This guy had some thoughts on subjects we've recently discussed...
It was on this day in 1950 that Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (books by this author) died, at the age of 94. But it was not old age that he succumbed to, nor disease — the nonagenarian fell off a ladder while pruning trees in his garden and died later from complications of his injury.
Shaw outlived most of his friends, among them many literary luminaries, but he did not seem particularly sentimental about this. Once, he was asked whether he missed any of his contemporaries, and he responded, “No, I miss only the man I was.” And he once proclaimed, “Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.”
While he was still alive, devoted fans wanted to start a Shaw society to promote his ideas. He was adamantly against the whole thing, writing the people who contacted him about it.
But he sort of gave up resistance, and a Shaw society was founded in 1941, on his 85th birthday. The effort was led by a Jewish refugee from Germany. Shaw wrote: “Go ahead, but don’t bother me about it. I am old, deaf, and dotty. In short, a Has Been.” The Shaw society is still going strong; it gathers one Friday evening a month at the Actors Centre in London’s Soho for lectures and readings of his plays. During the pandemic, they have been meeting on Zoom.
George Bernard Shaw said: “What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.”
And he said: “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no “brief candle” for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
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