‘Feelings’

Some popular musician whose stuff no-one really liked drops dead in the lift (!) of his vastly expensive house, and everyone rushes round with flowers and protests that he was a great influence on the development of popular music (though I hated his stuff) and they ‘feel’ quite devastated by his death and must weep publicly and ‘show their sadness and respect’. Not a word about the technicalities if any of his music.

Or a mathematician succeeds, after years of struggle with notebooks and log tables and differential calculus, in proving, say, Fermat’s last theorem. He is interviewed for Radio or TV. Is he asked ‘What does Fermat’s last theorem state?’ or ‘Give us the outline of your proof’? Is he heck. The interviewer is asked ‘Well, it must have been an emotional moment when you heard you’d got the Nobel. Tell us, how did you feel?’

Who (with more than two brain cells) give’s a nun’s wimple how he ‘Felt’. Feelings are neither here nor there; they are private and should be kept so; any interest in other people’s ‘feelings’ is impertinent and prurient. They don’t matter; they get in the way of what really matters. Cease this vulgarity; engage brain.