Битеф

’and was noted in her former life for her generosity, benevolence, and humanitarian instincts, ! She told Block: ’I decided I wanted to live. Nothing else cunted but that I wanted to live. I could have stolen from husband, child, parent of friend, in order to accomplish this ...’ She would remain close to those who were too far gone and too weak to eat their meagre rations. Insetad of pressing them to eat so that they might exist, she would eagerly take the food from them and wolf it down if they gave the slightest evidence that the effort fr them was too great. If a’cultured and aristocratic’ British woman could frankly confess to this, whc should Turnbull be surprised or shocked by the Ik ? I think you are missing a more important point. The Ik live almost entirely without what we call the virtues. If a people can survive without consideration for one another, without loyalty, love or affection, without faith or hope, then are these things so important? Moralists and many sociologists —would say that a people who lived without virtues would perish. Have the Ik perished yet? Remember Teilhard de Chardin’s phrase: the real question is not what you are looking at, but where you are looking from. We have the Ik looking at Turnbull, Turnbull looking at the Ik, and now us, here, looking at what Turnbull put down on paper. Where are we looking from? A person of no formal education could enjoy Turnbull’s story as a simple, if macabre, travel book. We look at it through a knowledge of what has been done in the study of linguistics, philosophy, sociology, psychology and an awareness of the bickerings of generations of anthropologists. Our minds are weighed down by scientific papers, popular paperbacks, documentary films, TV dkscussions, student arguments, what our schoolmasters taught us, what our parents told us, what we thought of what our parents told us, what we think of what Freud told us we should think about our parents, our worldly success, our physical constitution and our diet. We, here, are trained or conditioned, to doubt. We have no tribal consensus. Where we are looking from we hope is a pragmatic scientific agnosticism. We are waiting to see what happens. ’Nothing can be learned from the past’, says Popper, supported by Von Weizsäcker, the physicist: ’There is no logical way of concluding anything about the future from the past.’ May I extend that proposition and propound a heresy: is there any logical way of concluding anything about one society from another society? Can we really conclude anything about one man from study of another man? The American Psychoanalytic Association undertook a survey to test the efficiency of psychoanalysis. The results obtained were so disappointing that they were withheld from publication. Lévi-Strauss has observed that since remote antiquity men have used fire to transform their food. Why? Why does man cook? He doesn’t have to, Lévi-Strauss suggests we do so for symbolic reasons: to show we are men and not beasts. Professor Gusdorf has put your point in the form of a terrifying epigram. ’lf the principal preoccupation of ancient thought was to prove the existence of God, the primary

task of contemporary thought is to prove the existence of man.’ Men, as Trotsky wrote, limp behind events. An economist has admitted recently that reality may have outrun economic theory. Perhaps the reality of man’s nature has now outrun all his theories of what he is, (Denn Cannan)

In 1942, before his second term at Oxford, directed undergraduates in his first production Dr. Faustas at the Torch; followed at the Chanticleer Theatre (1945) by a revival of The Infernal Machine; directed Man and Superman, King John and The Lady from the Sea for Birmingham Repertory Theatre (all 1945) ; Love’s Labour’s Lost (first Stratford-upon-Avon production 1946) ; The Vicious Circle, The Brothers Karamazov (also 1946) ; Men Without Shadows, The Respectable Prostitute, Romeo and Juliet (1947) ; Boris Godunov (Covent Garden 1948) ; Salome (Covent Garden with sets by Salvador Dali 1949) ; Dark of the Moon (1949) ; Ring Round the Moon, The Little Hut, Measure For Measure (Stratford-upon-Avon and European Tour, 1950) ; A Penny for a Song, The Winter’s Tale, Colombe (adapted by Denis Cannan, 1951 ), Venice Preserv’d, The Little Hut (New York), Faust (Met., New York), The Beggar’s Opera (film with screenplay by Denis Cannan) 1953; The Dark Is Light Enough, Both Ends Meet, The House of Flowers (New York) 1954; The Lark, Titus Andronicus (Stratford-upon-Avon), also designer and composer of the music for the last-named production , 1955 ; Nov. 1955 under the auspices of the British Council, directed the Stratford Shakespeare Memorial Company in Hamlet (Phoenix and Moscow Art Theatre 1956) ; The Power and the Glory (adapted from Graham Greene’s novel by Denis Cannan and Pierre Bost, Phoenix 1956. Brook also composed the music ) ; The Family Reunion (also designed the sets) ; A View From the Bridge, La Chatte sur un Toit Brûlant, ( Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris 1956; The Tempest (also composed the music and designed sets), 1957; Irma La Douce, The Visit,