Non-Linear B
by Theodore Dalrymple (June 2013)
Such was the state of historical knowledge, or perhaps I should say ignorance, of my young patients that I was most favourably impressed whenever a young man deduced by his own unaided efforts that there must have been a First World War because there had been a Second.
Therefore I do not blush to record that I once made a deduction very similar to that of my patients who concluded from the fact that there had been a Second World War that there had been a first: namely that, if there had been a Linear B script of Minoan writing there must have been a Linear A. Of neither did I know anything.
The man who deciphered Linear B was called Michael Ventris. The brilliance of his achievement, a combination of dogged persistence, great learning and well-informed leaps of the imagination, was recognised at once: the BBC, for example, asked him to give a talk on the radio as soon as he had deciphered Linear B (which certainly would not happen nowadays).
Ventris was born into a family in which privilege and tragedy, convention and rebellion, were in constant tension, a tension which proved in his case to be a highly creative one, though also with an ultimately tragic outcome.
His mother moved in artistic circles, and Ventris grew up with Picassos on the walls of his home. From this he developed a taste for modernism which influenced (balefully, in my opinion) his choice of career. Of reserved and modest demeanour, even as a child, his appearance became that of an extremely refined man. Physiognomy is an inexact science, no doubt, but no one who saw him could have doubted his high intelligence and intellectual ability.
World renown came to Ventris very suddenly: in those days celebrity was less independent of achievement than it is now. But Ventris was not interested in fame or fortune and his end was tragic. Only four years after his great achievement, aged 34, he was killed in a motor accident. In the middle of the night, on a journey whose purpose was unknown, he drove at full speed into a truck parked at the side of a road and was killed instantly.
well, and it was only at and after his death that I realized how much I had missed in not getting to know him better.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
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