Quine’s autobiography is so eerily detached from its subject matter, one wonders what possessed him to write it. Do we know the backstory? Did he lose a bet or something?
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It is so epically badly written I’ve always wondered why the editor let it be published. And why Quine couldn’t see it himself. I wonder if he just never read an autobiography or memoir?
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He claims somewhere that he finds poetry so emotionally moving that early in life he resigned simply to stop reading it. So, maybe.
Are we quite sure that Quine was from this planet? I spent a few awkward moments in a faculty kitchen with him and Sellars when I was an undergrad, and couldn't confirm it then.
Of that pair, surely Sellars was the odder. But their being together in close quarters might have amplified each’s strangeness.
Quine was also apparently a fantastic banjo player.
Charles Darwin (
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