Tigger and Thoreau: Same-same...

ME: "Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too". That's the philosophy book for me. Just because something is simple doesn't make it's simplistic.

IVAN: Simplicity, magnanimity and trust: Thoreau.

ME: Too intellectual for me, this guy. I dig Tigger

IVAN: Which guy?

ME: Thoreau.

IVAN: No he ain't!

ME: Ye he is! Is he orange and does he bounce on his tushie???

IVAN: He is a tiger in man-clothes!

ME: So....Thoreau is really Tigger in disguise?

IVAN: Yep

ME: Never read Thoreau. Tell me about him.

IVAN: Ah! Thoreau! He was a sensualist and an observer deluxe, and his language is poetic. He wrote for himself.

ME: I like him already.

IVAN: Yep, you gonna love him. Very practical guy, he could see, he was awake.

ME: Was he happy?

IVAN: Well, he was a cohort of Emerson's. Lived in Emerson's garden.

ME: Those da dudes that waffled on about autumn leaves and boinked women with long flowing tresses from them Pre-Raphaelite paintings?

IVAN: Yep.

ME: Them were happy dudes, then. That was before it was fashionable to be artistically tortured by genius and commit suicide by booze and drugs.

IVAN: Absolutely.

ME: Cool! So, Tigger and Thoreau...Same-same...Fancy that!


from Conversations with Ivan Shapiro