Love is a Fallacy原文.doc

Love is a FallacyMax Shulman 　　1 Charles Lamb, as merry and enterprising a month of Sundays a fellow as you will meet in a month of Sundays, unfettered the informal essay with his memorable Old China and Dreams Children. There follows an informal essay that ventures even beyond Lambs frontier, indeed, informal may not be quite the right word to describe this essay; limp or flaccid or possibly spongy are perhaps more appropriate.　　2 Vague though its category, it is without doubt an essay. It develops an argument; it cites instances; it reaches a conclusion. Could Carlyle do more? CouldRuskin ?　　3 Read, then, the following essay which undertakes to demonstrate that logic, far from being a dry, pedantic discipline, is a living, breathing thing, full of beauty, passion, and trauma --Authors Note　　4 Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious , acuteand astute--I was all of these. My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, as precise as a chemists scales, as penetrating as a scalpel. And--think of it! --I was only eighteen.　　5 It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, for example, Petey Butch, my roommate at the University of Minnesota. Same age, same background, but dumb as an ox. A nice enough young fellow, you understand, but nothing upstairs. Emotional type. Unstable. Impressionable. Worst of all, a faddist. Fads, I submit, are the very negation of reason. To be swept up in every new craze that comes along, to surrender yourself to idiocy just because everybody else is doing it--this, to me, is the acme of mindlessness. Not, however, to Petey.　　6 One afternoon I found Petey lying on his bed with an expression of such distress on his face that I immediately diagnosed appendicitis. Dont move, I said. Dont take a laxative. Ill get a doctor.　　7 Raccoon, he mumbled thickly.　　8 Raccoon? I said, pausing in my flight.　　9 1 want a raccoon coat, he wailed.　　10 I perceived that his trouble was not physical, but mental. Why do you