The Devil's Pleasure Garden: Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti

When Annie Besant tried to get Jiddu Krishnamurti into Oxford, Oxford declined.

“Of course you realize,” she told the master at Balliol College, “that Krishnamurti is the son of God!”

“Yes,” said the master, with upperclass impassivity, “we’ve had the sons of some very important people at Oxford.”

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Graham Greene did get into Balliol.

Shelley, W.H. Auden and Robert Graves went to Oxford.

Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Nabokov went to Cambridge.

Poe, to the University of Virginia.

Henry James, to Harvard Law.

For Ishmael, “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”

Wilde went to Trinity College and to Oxford.

Beckett, to Trinity College.

Fitzgerald, to Princeton.

Leonard Cohen, to McGill.

Gore Vidal didn’t go to university, and was proud of it.

Hamlet went to Wittenberg, where he may have studied under Martin Luther, which would explain much.

But what’s it worth anymore? Literature is dead, science is compromised, math is elitist—it’s all elitist. You’re elitist. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Anon,

MacRobert

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Scanbox and YouTube, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, lives Greece, Irish citizen. He is of towering intellect but, as is often the case with such people, not that bright.