Laudator Temporis Acti

Alan Watts (1915-1973), In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915-1965 (1972; rpt. Novato: New World Library, 2007), p. 151:

Now it seemed natural to me to be exuberant about religion, just as it also seemed natural and contradictory to be religious and at the same time to be exuberant about life, to go about our loving and eating and drinking with the innocent splendor of the flowers doing likewise. If one is going to have church and ritual of any kind, why not live it up? If I put on vestments of brocade, light candles, burn incense, and intone mysterious chants, I do not do it to fool people or to flatter God. I do it out of simple delight and fascination for the color, the stately dance, and the sense of mystery—not of the kind of mystery which can be revealed or explained, but the kind of mystery which God must be to himself. Mystery, mystic—the Greek rueiv—the finger on the lips; mum’s the word; do not spoil it with an explanation. I was not really interested in what rites and ceremonies symbolized, and still less in future results they might be supposed to achieve.

Image of the paragraph from Google Books:


There is no such Greek word as rueiv—this is of course a misprint for μυεῖν (in transcription muein). I think that the misprint also appears in the original edition (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).

Labels: typographical and other errors