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Originally Posted by Istvan diVega
There's no dichotomy there that I can see?
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It's this wee bit which caused me to pause, Roz:
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a humanist, a preacher of . . . reasonable kindness . . . of self-restraint without self-punishment . . . minimizing the inevitable sufferings. . . .
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I've never felt that Vance was preaching, either through the selfish actions of his characters or the consequences which befell them. He seemed to me to be a harshly hilarious critic of human folly, perhaps even in a way that suggested human beings were far too selfish and self-destructive to guide to redemption.
However, I don't intend to belittle your own sense of the man. I qualify and clarify only to be true to my own memory of Vance's writing, not to delegitimate anyone else's. At any affecting funeral or wake, we wish only to honor the person we remember. If I can't find that person represented as I knew them, then I wish to delineate the person I knew, if only to testify to time that they mattered (or
also mattered) in that specific way.