Quotes of the Month, 2003
________________________________________________________________________
I for my part am not one of those who have innate knowledge. I am merely one who loves the past and is diligent in investigating it.
Confucious (circa 551- 479 BC)
________________________________________________________________________
February The world’s an orphans’ home. Shall
we never have peace without sorrow?
without the pleas of the dying for
help that won’t come? O
quiet form upon the dust, I cannot
look and yet I must. If these great patient
dyings—all these agonies
and woundbearings and bloodshed—
can teach us how to live, these
dyings were not wasted.
MARIANNE MOORE
In Distrust of Merits (1944)
________________________________________________________________
|
HAMLET: HORATIO: --William Shakespeare (1564-1616) |
Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark
|
__________________________________________________________________
April
“Didn’t you ever meet a reporter before?” I asked him.
“Tits on a bull,” he said. “Nothing personal.”
But what a story he told me, as one-pointed and resonant as any war story I ever heard, it took me a year to understand it.
“Patrol went up a mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.”
I waited for the rest, but it seemed not to be that kind of story ….
After a year I felt so plugged in to all the stories and the images and the fear that even the dead started telling me stories, you’d hear them out of a remote but accessible space where there were no ideas, no emotions, no facts, no proper language, only clean information. However many times it happened, whether I’d known them or not, no matter what I’d felt about them or the way they died, their story was always there and it was always the same: it went, “put yourself in my place.”
--Michael Herr
Dispatches (1977), pages 15-16 and 36.
And then, in one of those great thundering jolts in which a man’s real motives are revealed to him in an electrifying vision, I understood, at last, why I jumped hospital that Sunday thirty-five years ago and, in violation of orders, returned to the front and almost certain death.
It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down and I couldn’t do it to them. I had to be with them rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them. Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.
--William Manchester
Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (1980),
Ballentine edition, 1987, pages 450-451.
________________________________________________________________
“Kay won’t tell me,” said the Wart, “what happens when you are made a knight. He says it is too sacred. What does happen?”
“Oh, just a lot of fuss. . .”
. . .
“If I were to be made a knight,” said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, “I should insist upon doing my vigil all by myself, as Hob does with his hawks, and I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there should be none left, while if I were defeated, it would be I who would suffer for it.”
“That would be extremely presumptuous of you,” said Merlyn, “and you would be conquered, and you would suffer for it.”
“I shouldn’t mind.”
“Wouldn’t you? Wait till it happens and see.”
“Why do people not think, when they are grown up, as I do when I am young?”
“Oh dear,” said Merlyn. “You are making me feel confused. Suppose you wait till you are grown up and know the reason?”
“I don’t think that is an answer at all,” replied the Wart, pretty justly.
Merlyn wrung his hands.
“Well, anyway,” he said. “Suppose they didn’t let you stand against all the evil in the world?”
“I could ask,” said the Wart.
“You could ask,” repeated Merlyn.
He thrust the end of his beard into his mouth, stared tragically in the fire, and began to munch it fiercely.
. . .
“So Merlyn sent you to me,” said the badger, “to finish off your education. Well, I can only teach you two things, to dig, and to love your home. These are the true end of philosophy.”
--T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone (1938). This book became the opening story of the four stories that make up The Once and Future King (1958), White’s epic version of the legend of Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlyn, and the other Camelot characters.
___________________________________________________________________
As a source of energy in a place like Hardborough which required so little, an energy, too, which was often expended in complaints, she was bound to create a widening circle of after effects which went far beyond the original impulse. Whenever she realized this she was pleased, both for herself and for the sake of others, because she always acted in the way she felt to be right. She did not know that morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.
--Penelope Fitzgerald
The Bookshop (published in Great Britain in 1978; first U.S. edition, 1997)
Meanwhile, Flory had signed a public insult to his friend. He had done it for the same reason he had done a thousand such things in his life; because he lacked the small spark of courage that was needed to refuse. For, of course, he could have refused if he had chosen; and equally of course, refusal would have meant a row with Ellis and Westfield. And, oh, how he loathed a row!
--George Orwell
Burmese Days (1934)
pages 55-56
__________________________________________________________________
July
Now both the pitch and volume of his voice rose. “If I were you, I’d say, ‘Why don’t you get the hell off me, you son-of-a-bitch spook! Get the hell off me!’ ” He waved his right hand in such a striking gesture that the tables around us grew momentarily silent.
His words struck at my heart because he alone was the father and could speak such a thing, could threaten the profane spirit, could give reassurance. Only now I didn’t need it anymore. I needed it back then, when his voice would echo throughout our tiny flat, “Old man river,/ That old man river. . .” Still, by hearing his voice again, I felt released, if only for a moment. He stood between me and my oppressor, and, though it was too late to rescue the haunted child, it was not too late to meet in the world as men.
“The spook is me,” I said.
“The spook isn’t you. Kick the bastard out and be done with it.”
--Richard Grossinger, “A Phenomenology of Panic,” The Sun, April 2003, p. 20,
reprinted from Panic: Origins, Insight, and Treatment (2002)
edited by Leonard J. Schmidt M.D. and Brooke Warner
(Only pages 15 and 16 of the article are available for viewing on The Sun’s website.)
Grossinger (b. 1944, New York City) was writing about a lunch meeting
with his stepfather, who died a few months later and from whom he’d
been estranged for the 30 previous years. The April issue is a
particularly good one—check your local library, or
order the issue from http://www.thesunmagazine.org/ .
‘Readers Write’ on Vanity
(June issue) is good, too.
____________________________________________________________________
August
The pocket radio is a notorious example; whether we like it or not, it points the way inevitably to a day when person-to-person communication is universal. Then everyone in the world will have his individual telephone number, perhaps given to him at birth and serving all the other needs of an increasingly complex society (driving license, social security, credit card, permit to have additional children, etc.). You may not know where on Earth your friend Joe Smith may be at any particular moment; but you will be able to dial him instantly—if only you can remember whether his number is 8296765043 or 8296756043.
--Arthur C. Clarke
Voices From the Sky (1962)
Work is good, and reading is good, but friends are better.
--James Clerk Maxwell,
in a letter written to a friend
during Maxwell’s most productive
years, 1860-1865, soon after he’d moved
from Aberdeen, Scotland to London.
The very technology that makes our living simpler makes our society more complex. The more efficient we get, the more specialized we become and the more dependent.
--Thomas Griffith
The Waist-High Culture (1959)
_____________________________________________________________
September
My half brothers and sisters are eating crabs at a sawbuck table on the screened porch. The carcasses mount toward a naked light bulb. …
Thérèse runs to the kitchen door. “Mother! Jack is here!” She holds her breath and watches her mother’s face. She is rewarded. “Yes, Jack!” …
Lonnie has gone into a fit of excitement in his wheelchair. His hand curls upon itself. I kiss him first and his smile starts his head turning away in a long trembling torticollis. He is fourteen and small for his age, smaller than Clare and Donice, the ten-year-old twins. But since last summer when Duval, the oldest son, was drowned, he has been the “big boy.” His dark red hair is nearly always combed wet and his face is handsome and pure when it is not contorted. He is my favorite, to tell the truth. Like me, he is a moviegoer. He will go see anything. But we are good friends because he knows I do not feel sorry for him. For one thing, he has the gift of believing that he can offer his sufferings in reparation for men’s indifference to the pierced heart of Jesus Christ. For another thing, I would not mind so much trading places with him. His life is a serene business.
My mother is drying her hands on a dishcloth.
“Well well, look who’s here,” she says but does not look.
…
“What do you plan to do?”
I shrug. There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, and for good and selfish reasons. It only remains to decide whether this vocation is best pursued in a service station or —
“Are you going to medical school?”
--Walker Percy
The Moviegoer (1961)
Ballentine paperback, 1988
Pages 120-121, and 204.
__________________________________________________________________
October
Like many young men in the South, he became overly subtle and had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant’s son from Passaic who decides to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course. Except war. If a man lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what he is waiting for is war—or the end of the world. That is why Southerners like to fight and make good soldiers. In war the possible becomes actual through no doing of one’s own.
...
His trouble came from groups. Though he was as pleasant and engaging as could be, he had trouble doing what the group expected him to do. … He either disappeared into the group or turned his back on it.
Once when he was a boy his father and stepmother put him in a summer camp and went to Europe. Now here was one group, the campers, he had no use for at all. The games and the group activities were a pure sadness. One night as the tribe gathered around the council fire to sing songs and listen to the director tell stories and later ask everyone to stand up then and there and make a personal decision for Christ, he crept out of the circle of firelight and lit out down the road to Asheville, where he bought a bus ticket which carried him as far as his money, to Cedartown, Georgia, and hitchhiked the rest of the way home. There he lived with his aunts for several weeks and with the help of a Negro friend built a tree house in a tall sycamore. They spent the summer aloft, reading comics while the tree house tossed like a raft in a sea of dappled leaves.
--Walker Percy
The Last Gentleman, Tenth printing, 1990; pages 10 and 13
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / New York
I blinked. All at once Miss Maude, whom I had known all my life or thought I knew, went off her rocker. Or she had been off her rocker for forty years and now at last came to herself. … At first I thought she was crying, but it was not grief, it was happiness, gratitude. She twisted a handkerchief in her hands.
“I just can’t tell you what this means to me,” said Miss Maude, pumping her tired hands back and forth.
“Raine got Jan to give Miss Maude a walk-on in the library scene,” explained Lucy.
…
I looked at Maude in astonishment. Had everybody in this town gone nuts or was I missing something? The special nuttiness of the movie people I was used to, but the town had gone nuts. Town folk, not just Maude, acted as if they lived out their entire lives in a dim charade, a shadowplay in which they were the shadows, and now all at once to have appear miraculously in their midst these resplendent larger-than-life beings. She, Maude, couldn’t get over it: not only had they turned up in her library, burnishing the dim shelves with their golden light; she had for a moment been one of them!
--Walker Percy, Lancelot (1977) pp.151-52
__________________________________________________________________
For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. ... I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something that shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well--by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion. ... It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt.
--James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 — December 1, 1987), Giovanni's Room (1956).
"I
no longer pretend to understand the world." She is shaking her head yet
still smiling her sweet menacing smile. "The world I knew has come
crashing down around my ears. The things we hold dear are reviled and
spat upon." She nods toward Prytania
Street. "It's an interesting age you will live in—though I can't say I'm sorry to miss it. But it should be
quite a sight, the going under of the evening land. That's us all
right. And I can tell you, my young friend, it is evening. It is
very late."
For her too the fabric is dissolving, but for her even the dissolving makes sense. She understands the chaos to come. It seems so plain when I see it through her eyes. My duty in life is simple. I go to medical school. I live a long useful life serving my fellowman. What's wrong with this? All I have to do is remember it.
"—you have too good a mind to throw away. I don't quite know what we're doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man."
--Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, Ballentine paperback, p.45.
I wanted to
depict the ambiguities of a society where bigotry, cruelty, hypocrisy, and
corruption are rife, the better to show how truly heroic it is, whatever your
age, to fight a battle that can never be won. And I also wanted to
reflect the fact that life can be difficult and confusing between the ages of
11 and 17, even when armed with a wand.
--J.K. Rowling, in an acceptance speech last month for an award she received in Spain, related to her Harry Potter series of books. Source: NY Times, Arts Briefing, 10/28/03, page B2
_____________________________________________________________
There is an age-old conflict between intellectual leadership and civil authority. How old, how bitter, came home to me when I came up from Jericho on the road that Jesus took, and saw the first glimpse of Jerusalem on the skyline as he saw it going to his certain death. Death, because Jesus was then the intellectual and moral leader of his people, but he was facing an establishment in which religion was simply an arm of government. …
Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures. You cannot possibly maintain that informed integrity if you let other people run the world for you while you yourself continue to live out of a ragbag of morals that come from past beliefs. That is really crucial today. …
I began this series in the valley of the Omo in East Africa, and I have come back there because something that happened then has remained in my mind ever since. On the morning of the day that we were to take the first sentences of the first programme, a light plane took off from our airstrip with the cameraman and the sound recordist on board, and it crashed within seconds of taking off. By some miracle the pilot and the two men crawled out unhurt.
But naturally the ominous event made a deep impression on me. Here I was preparing to unfold the pageant of the past, and the present quietly put its hand through the printed page and said, ‘It is here. It is now.’ History is not events, but people. And it is not just people remembering, it is people acting and living their past in the present. History is the pilot’s instant act of decision, which crystallizes all the knowledge, all the science, all that has been learned since man began.
We sat about in the camp for two days waiting for another plane. And I said to the cameraman, kindly, though perhaps not tactfully, that he might prefer to have someone else take the shots that had to be filmed from the air. He said, ‘I’ve thought of that. I’m going to be afraid when I go up tomorrow, but I’m going to do the filming. It’s what I have to do.’
We are all afraid—afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. …
--Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (1973)
The book is also a TV series, and the quotes here
are from ‘The Long Childhood,’ the last segment
in the series, pages 429, 435, and 438 in the book.
Go to quotes of the month for 2004
Go to dwt other links page
Go to dwt homepage