiosyncratically so.)
If language was no object a few others, including duplicates from other people:
1) Galileo
2) Leibniz
3) Aristotle
4) Democritus
I’d also wouldn’t mind including Ada, countess Lovelace, somehow, but I suspect I’d be disappointed about the computing thing
I think Goedel would have been interesting, although, by all counts, he was odd and somewhat of a loner. Also would have had to have caught him before he became mentally ill in later life.
Out of curiosity, have you read the Dawson biography? It seems poor Goedel was ill all his life, just that it became worse (more and more frequent, more and more severe) as he aged. Not to say one shouldn’t try to interact, but it would have been hard, I imagine.
It was an interesting contrast from the notes that Hao Wang left us (_Reflections on Kurt Goedel_, etc.) which basically does not address his illness much at all.
I had both on my shelf once at CMU when Clark Glymour came in and he mentioned in passing that he had met Goedel (and Hao Wang, I believe) as a graduate student at Princeton and asked what I thought of the Dawson book. I said that our colleague Wilfried Sieg would be better at answering on any details, but that the contrast was amazing (even accounting for the different goals). Clark suggested that there was a “cannot disrespect teacher” thing at play with Wang.
Whatever it may be, the biographers affect our answers to these questions, I’m sure!
Isaac Asimov, Charles Bukowski, and Richard Feynman, with Hitchens in the on-deck circle.
Just curious PCC, but which of Shakespeare’s major plays are still on your reading list?
My three dining companions would be:
Oscar Wilde (renown as one of the greatest conversationalists but also a good listener, unlike many other wits).
Ian Fleming (the creator of James Bond was known to be a charming fellow, and I’d have suggested a few ideas for OO7’s next adventure).
Pauline Kael (the late film critic had a vivacious personality and brassy wit; it would be fun discussing movies and literature over drinks).
Other equally good choices: Lincoln, Charles I and Charles II, FDR, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, and many others…
I have to do some research and find the names of three people who have (allegedly) hidden significant treasures which remain unfound. One is not enough, since rumours may be false or the treasure may be discovered by now.
Not too ancient: the Egyptian pharaohs may have hidden a lot, but I doubt their directions may be followed now. The pirates’ treasures may be lost for good as well.
Probably some Nazis; they definitely had some loot stashed just 70 years ago. Saddam or Gaddaphi would do fine too, but I don’t speak their language (though they may know English).
James Madison — To find out EXACTLY what he meant by “a well regulated militia” in the Second Amendment.
Alexander Hamilton — To get him to talk to James Madison, and maybe see if they could find a way to outlaw slavery through the U.S. Constitution. (And also because I’m reading Hamilton by Ron Chernow and find Hamilton to be a fascinating character!)
Carl Sagan — To get his insight on our current situation.
Einstein as he has the ability to explain the Theory of Relativity to a janitor and I like it explained to me.
Abraham Lincoln just like to listen to him speak
Christopher Hitchens