“Before I was married, I had a hundred theories about raising children and no children. Now, I have three children and no theories.” John Wilmot, English writer born 1 April 1647, lamenting the consequences of wisdom achieved too late.
Below – John Wilmot, a man who misses the happy days of theorizing.
Part The Second: Right And Wrong
“By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.” – Charles Wadsworth, American clergyman who died on 1 April 1882, describing why for the past three decades I have always been wrong.
Below – The Three Wrongs who think I’m never right.
For the sake of an aesthetically fruitful collaboration between eye and mind:
“Under a blazing mid-afternoon summer sky, we see the Seine flooded with sunshine . . . people are strolling, others are sitting or stretched out lazily on the bluish grass.” – Georges Seurat, French Post-Impressionist painter who died on 29 March 1891. Though Seurat’s language is both colorful and emotionally evocative, it cannot do justice to his masterpiece, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” below.
“Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.” – Marc Chagall, Russian-French painter who died on 29 March 1985.
I think that Chagall was right: Art cannot compete with the beauty of flowers. But women can.
“You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.” – Neil Kinnock, English politician born on 28 March 1942.
Americans have recently been forcibly reminded that Kinnock is manifestly correct in this matter, for while in most cases things add up, there are clearly occasions when they add down.
Behold The Haunted Restaurant! The mansion in the photograph below was once a thriving hotel and restaurant, but it is now completely deserted and sits menacingly on the sinister wastelands of the High Plains. It is outside a small town along the route I take to Colorado, but I will not reveal its exact location, because anyone who visits the place or even looks at it will inevitably suffer a terrible calamity. Are you skeptical? Then consider this fact: I first caught a brief glimpse of The Haunted Restaurant many years ago, when I knew nothing of its vindictive spectral residents. I was then a happy man without children (redundant – I know). Now I have three sons. Sometimes ghosts are real – and in my bitterly experienced view, they can be excessively vengeful.
“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” – Henry Adams, American journalist, historian, and novelist, who died on 27 March 1918.
Adams (born 16 February 1838) is the author of an autobiographical work with which more people should be acquainted – “The Education of Henry Adams.” In it he chronicles his struggles to understand the intellectual, social, technological, scientific, and political changes that had taken place in the world between the American Civil War and the years just before World War I – changes for which his education had done little to prepare him. Adams is a witty, self-deprecating, and vastly intelligent writer; he was also a prescient one, since he foresaw that the rate of change would continue to accelerate and that traditional education in the United States, unable to keep pace with rapidly unfolding developments, would need to be supplemented by considerable reading and experience.
It is wise to remember that the Victorian Era which shaped the life of Henry Adams gave birth to the ideas of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein – ideas that have, in turn, helped to shape the way we now interpret our world, our society, and ourselves. Thus, by reading “The Education of Henry Adams” we can more fully divine the half-hidden wellsprings of our collective identity. Finally, in a time when scientific discovery and technological innovation seem to increase exponentially with each passing year, it would be prudent to read carefully a book written by a brilliant and frequently bewildered man who shared both our hopes and our confusions.
Some quotes from Henry Adams:
“American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.”
“Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.”
“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”
“It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.”
“Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.”
“The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.”
“The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.”
“Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.”
My friends: I will not be posting on articles for the next few days, since I will be in the Colorado Rockies, hiking and, hopefully, horseback riding. However, if I find the right horse, I will be gone for an indeterminate amount of time, because I will immediately “light out for the Territory,” as Huck Finn so adroitly put it. I know that this sort of escape is “such stuff/As dreams are made on,” but it is a decidedly American dream: Many of our greatest spirits have yearned to disappear from history, to leave the culturally scripted path of ambition, to move past self-created boundaries, and thereby discover a deeper, richer, more meaningful relationship with the larger world beyond society’s frontier.
Admit it: You know exactly what I mean, and some of you even now would gladly join me on a flight from what currently passes for civilization. Like Huck, we’ve “been there before” and can’t stand it.
I acknowledge the fact that adulthood is circumscribed by duties and responsibilities, and measured against the weighty authority of those imposing words, to heed what has traditionally been termed “the call to adventure” can seem, at best, quixotic. Therefore, within a short time I will almost certainly return from Colorado and resume the work and roles that shape my mundane life.
But I hope not.
Below – The Territory begins just beyond the distant mountains.
“An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.” – Simon Cameron, American financier, Senator from Pennsylvania, and Secretary of War under Abraham Lincoln, who was born on 8 March 1799.
The Wisdom of Simon Cameron, Part II:
“I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here… We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped.” – Simon Cameron, speaking about the Smithsonian Institution. This remark might make Cameron seem foolish, but as a good Republican, he was merely articulating what would eventually become his party’s all-but-official position on science.
Confucius said: “In all matters, the first thing that a petty person thinks about is profit.” The Chinese ideogram that the translator has rendered as “profit” means “calculated self-interest.” Is that not an accurate description of most American politicians? And does it not perfectly capture the character of Mitt Romney? And by the way: For Confucius, the expression “petty person” meant “failed human being.”
”I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.” – Hippolyte Taine, French historian and ailourophile, who died 5 March 1893.
I asked one of my cats about this claim, and he told me that, epistemologically speaking, it was “prima facie.” Then he dismissed me and went back to napping, which he calls “somnolent metaphysical inquiry.”
Below – The sun-dappled Socrates of my household deep in thought.
Born 5 March 1955 – Penn Jillette, American magician, illusionist, atheist, libertarian, skeptic, and author, who, along with his partner Teller, has performed the invaluable service of championing reason and fact over belief and delusion on the “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!” television program. These courageous men have followed the enlightened path of other benevolent magicians like Harry Houdini and the Amazing Randi, who, knowing how susceptible human beings are to illusion, have devoted themselves to exposing frauds, especially ones operating to great personal profit in the fields of parapsychology and religion.
My Friends: We have to stop being so willing to allow crackpots, fools, and charlatans to take advantage of our trust, hope, and fear, and, perhaps above all, we need constantly to engage in the hard task of interrogating our own beliefs and opinions by reading widely and then taking what we have learned from books and measuring it against our experience in the world. In this regard, I hope that everyone has read the work of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, because they are among our species’ greatest contemporary liberators.
In honor of Penn Jillette’s birthday, I offer everyone an instructive talk from Michael Shermer, one of the sanest human beings on the planet.
