Wednesday

29 November 2017

— gun-metal gray dawn with streaks of silver

Good Morning All,

In today’s Day Book is my all time favorite quotation, the single wisest item I have ever read in one sentence. Esther likes to give me stick for all my favorite favorites and the two dozen items in my top-ten lists, but this time this quote is really at the top of my list.

I got into quote collecting years ago while reading Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, a novella I love so much I dare not read it, since it plays such havoc with my own writing style.

In it, Buddy Glass, who is the narrator (and my favorite Salinger character), talks about the quotation wall he keeps with his elder brother Seymour. One of them is from the 18th Century Japanese poet Issa:

O snail, 

Climb Mount Fuji, 

But slowly, slowly! 

For years when I was in the mood I’d go in to other teachers' classrooms and write that haiku on the board. It was sort of my Kilroy-was-here. As far as I know, no one ever suspected me. Issa by the way is a pen name and means “a cup of tea”.

The last year of high school and all through college I collected quotes in a stenographer book, which I may still have out in some box at Wales. One of the quotes in it is: “Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”

At the time, I thought it was from George Eliot’s Silas Marner. A couple of years ago, to my shock and amazement, I discovered it is from Dinah Maria Mulock Craik's A Life for a Life. (I’m happy to report I didn’t and don’t think any less of the wisdom of those words even if they come from some obscure Victorian scribbler virtually no one has ever heard of.)

I have inserted my all-time favorite nuggets of wisdom into a list of other favorites below. If you can—before looking below!--correctly pick it out on your first try, I shall gladly buy you a beer the next time we are in the same place at the same time: 

To understand completely is to forgive all. — Tolstoi in War and Peace.

I trust people and I am willing to pay the price. — E. M. Forster in Howard’s End.

You can’t fault people for their good intentions. — Emmanuel Kant in Critique of Pure Reason.

So we beat on boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby.

Love is a great beautifier. — Louisa May Alcott in Little Women.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see. Paul Klee

Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/paul_klee“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. — Robert Frost

The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel. — Horace Walpole in a letter to Anne, Countess of Ossory,

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship. — Iris Murdoch in A Severed Head.

The giver is grateful. — Zen koan.

The earth keeps some vibration going / There in Your Heart, and that is you. / And if the people find you can fiddle, / Why fiddle you must, for all your life. — Edgar Lee Masters in Spoon River Anthology.

We live in a rainbow of Chaos. — Paul Cezanne

Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you. 

— Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Art does not reproduce what we see: rather, it makes us see. — Paul Klee

Those whom the gods love grow young. — Oscar Wilde

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Two Holly snaps: