Tuis » Algemeen » Koeitjies & kalfies » Laurens van der Post
| Laurens van der Post [boodskap #7928] |
Vr, 03 Januarie 1997 00:00  |
Gideon Dreyer
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Ek het net verneem van die dood van Sir Laurence. Was daar berigte hiervan
in die RSA pers. Hier was geen woord daaroor nie ons is te besig om te
skaats.
Vriendelike groet
Xfiles
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| Re: Laurens van der Post [boodskap #7936 is 'n antwoord op boodskap #7928] |
Sa, 04 Januarie 1997 00:00  |
Koos[1]
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On 3 Jan 1997 21:03:22 GMT, "xfiles" wrote:
in die RSA pers. Hier was geen woord daaroor nie ons is te besig om te[/color]
> skaats. >>
En dan natuurlik die berigte oor die onwettige kind wat hy verwek het
en verwerp het.
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| Re: Laurens van der Post [boodskap #7937 is 'n antwoord op boodskap #7928] |
Sa, 04 Januarie 1997 00:00 |
Charl Durand
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Jy't al die juicy bits oor sy buite-egtelike kind misgeloop!
xfiles wrote in article
...
> Ek het net verneem van die dood van Sir Laurence. Was daar berigte hiervan
> in die RSA pers. Hier was geen woord daaroor nie ons is te besig om te
> skaats.
> Vriendelike groet
> Xfiles
>
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| Re: Laurens van der Post [boodskap #7938 is 'n antwoord op boodskap #7928] |
Sa, 04 Januarie 1997 00:00 |
cg
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"xfiles" wrote:
> Ek het net verneem van die dood van Sir Laurence. Was daar berigte hiervan
> in die RSA pers. Hier was geen woord daaroor nie ons is te besig om te
> skaats.
> Vriendelike groet
> Xfiles
Heel waarskynlik daar was maar ek het dit nie gesien nie. SAUK-TV het wel 'n Laurens van der Post
dokumenter uitgesaai.
Die volgende berig het in die _London Times_ van Desember 17 verskyn....
SIR LAURENS VAN DER POST
Sir Laurens van der Post, writer and explorer, died yesterday aged
90. He was born in South Africa on December 13, 1906.
In an age of rampant materialism, Laurens van der Post was a passionate
and prominent champion of spiritual values. The precise nature of his
spirituality was not always clear, and his more Messianic pronouncements
could seem both portentous and imprecise; but the views he expressed in
more than two dozen books struck a chord with millions of readers, and
made him an influential confidant of public figures as diverse as Margaret
Thatcher and the Prince of Wales.
Part man-of-action, part mystic, he distilled in his work a lifetime's varied
experience. He had been an explorer and a soldier, a farmer and a
conservationist, a campaigner and a dreamer. But it was as a prophet out
of Africa that he won for himself a niche in English life and letters, with his
intensely felt and emotionally expressed evocations of that continent's
landscape and peoples, and his insistence on the message he believed it to
hold in trust for the West.
"I feel myself," he wrote, "to have become a kind of improvised footbridge
across the widening chasm between Europe and Africa." As the chasm
widened, van der Post came more and more to equate the primitive
peoples of the Africa he had known in childhood with those non-rational,
instinctive and intuitive aspects of the human psyche whose satisfaction
and expression he believed to be vital to the sanity, even the survival, of
civilised man.
Dreams were for him the link between the worlds of the primitive and the
technological and he liked to describe how, in his boyhood, his habit of
dreaming got him into trouble with the sober, Calvinist, Bible-reading
Afrikaner family from which he sprang.
Laurens Jan van der Post was born, the thirteenth of 15 children, at
Philippolis in the Orange Free State (of whose Volksraad, or state
legislature, his father had been chairman) and educated at a country
school and then at Grey College, Bloemfontein.
In his late teens he became a journalist on a paper in Durban, eventually
becoming its shipping correspondent. After travels which included a series
of journeys with a Norwegian whaling captain, and a trip to the Far East
with the novelist William Plomer, he arrived in London. There he struck
up the first of his many friendships with famous 20th-century figures, when
he made the acquaintance of John Maynard Keynes, the Woolfs, and the
other leading lights of Bloomsbury.
Married to a South African, Marjorie Wendt, and with two young
children, for a while in the 1930s he combined writing - his novel In a
Province appeared in 1934 - with dairy farming in Gloucestershire. He
was later to describe these years as the unhappiest of his life; both the
writing and the farming went well, but he was oppressed by a sense of
impending world catastrophe.
War was to mark the beginning of his long journey of self-discovery.
Packing his wife and children off to South Africa, he enlisted in the British
Army. In 1941 and 1942 he served with the commandos and led guerrilla
groups behind enemy lines in Abyssinia and the Dutch East Indies. In
1943 he was captured in Java by the Japanese.
Three years in PoW camps forged in him a philosophy, mystical in
character and therefore elusive in words. His toughness and bravery in the
face of appalling treatment from his guards is well documented. He later
ascribed it to the discovery within himself of "another person" or "other
voice".
Although he had no doubt of the rightness of bombing Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, he always insisted that he bore no rancour towards the
Japanese. In A Bar of Shadow, later republished with two companion
pieces as The Sower and the Seed, a memorable portrait of a brutal yet
honourable Japanese sergeant lent weight to what may claim to be a minor
classic in the literature of war. In 1983 it was filmed as Merry Christmas
Mr Lawrence, with the pop star David Bowie in a leading role.
On release he joined Mountbatten's staff as GSO1, took part in quelling
disorders in Java and attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel. In 1947 he
was appointed CBE. Regarding himself after the war as a changed man,
he set about building a new life. His first marriage was dissolved in 1948,
and in 1949 he married Ingaret Giffard, an English actress, novelist, and
playwright.
With her support, he resumed what was to become a prolific career as a
writer. From an investigation into the economic possibilities of the forests
which clothed Mount Mlange in Malawi, van der Post found material for
his Venture to the Interior, in which the introspective and the romantic
were happily blended with a sensitivity to the spirit of place that recalled
the early D. H. Lawrence.
Meanwhile he had fallen under the spell of Carl Gustav Jung, in whose
doctrines he found a theoretical basis for his empirical beliefs. In The
Dark Eye in Africa, published in 1954, he developed his theme of the
complementary nature of those elements in the human psyche symbolised
by black and white.
The black he equated with the instinctive and pagan aspects, the white
with logic, reason and intellectual discipline. In a healthy society, these
forces should be balanced as the positive and negative charges of
electricity balanced to produce a flow of energy. In our own society, the
"white" forces have swelled into an exaggerated materialism and crushed
the creative "black" forces of myth, mysticism and imagination.
"Without myth, the life of a people lacks direction and meaning." The great
need of our time, he urged, was to recapture our myths, and in the
"miraculously preserved archaic quality of Africa" we should seek them.
"The world apprehends that Africa may hold the secret of its own lost and
hidden being."
In 1952 he had visited the Kalahari Desert, and he returned there later to
make television films. The nomadic Bushmen he saw as almost the last
survivors of an ancient Stone Age culture complete with the intuitive,
semi-magical powers in which he so ardently believed.
In two resulting books, The Lost World of the Kalahari and The Heart
of the Hunter, his powers of vivid description, sensitivity to atmosphere
and human sympathy found full scope. If his life's work had a central
creed, it was perhaps that we must "redeem the Bushman in all of us,
before it is too late".
Van der Post could write only when his emotions were engaged and the
"dark man" within was on the qui vive. If everything tended to be a little
larger than life, including his own shadow, this for most readers added to
the enrichment of life in an age when it is more fashionable to denigrate
and diminish than to magnify and praise.
In 1964 he brought out Journey Into Russia, and four years later a
Portrait of Japan which, written without bitterness, sought out beneath
the ugliness of Westernisation an ancient beauty and faith. In 1976 Jung
and the Story of Our Time told of his relationship with the great
philosopher-psychiatrist and of the origins and growth of Jung's
philosophy. In lighter vein, First Catch Your Eland (1977) discoursed on
African and other exotic ways of cooking. "Studying grasses and cooking
in winter" were listed in Who's Who among his recreations.
A charismatic personality and a persuasive speaker, he had a high public
profile for so introspective and private a man, and he was not afraid to
enter political debates. He never forgot his Afrikaner origins, but was an
early and outspoken opponent of apartheid, seeking to warn his
countrymen of the dangers inherent in their policy, spiritual as well as
political, rather than to confront them with demos, boycotts and abuse.
He was to be equally critical of opposition leaders; he insisted that
Desmond Tutu did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, and described
Nelson Mandela as "a miserable figure who speaks with a double tongue";
he was a keen supporter of Chief Buthelezi.
Inherently a preacher and a poet, not a politician, he was a romantic
whose diagnosis of the spiritual ills of our time may have been prophetic,
but whose remedies, in so far as they can be defined, were vague and
perhaps impossible to apply. But his wisdom and personal qualities came
to be deeply appreciated by a number of people who occupied more
active positions on the public stage.
He was a personal friend of Margaret Thatcher during her premiership,
and was among those who counselled her to a policy of firmness during
the Falklands crisis. He hailed her handling of the invasion as "a brilliant
enterprise of war" and dismissed accusations of jingoism as "radical and
liberal slush".
The importance of the individual in van der Post's world view, together
with his belief that socialism was "a rotting corpse whose smell in our
midst has tainted the political atmosphere far too long", undoubtedly
endeared him to the Conservative Prime Minister. He was knighted , on
her recommendation, in 1981.
But it was perhaps his emphasis on the collective unconscious, and the
link it suggested between a monarch and his subjects, that appealed to the
heir to throne. He was a close and valued friend of the Prince of Wales
for decades, and his influence on Prince Charles's interest in spiritual
matters was widely felt to be profound. In 1982 he acted as godfather to
Prince William, a decision viewed with suspicion by some within the
Church of England in the light of his advocacy of a generalised notion of
faith rather than adherence to any one Faith - a notion apparently since
espoused by the Prince of Wales himself. In 1987 van der Post and
Prince Charles went on a five-day retreat in the Kalahari. Last year Sir
Laurens was a vigorous defender of the Prince in the aftermath of Diana,
Princess of Wales's Panorama broadcast.
Although van der Post never relinquished his links with South Africa, he
looked on England as his home for more than 50 years, and in the last
decades of his life he lived much of the time between Chelsea and
Aldeburgh.
He is survived by his second wife, who became a Jungian therapist, and
his daughter from his first marriage. His son and his first wife predeceased
him.
Q /
--X------------------------------------------
O \
Daar was ook 'n berig in _The Washington Post_.
Sien ook....
http://haven.ios.com/~davehuge/LvdPReq.html
Colin Garvie
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| Re: Laurens van der Post [boodskap #7967 is 'n antwoord op boodskap #7928] |
Wo, 08 Januarie 1997 00:00 |
johanna rykheer
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"Charl Durand" wrote:
>
> Jy't al die juicy bits oor sy buite-egtelike kind misgeloop!
Daar is 'n program op SAfm (Engelse radiosender van die SABC)
genaamd "The Editors", waar 3 koerantredakteurs of politieke
analiste kommentaar lewer oor die gebeure van die afgelope
week en spekuleer oor wat verder gaan gebeur. Een van hulle
het gesê: "And then there was the news about the death of
that big old fraud, Laurens van der Post."
Johanna Rykheer
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| Re: Laurens van der Post [boodskap #7988 is 'n antwoord op boodskap #7928] |
Vr, 10 Januarie 1997 00:00 |
Koos[1]
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On 10 Jan 1997 14:25:11 GMT, tie...@aol.com (Tierkat) wrote:
[/color]
> Sir Laurens in my oe was een van die groot geeste van ons tyd.... waarom
> nou weer in die "gutter" gaan rondgrawe?>>
OK. So jy se se moer met die kind wat sy aandag probeer kry het en
keer op keer verwerp is.
Te moer met die tiener wat hy verwagtend gemaak het.
Hy is 'n "groot gees" en hulle moet maar opgeoffer word voor daardie
altaar.
No ways, china.
By the way, dis nie ons wat in die gutter grawe nie, ons se maar net
jou held is verskeie kere in die gutter opgemerk.
Die groot Jung gees wat eerlikheid en beginsels verkondig het.
Die profeet van die gedagte om jouself eerlik te sien en ander om jou
te erken vir wat hulle is en hulle te respekteer en so aan.
...die skynheilige ou drol.
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| Re: Laurens van der Post [boodskap #7989 is 'n antwoord op boodskap #7928] |
Vr, 10 Januarie 1997 00:00 |
Tierkat
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Aai tog..... die morele oordele wat ons net moet aanlas.....
Sir Laurens in my oe was een van die groot geeste van ons tyd.... waarom
nou weer in die "gutter" gaan rondgrawe?
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