Lifelines: A Commonplace Book

By charlie cherry

A personal collection of memorable writings and statements of proverbial wisdom on a variety of topics from Ability to Youth.  Also includes lists of the author's favorite readings, films, curiosiites, and travel sites.

• Language: English
• Publisher: charlie cherry
• Release date: Jun 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781533780973

charlie cherry

A graduate of Loyola University (Baltimore) and the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), Charlie Cherry teaches at Villanova University and is Editor of Quaker History based at Haverford College.  He is author of A Quiet Haven: Quakers, Moral Treatment, and Asylum Reform and co-author of two communication textbooks.

Book preview

There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.—Pierre Bayle (1647-1706)

Mankind would lose half its wisdom built up over centuries if it lost its great sayings. They contain the best parts of the best books.—Thomas Jefferson

Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.—Dalai Lama

Everything we know about the workplace suggests that few if any knowledge workers ever refer to documents again once they have filed them away, which should come as no surprise, since paper is a lousy way to archive information. It’s too hard to search and takes up too much space.  Besides, we all have the best filing system right there on our desks—the personal computer.—Malcolm Gladwell, The Social Life of Paper: Looking for Method in the Mess, The New Yorker, March 25, 2002.

For Leigh Fermor, literature is not something simply to conjure with, still less something to theorize about; it is both incantatory music and a body of accumulated wisdom, and one can live by its ordinances, or on its wealth of suggestion, much as a minister lives by the Scriptures. —Anthony Lane, An Englishman Abroad: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Journey through the Twentieth Century, The New Yorker, May 22, 2006.

Every breath and word is an effort at translation and, at times, that effort can seem impossible. But poems, lyrics, and stories can do an end run around the stubborn distance that separates us, helping us feel what it is to be alive. Words can create meaning, teach us our own thoughts, and perhaps even describe a life. But we have to plumb, with curiosity sustained over time, with toleration of uncertainty, the unsettling, elusive stories that make us who we are.—Joshua Wolf Shenk, A Melancholy of Mine Own, in Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, ed. Nell Casey (2001), p. 251.

Life passes into pages if it passes into anything. . . .-–James Salter, Burning the Days (1997), p. 216 (See IMMORTALITY)

He wanted the lasting feelings only books could provide. —Annie Dillard, The Maytrees (2007), p. 210.

No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket.  A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself.  It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips—not to be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech. . . . Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. . . . There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning of the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.

—Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854), pp. 118-119 & p. 123.

One should never underestimate the power of books.—Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies (2006), p. 304. (See BIOGRAPHY)

A library is thought in cold storage.—Herbert Samuel (1870-1963)

When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.—Anatole France (1844-1924)

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.—Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

But speedily an earnest longing rose

To brace myself to some determined aim,

Reading or thinking; either to lay up

New stories, or rescue from decay the old.—William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book First, lines 115-118. 

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.—Ross Macdonald (1915-1983) 

A book is written, not to multiply this voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to perpetuate it. . . . In the sum of his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, manifest to him;—this, the piece of true knowledge, or sight, which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him to seize. He would fain set it down forever; engrave it on rock, if he could, saying, This is the best of me; for the rest I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated like another; my life was as the vapour, and is not; but this I saw and knew; this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.—John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (1865) 

We who are quotatious are never truly alone, but always hear the cheerful flow of remarks made by dead writers so much more intelligent than we. It may well be that tuning into this flow is as close to wisdom as those of us who are quotatious are likely to get.—Joseph Epstein, A Line Out for a Walk (1991), p. 107.

. . . words

as slippery as smooth grapes,

words exploding in the light

like dormant seeds waiting

in the vaults of vocabulary,

alive again, and giving life:

once again the heart distills them.—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), Ode to the Dictionary

XIV:   MOST ENJOYABLE READS

I.    INTRODUCTION

A Commonplace book (also called Zibaldone or hodgepodge book) comes from the Latin locus communis or topos koinos in Greek, which can be interpreted as a common place or, by extension, a theme or argument of general application, such as a collection of favorite writings or statements of proverbial wisdom.  It is a personal collection and varies significantly among individuals.  Popular since the Renaissance, many have been formally published, many simply kept within the family.  They are not journals or diaries, which are often tracked chronologically or are more introspective. They can, however, be guides to the collector’s character or soul.  As Rachel Toor has noted, beyond a student or teacher collecting a stock of ideas for speeches and compositions, some collections are more personal and meant to provide inspiration, direction, and moral fortitude. Reading the commonplace books of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or any number of antebellum Southern ladies can provide us with an interior view of each person’s self-image and the words that motivated him or her (Commonplaces: From Quote Books to ‘Sig’ Files, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 25, 2001).

In relating Renaissance enthusiasm for commonplace books, Erasmus described the daughters of his friend Thomas More:

As they flit like so many little bees between Greek and Latin authors of every   species, here noting down something to imitate, here culling some notable saying to put into practice in their behavior, there getting by heart some witty anecdote to relate among their friends, you would swear you were watching the Muses at graceful play in the lovely pastures of Mount Helicon, gathering flowers and marjoram to make well-woven garlands.

In his De Copia (1512), Erasmus provided a model of how to store collections of significant ideas, and in 1706 John Locke wrote A New Method of a Common Place Book, where he offered concrete advice on the arrangement of material, including specific subjects and categories.  As Jonathan Swift noted in A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet, a commonplace book can function as a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. You enter not only your own original thoughts (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own. Authors of commonplace books include Seneca the Younger, John Milton, Philip Melanchthon, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Robert Southey, Edward Gibbon, W. H. Auden, Nicholson Baker (see the latter’s essay in the Autumn 2000 issue of The American Scholar).

Scott Black, in his Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (2006), argues that essays emerged from such reader collections: If commonplace books enabled the collection of textual gleanings that furnished an educated mind, essays name the work of digestion that integrates those findings into one’s thinking. The literacy named by ‘essay’ is the skill of working through gathered texts, registering on the page the commentary—one’s own processing of the texts—that is the lesson, and the activity, of humanist education.  The father of this form is Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) whose Essays (1580)—from the French essais or attempts— were reflections on his readings that made liberal use of quoted passages.

Personal:  Reading has been my life. It’s also been my employment (college English teacher). It has been a stay against hard times, a way of keeping busy, my favorite hobby, a substitute for experience, an explanation for that experience, a prescription, an escape, a breakwater against the boredom, the inertia, the defeats, and the surprises that life gives us.  What follows is a distillation of all that reading by way of fixing it for myself, of giving it both some permanence and validating the activity that has most consumed my waking hours—in some sense an autobiography.  It is also a way of recapturing many moments of learning, reflection, surprise, insight, basic pleasure provided by more creative minds than mine.

I’ve lived in a world of words. From a morass of notecards, letters, texts, files, and marginalia, I’ve tried to assemble those passages/aphorisms/facts that have resonated with me at different points in my life.  Sometimes they appealed because of personal experiences at the time—and thus become a sort of intellectual and emotional tracking—sometimes because of the alchemy of language with its elusive if suggestive contexts and rhythms, sometimes because intriguing stories or facts simply caught my eye.

PS:  The New Yorker is frequently cited here. Why? It’s for me the best source of life and learning, a gold standard for creative fiction, the informal essay, and humor.  For more than forty years it’s been a mainstay in my intellectual life, a tonic, a joyful interruption, a balm for low spirits.  I’ve heeded W. H. Auden’s poetic injunction to Read The New Yorker . . .  and take short views [see Advice]. It has proved to be wise counsel.

I also owe a debt to Internet sites such as Wordsmith.org, Delanceyplace.org, and Wikipedia.org.

Special thanks as well to Greg Cherry, Carol Jacobs, Everita Cortum, Carole Kenney, Louis Phillips, Bob Cross, Laura Tscherry, Amber Viescas, and Sharon Rose-Davis.

II: TOPICS

ABILITY

ABORTION

ABSENCE

ABSURD 

ACADEMIC(S) (See EDUCATION)

ACTION

ACTOR/ACTRESS

ADOLESCENCE

ADULTERY (See AFFAIR)

ADULTHOOD

ADVENTURE

ADVERTISING

ADVICE

AFFAIR (See ADULTERY)

AGING (See MIDDLE AGE, TIME, YOUTH)

AGNOSTICISM

AGONY

ALCOHOL (See MARTINI)

ALZHEIMER’S

AMBIGUITY

AMBITION

AMERICA(N)

AMOUR-PROPRE (See SELF-LOVE)

ANAGRAMS

ANGER

ANIMALS

ANONYMITY

ANTIHERO (See HERO)

APHORISM

APOLOGY

ARCHITECTURE

ARGUMENT

ART(S)

ARTIST

ASSUMPTIONS

ATHEISM 

AUTOMATION

AUTOMOBILES

AUTUMN (See SEASONS, SPRING, SUMMER, WINTER)

BACTERIA

BASEBALL (See SPORTS)

BEACH (See SEA, WATER)

BEAUTY (See GRACE)

BELIEF [See DIVINITY, GOD(S), RELIGION]

BIOGRAPHY

BIRD(S)

BIRTHDAY

BLESSING

BLINDNESS

BOATS

BOOKS

BORE

BOREDOM

BRAIN (see MIND)

BRAVERY

BREATH

BREVITY

BROTHERHOOD

BUILDINGS

BUMPER STICKERS

BURIAL

BURIED LIFE

CALIFORNIA

CAPITALISM

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

CAPITALIZATION

CARES

CARING

CARNIVAL

CAT(S)

CELEBRATION (See JOY)

CEMETERY

CONSORSHIP

CERTAINTY

CHANCE

CHANGE

CHARACTER

CHARITY

CHARM

CHASTITY

CHEAT

CHILDHOOD

CHILDREN

CHOICE

CHRISTIANITY

CINEMA (See MOVIES)

CITY

CIVILITY

CIVILIZATION

CLASS

CLERISY (See READING)

CLICHES

CLUTTER

COLD 

COMEDY (See HUMOR)

COMFORT/COMMISERATION

COMING-OF-AGE

COMMENCEMENT TALKS

COMMITTEE

COMMON COLD 

COMMON SENSE

COMMUNICATION

COMMUNITY

COMPANIONSHIP

COMPASSION

COMPROMISE

CONFIDENCE(S)

CONFORMITY

CONGRESS 

CONNOISSEUR

CONSCIENCE  

CONSCIOUSNESS (See IDENTITY, INNER LIFE, SELF)

CONSERVATIVES

CONSOLATION (See DEATH, GRIEF, LOSS,  MOURNING)

CONTENTMENT

CONVERSATION 

COOKING

CORRUPTION

COURAGE

CRAVING

CREATIVITY

CRITICISM

CROSSWORD PUZZLES

CRUISE

CULT

CULTURE

CURE

CURIOSITY

CUSTOM

CYNIC(ISM)

DAMAGE

DANCE

DANCER

DAUGHTERS

DEAN

DEATH (See CONSOLATION, GRIEF, LOSS, MOURNING)

DEBATE

DECISIONS

DEDICATION

DEFEAT

DEGRADATION

DEMENTIA

DEMOCRACY

DEPRESSION (See DESPAIR, SUICIDE)

DESIRE

DESPAIR (See DEPRESSION, SUICIDE)

DETECTIVE FICTION

DEVOTION

DICTION

DIPLOMACY

DIRECTION

DISEASE (See ILLNESS)

DISORDER

DISSOCIATION

DISTRESS

DIVINITY [See BELIEF, GOD(S), RELIGION]

DIVORCE

DOGS

DOUBT

DRAMA

DREAMER

DREAMS

DROWNING

DRUGS

EARTH

ECONOMISTS

ECONOMY

EDITING

EDUCATION [See ACADEMIC(S)]

ELATION

ELEGY

EMANCIPATION

EMPATHY

EMPTINESS

ENEMY

ENERGY

ENGLISH MAJOR

ENLIGHTENMENT

ENNUI

ENTHUSIASM

ENVIRONMENT

ENVY

EPIGRAM

EPILEPSY

EPISTEMOLOGY

EPITAPH

EQUALITY

EROTIC

ESSAY

ETERNITY (See IMMORTALITY, SOUL)

ETHICS (See MORALITY)

EULOGY

EUPHEMISMS

EUTHANASIA

EVIL

EVOLUTION

EXCELLENCE

EXCESS

EXERCISE

EXISTENCE

EXISTENTIALISM

EXPEDIENCY

EXPERIENCE

EXPLORATION

FACTS

FAILURE

FAITH

FAME

FAMILY

FANATICISM

FANTASY

FARMING

FASHION

FAT

FATE

FATHER

FEAR

FEMINISM

FICTION (See LITERATURE, NOVEL)

FIRE

FISHING

FLATTERY

FLIES 

FLIGHT 

FOOD (See COOKING)

FOOL

FORCE

FOREIGN AID

FORGIVENESS

FORTUNE

FREEDOM

FRIENDSHIP

FRIVOLITY

FROST

FULFILLMENT

FUNERAL

FUTILITY

GAMBLING

GENES

GENIUS

GIFTS

GOBBLEDYGOOK/DOUBLESPEAK

GOD(S) (See BELIEF, DIVINITY, RELIGION)

GOLD

GOLF

GOODNESS

GOSSIP

GOVERNMENT

GRACE (See BEAUTY)

GRANDCHILDREN

GREATNESS

GRIEF (See CONSOLATION, DEATH, LOSS,  MOURNING)

GROWTH

GUEST

GUNS

GUILT

HABIT

HAIKU

HAPPINESS

HATRED

HEALTH

HEALTH CARE

HEART

HEAVEN

HEIGHT

HELL

HELP

HEREDITY

HERESY

HERO (See ANTIHERO)

HESITATION

HISTORY

HOLIDAYS (See LEISURE)

HOLOCAUST 

HOME

HOMOSEXUALITY

HONOR

HOPE

HORROR

HORSE-RACE 

HUMAN CONDITION

HUMANISM

HUMANITIES

HUMAN NATURE

HUMILITY

HUMOR (See COMEDY)

HUMOROUS STORE SIGNS

HUNTING

HURT

HUSBAND

HYPOCRISY

IDEAS

IDENTITY (See CONSCIOUSNESS, INNER LIFE, SELF)

IDLENESS

IGNORANCE

ILLNESS (See DISEASE)

ILLUSION

IMAGERY

IMAGINATION

IMMIGRATION

IMMORAL

IMMORTALITY (See ETERNITY, SOUL)

IMPRESSIONS

INDECISION

INDEPENDENCE

INDOLENCE

INERTIA

INFIDELITY

INHERITANCE

INNER LIFE (See CONSCIOUSNESS, IDENTITY, SELF)

INNOCENCE

INSANITY (See MADNESS, MENTAL ILLNES)

INSENSITIVE

INSPIRATION

INSULTS

INTELLECT

INTELLIGENCE

INTELLIGENT DESIGN

INTIMACY

INTUITION

IRISH

IRONY

IRRATIONAL

ISOLATION 

ISRAEL

JAZZ

JEALOUSY

JEWS

JOURNALISM

JOY (See CELEBRATION)

JUDGMENT

JUSTICE

KILLING

KINDNESS

KNOWLEDGE

LABOR

LAND

LANGUAGE (See WORDS)

LAST WORDS (SUPPOSEDLY)

LAUGHTER

LAW

LAWYER

LEADERSHIP

LEARNING

LEGACY

LEISURE (See HOLIDAYS)

LESBIANISM

LIBERAL

LIBERAL EDUCATION

LIBERTY

LIBRARY  

LIES

LIFE

LISTENING

LITERATURE (See FICTION, NOVEL)

LIVING

LONELINESS

LONGING

LOSS (See  CONSOLATION, DEATH, GRIEF, MOURNING)

LOVE (See SEX)

LUCK

LUST

LYRIC

MADNESS (See INSANITY, MENTAL ILLNESS)

MAGIC

MAN

MANNERS

MARRIAGE

MARTINI (See ALCOHOL)

MASKS

MASTURBATION

MEANING

MEDICINE

MEETINGS

MELANCHOLY

MEMOIR

MEMORIZE

MEMORY

MEN

MENTAL ILLNESS (See INSANITY, MADNESS)

MERCY

MIDDLE AGE (See AGING, TIME, YOUTH)

MILITARY SERVICE (See WAR)

MIND (see BRAIN)

MIRACLES

MISCALLS

MISERY

MISOGONY 

MISTAKES

MISUNDERSTANDING

MOB

MODESTY 

MONEY (See SOCIAL JUSTICE, WEALTH)

MOON 

MORALITY (See ETHICS)

MORTALITY

MOTHER

MOTIVE

MOTTO

MOURNING (See CONSOLATION, DEATH, GRIEF, LOSS)

MOVIES (See CINEMA)

MURDER (see VIOLENCE)

MUSIC

MYSTICISM

MYTHS

NAKED

NATURE

NEIGHBORHOOD

NERVES

NERVOUS

NEUROTICS

NEWS

NIGHT

NONCONFORMITY

NON-VIOLENCE

NOSTALGIA

NOVEL (See FICTION, LITERATURE)

OBESITY

OBITUARY

OPINIONS

OPPORTUNITY

OPTIMIST

OPTIONS

ORDER

ORDINARY

ORIGINALITY

PAIN (See SADISM/MASOCHISM)

PAINTING(S)

PARADOX

PARENTS

PASSION

PAST

PATENTS

PATHOS

PATIENCE

PATRIOTISM

PEACE

PEOPLE

PERFECTION

PERSEVERANCE

PERSUASION

PESSIMIST

PHILOSOPHY

PHOTOGRAPHS

PHYSICIAN

PLACE

PLAGUE

PLANTS

PLEASURE

PLOT

PLURALISM

POETRY

POETS

POLITICS

PONDERABLES

PORNOGRAPHY

POSSESSIONS

POSTMODERN

POVERTY

POWER

PRAISE

PRAYER

PREJUDICE (See RACE/RACISM)

PRESCIENCE

PRIDE

PRINCIPLES

PRIVACY

PROBLEM

PROCRASTINATION

PROFANITY

PROFESSORS

PROGRESS

PROMISE

PROPAGANDA

PROPHETS

PSYCHIATRY

PSYCHOTHERAPY

PUNISHMENT

PUNS

PURPOSE

QUARREL

QUIETNESS

RACE/RACISM (See PREJUDICE)

RADICALS

RAGE

RAIN

RAPE

READING (See CLERISY)

REALITY

REASON

REDUNDANCIES

REFUGEES 

REGRETS

RELATIONSHIPS

RELIEF

RELIGION [See BELIEF, DIVINITY GOD(S)]

REMORSE

RESPONSIBILITY

RETIREMENT

REUNION

REVENGE

REWARD

RISK

RIVER

RITUAL

ROMANCE

ROMANTIC

ROMANTIC POETS

ROME

ROUTINE

RUINS

SADISM/MASOCHISM (See PAIN)

SAINT

SALVATION

SARCASM

SATAN

SATIRE

SCAPEGOAT

SCHOLAR

SCIENCE

SEA (See BEACH, WATER)

SEASONS (See AUTUMN, SPRING, SUMMER, WINTER)

SECRECY

SEDITION

SEDUCTION

SELF (See CONSCIOUSNESS, IDENTITY, INNER LIFE)

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

SELFISH

SELF-LOVE (See AMOUR-PROPERE)

SELF-SUFFICIENT

SEMIOTICS

SEX (See LOVE)

SHAME

SHIBUMI

SHIPS

SIBLING

SIGHT

SILENCE

SIMILES

SIMPLICITY

SIMPLIFY

SIN (SINNERS)

SING

SLAVERY

SLEEP

SMELL

SMILE

SNOW

SOCIAL JUSTICE (See MONEY, WEALTH)

SOCIETY

SOLITUDE

SORROW

SOUL (See ETERNITY,  IMMORTALITY)

SPEECH

SPIRITUALITY

SPORTS

SPREZZATURA

SPRING (See AUTUMN, SEASONS, SUMMER, WINTER)

STATES

STATISTICS

STORM

STORY

STRESS

STUDENTS

STYLE

SUBURBIA

SUCCESS

SUFFERING

SURFING

SUICIDE (See DEPRESSION, DESPAIR)

SUMMER (See AUTUMN, SEASONS, SPRING, WINTER)

SUN

SUNDAY

SURFING

SURREALISM

SURRENDER 

SUSPENSE

SWIMMING

SYMPATHY

TALENT

TASTE

TAXES

TEACHING (TEACHER)

TEASING 

TECHNOLOGY

TELEVISION

TEMPTATION

TENSION

THANKSGIVING

THEFT

THERAPY

THOUGHT

THRILLERS

TIME (See AGING, MIDDLE AGE, YOUTH)

TOASTS

TORTURE

TOUCH

TRADITION

TRAGEDY

TRASH-TALKING

TRAVEL

TRUTH

UNCONSCIOUS

UNIVERSE

UTOPIA

VALUES

VANITY

VEGETARIANISM

VICE

VICTORIAN

VICTORY

VIOLENCE (see MURDER)

VIRTUE

VISION

VISIONARY

WALKING

WAR (See MILITARY SERVICE)

WARNING

W.A.S.P.

WATER (See BEACH, SEA)

WEALTH (See MONEY, SOCIAL JUSTICE)

WILL

WIND

WINE

WINTER (See AUTUMN, SEASONS, SPRING, SUMMER)

WISDOM

WISTFULNESS

WIT

WIVES

WOMEN

WONDER

WORDS (See LANGUAGE)

WORK

WORRY

WRITERS

WRITING

YOUTH (See AGING, MIDDLE AGE, TIME )

ABILITY

To know how to hide one’s ability is great skill.—Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

Never was ability so much below mediocrity so well rewarded; no, not even when Caligula’s horse was made a consul.—John Randolph (1773-1833) on Richard Rush

ABORTION

I'm sorry, but all these life begins at conception arguments are sheer nonsense. Killing a cluster of cells that has the potential of becoming human life is not the same as killing a human being. Here is a reductio ad absurdum argument for all the extreme pro-lifers. With modern cloning technology, a simple skin cell is a potential baby. Where do pro-life people stand on removing a wart or a mole? Are dermatologists the latest in the long list of baby killers?—Dialogue is Needed on Abortion, St. Petersburg Times [Florida], May 20, 2009.

ABSENCE

This corner makes me drowsy

like a bad unguent. Your absence is

a need to close my eyes. The cracked Tiffany lamp

a shaded rose you bought at a Brooklyn thrift shop—

now a throbbed Persephone

gone underground.

You are no epitaph but that scarred piano

we used to play. Great music trivializes, when

so much worse hurts, can’t keep my

eyelids open. The hypnotizing rugs that

stare into Alone. My thoughts sway into violent,

black somnambulant, cold death

supplying the madness of your gone. . . .—Jane Mayhall, Why a Corner in the Apartment Puts Me to Sleep

Absence diminishes commonplace passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and kindles fire.—Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its color.—W. S. Merwin, Separation

ABSURD

Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion.  By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide. I know, to be sure, the dull resonance that vibrates through these days.  Yet I have but a word to say: that it is necessary. When Nietzsche writes: "It clearly seems that the chief thing in heaven and on earth is to obey at length and in a single direction: in the long run there results something for which it is worth the trouble of living on this earth as, for example, virtue, art, music, the dance, reason, the mind—something that transfigures, something delicate, mad or divine," the elucidates the rule of a distinguished code of ethics. But he also points the way of the absurd man. Obeying the flame is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do. However, it is good for man to judge himself occasionally. He is alone in being able to do so.—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), pp. 47-48. 

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.—Voltaire (1694-1778) 

ACADEMIC(S) (See EDUCATION)

[academic publishing]: No one reads these books. Everyone just agrees to publish everyone else’s. It’s one big circle jerk. It’s a giant economic agreement. When you think about it, it probably violates the Sherman Act.—Lorrie Moore, Terrific Mother, in Birds of America (1998), p. 279.

I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior.—Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (1928).

I wrote, The clock is the weapon with which we butcher our lives, and felt pleased with myself.  From the age of twelve and my huge paper route, the largest in the Toledo area, my life has been strictly circumscribed by the clock. There is scarcely a profession more time-conscious than the academic—outside the obvious trains, planes, and buses—given the classes, appointments, committee meetings, faculty meetings, perhaps meeting meetings that are organized to stuff lacunae. Even our annual Modern Language Association convention meetings include schedule items such as 5:10-5:35, Getting to Know Each Other Cocktails.—Jim Harrison, Julip (1994), p. 226.

Elitist is a label for people (like me) who believe that, frequently, egalitarianism is envy masquerading as philosophy. . . . Surely a just society is one in which people deserve their positions, and in which inequalities are reasonably related to reasonable social goals. Justice requires a hierarchy of achievement—unless all achievements are of equal social value, in which case all inequalities are arbitrary and illegitimate privileges. Something like that extreme egalitarianism enjoys a vogue in academic circles, and helps produce grade inflation.—George F. Will, D is for Dodo, Newsweek, February 9, 1976.

Academic and aristrocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that comman sense can rarely reach them.—Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

ACTION

When in doubt about what should be done, do nothing.—William Lamb, the 2nd Lord Melbourne

Oh, how many a Glorious Record

Had the angels of me kept

Had I done instead of doubted

Had I warred instead of wept.—Charles S. Robinson, Waking, in Church Work: Twenty-Six Sermons Preached in the Presbyterian Memorial Church (1873), p. 283.

Love and patience—if only he had had them both at once—would surely have seen them through. And then what unborn children might have had their chances, what young girl with a headband might have become his loved familiar? This is how the entire course of a life can be changed—by doing nothing.—Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach (2007), pp. 202-203.

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe, is in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do.—John Ruskin (1819-1900)

Never confuse motion with action.—Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.—John Leonard (1939-2008) 

He that desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.—William Blake 

ACTOR/ACTRESS

An actor is a man who pretends to be someone who is usually pretending to be someone else.—Kenneth Tynan, Journals, The New Yorker, November 16, 1975.

You have to protect your edges, Dennis Hopper said, explaining why Penn keeps much of the world at arm’s length. James Dean said to me when I was young, ‘The giant sequoia tree in its beginning is very small inside but the bark is very large. The bark is a foot thick but doesn’t get bigger. The bark is there to allow the inside to grow. An actor is like that.’  Every time you do an emotional scene, you’re exposing yourself. The second the scene’s over, you have to shut it back down and put your bark back on. If you walk around without it, you’re just a wounded tree—you’re going to die, because there’s just too much stuff coming into you. Sean goes deep into his emotional inner life. He allows you to see it, then he closes it back up. He has to, or he wouldn’t be able to survive.—John Lahr, Citizen Penn: The Many Missions of Sean Penn, The New Yorker, April 3, 2006.

Actors don’t pretend to be other people; they become themselves by finding other people inside them.—Aunt Roo in David Malouf, Harland’s Half Acre (1984), p. 196.

ADOLESCENCE

There is perhaps, for all concerned, no period of life so unpleasant, so unappealing, so downright unpalatable, as that of adolescence. And while pretty much everyone who comes into contact with the adolescent is disagreeably affected, certainly no one is in for a ruder shock than the actual teen-ager himself. Fresh from twelve straight years of uninterrupted cuteness, he is singularly unprepared to deal with the harsh consequences of inadequate personal appearance. Almost immediately upon entering the thirteenth year of life, a chubby child becomes a fat girl and a boy previously spoken of as small for his age finds that he is, in reality, a boy who is short.—Fran Lebowitz, Tips for Teens, Newsweek, January 1, 1979.

Should your political opinions be at variance with those of your parents, keep in mind that while it is indeed your constitutional right to express these opinions verbally, it is unseemly to do so with your mouth full—particularly when it is full of the oppressors’ standing rib roast.—Lebowitz (see above)

Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you something to think about that you didn’t make up yourself—a wise move at any age, but most especially at 17, when you are in the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions.—Lebowitz (see above)

At the height of first love, Saturday nights in parked cars or on the busted couch of somebody’s forsaken game room, the friction of adolescent passion driving me forward. —Jill McCorkle, Final Vinyl Days and Other Stories (1998), p. 85.

Adolescence isn’t a period; it’s a coma. —Richard Armour

I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived.  Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance.  However . . . who said that thing about the littleness of life that art exaggerates?  There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.—Julian Barnes, The Sense of An Ending (2011), p. 102.

I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.—James Joyce, Araby (1914)

If any man have a Stubborn and Rebellious Son of sufficient understanding, viz., sixteen years of age, which will not Obey the Voice of his Father or the Voice of his Mother . . . then may his Parents lay hold on him, and bring him to the Magistrates Assembled in Court, and Testify unto them that their Son is Stubborn and Rebellious . . . and such a Son shall be Put to Death.— Acts and Laws of the Colony of Connecticut (1715); see also Deuteronomy 21:18-21.

To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent.  If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.—W. H. Auden on A. E. Houseman, in The New Yorker, Feb. 19, 1972.

Oh, ‘tis jesting, dancing, drinking

Spins the heavy world around.

If young hearts were not so clever,

Oh, they would be young for ever.

Think no more; ‘tis only thinking

Lays lads underground.—A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (XLIX) 

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show—

How selfhood begins with a walking away

And love is proved in the letting go.—C. Day Lewis [on watching his son Sean who has just come of an age to go to school on his own and play football]

A rod is the very best thing to apply

When children are crying and cannot say why.—Edward Gorey (1925-2000)

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.—W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939

At five o’clock we turned on the television and watched The Mickey Mouse Club. It was understood that we were all holding a giant bone for Annette. This was our excuse for watching the show, and for me it was partly true. I had certain ideas of the greater world that Annette belonged to, and I wanted a place in this world. I wanted it with all the feverish, disabling hunger of first love.—Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life: A Memoir (1989), p. 43.

When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever.—Tobias Wolff (see above), p. 286.

My God, he couldn’t help thinking, how terrible it is to be that age, to have emotions so near the surface that the slightest turbulence causes them to boil over. . . . That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about—acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply.—Richard Russo, Empire Falls (2002), p. 79.

I look around for my girls, but they’re gone, of course. . . . I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was a dark gray and his back stiff, as if he’d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.—John Updike, A & P (1961).

Thus, the whole phalanx of unconsciously priapic preachers inveighing against the sweet disease that was gradually filling my adolescent body to bursting: woman. Just one taste and—Bam! —the end of Eden.

Which at 15, was all I wanted. Even as the preachers poured down their fire on my head, all I could think of was the sweaty sex that first bite, because it was shared, must surely have led to, the momentary but absolute release of it, how lewd and illicit and finally fucking free it must have been, how almost worth it. . . . .—Christian Wiman, Kill the Creature, The American Scholar (Spring 2015)

How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents.  There is a yet more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change.—Iris Murdoch, The Bell (1958), p. 38. 

In America, the family, in the Roman and aristocratic of the word, does not exist. All that remains of it are a few vestiges in the first years of childhood, when the father exercises without opposition, that absolute domestic authority which the feebleness of his children renders necessary, and which their interest, as well as his own incontestable superiority, warrants. But as soon as the young American approaches manhood, the ties of filial obedience are relaxed day by day: master of his thoughts, he is soon master of his conduct. In America, there is, strictly speaking, no adolescence: at the close of boyhood, the man appears, and begins to trace out his own path.—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840), Part II, Book Three, p. 229. 

I became an adolescent, enrolling my body in the obligatory school of pain-without-dignity called puberty, nearly flunking, then graduating almost without noticing. I discovered in the process that some girls were nothing like 95 percent Crud. I also discovered that there was life after baseball, that America was not the Good Guys, that God was not a Christian, that I preferred myth to theology, and that, when it dame to heroes, the likes of Odysseus, Rama, and Finn McCool meant incomparably more to me than the George Washingtons, Davy Crocketts, and Babe Ruths I’d been force-fed.—David James Duncan, A Mickey Mantle Koan, Harper’s Magazine (September 1992).

I knew I had changed. As quick as that. But I didn’t know how. There were no streaks of blood crawling down my legs, like you see in the movies. No pounding, no sickness. But I felt very much the way I’d felt that time on the train from Greensboro when I turned myself into Marcus, the redheaded boy with braces. It was somebody else, I was utterly at peace, and I had a new odor. Nobody but me or a delicate animal would ever have noticed. As I climbed our steps, I wondered if Roz had smelled it and refused me.—Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden (1986), p. 64.

ADULTERY (See AFFAIR)

He was obliged to sleep with her now; it was a kind of race, in which he had fallen dangerously behind. The men she had slept with were each still in her, a kind of investment, generating interest. Part of Frank’s gift to her was the heightened value his innocence assigned her.  She was experienced. They were never quite equal. She ran risks, coming to him, the same risks he did, of discovery and a disrupted family, but he considered her marriage too damaged already to grieve for, whereas his own was enhanced by his betrayal, his wife and children rendered precious in their vulnerability.—John Updike, Natural Color, The New Yorker March 23, 1998.

She was fifty-two, beyond children but not folly, and despised herself for the hold the old man had over her. She knew he had not just a wife, but another woman. And, she suspected, one or two others. She lacked even the sultry glory of being his only mistress. She did not understand herself. He had the sourdough smell of age. His chest sagged into shriveled teats; his lovemaking was unreliable, yet she found it strangely wholesome in a way that defied sense. With him she felt the unassailable security of being loved and yet she knew that one part of him—the part she wanted most, the part that was the light in him—remained elusive and unknown. In her dreams Dorrigo was always levitating a few inches above her. Often of a day she was moved to rage, accusations, threats and coldness in her dealings with him. But late of a night, lying next to him, she wished for no one else.—Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), pp. 17-18.

He was bored by the sex of his adulteries, which was why, he presumed, he pursued them ever more ardently, imagining that there must be somewhere someone who could break the spell of torpor, his soul’s strong sleep. Occasionally a woman misunderstood him and imagined a future life with him. He would quickly disabuse her of the malady of romance. Thereafter, they thought him only interested in the pleasures of the flesh; in truth nothing interested him less.—Flanagan (see above), p. 288.

There grew between him and Ella a conspiracy of experience, as if the raising of children, the industry of supporting each other in ways practical and tender, the sum of years and then decades of private conversations and small intimacies—the odour of each other on waking; the trembling sound of each other’s breathing when a child was unwell; the illnesses, the griefs and cares, the tendernesses, unexpected and unbidden—as if all this were somehow more binding, more important and more undeniable than love, whatever love was. For he was bound to Ella. And yet it all created in Dorrigo Evans the most complete and unassailable loneliness, so loud a solitude that he sought to crack its ringing silence again and again with yet another woman. Even as his vitality leached away, he labored on in his quixotic philanderings. If there was no real heart to any of it, if it was dangerous in so many ways, that added to it for him. But far from ending the scream of his solitude, it amplified it.—Flanagan (see above), p. 300.

A love affair is not a love affair if the whole world knows about it.—Vanity Fair, vol. 61 (1998)

In the plate glass of a department-store window their reflection was arrested while they embraced.  They did not see that image recording for an instant a stylishness they would not have claimed as theirs, or guessed that, in their love affair, they had possessed. Unspoken, understood, their rules of love had not been broken in the distress of ending what was not ended and never would be. Nothing of love had been destroyed today: they took that with them as they drew apart and walked away from one another, unaware that the future was less bleak than now it seemed, that in it there still would be the delicacy of their reticence, and they themselves as love had made them for a while.—William Trevor, A Bit on the Side The New Yorker, October 29, 2001.

Nabokov said of adultery in Madame Bovary that it was a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.—Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), p. 91.

An adultery story is always about yearning and loss. And about desire and the freedom to enact one’s desire, so that an adultery story is also always about autonomy. And about sorrow. Because in every adultery story, no matter how euphorically it begins, we always encounter more sorrow than we deemed possible, for adultery always causes sorrow, even as it unfurls whatever past sorrows we have experienced.  An adultery story always tries to determine whether we are in control of our own desire or whether these feelings are beyond our ability to manage them. And these—yearning, loss, desire, sorrow, autonomy—are . . . the fundamental bedrock of the chastened human soul.—Louise DeSalvo, Adultery (1999), p. 31.

It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.—Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (1945), p. 60.

She’s different, he said. She’s funny—she makes me laugh. She doesn’t take everything too seriously.

And how do you feel about deceiving Anna?

He gulped his coffee. She saw him flooded with shame then, not able to trust himself to speak: an unpracticed liar. These things happen, she soothed. We can’t pretend they don’t. Even if we were good, if we were perfectly and completely chaste, we can’t control what happens in our imagination. So being good might only be another kind of lie.—Tessa Hadley, Mother’s Son, The New Yorker, August 20, 2004.

Adultery is a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of meanness and selfishness and lying flow love and joy and peace beyond anything that can be imagined.—Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

Thou with strange adultery

Dost in each breast a brothel keep;

Awake, all men do lust for thee,

And some enjoy thee when they sleep.—Abraham Cowley 

ADULTHOOD

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long Indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.—John Banville, The Sea (2005), p.69.

ADVENTURE

A day will come when beings, now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon Earth as a footstool and laugh, and reach out their hands amidst the stars. —H. G. Wells, Nature Magazine (1902).

There will certainly be no lack of human pioneers when we have mastered the art of flight. . . . Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travelers, maps of the celestial bodies.—Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), 1610 letter to Galileo.

All other creatures look down upon the Earth, but man was given a face so that he might turn his eyes toward the stars, and gaze upon the sky.—Ovid

There comes a time . . . when one realizes that adventure is as humdrum as routine unless one assimilates it, unless one relates it to a central core which grows within and gives it contour and significance. Raw experience is empty, just as empty in the forecastle of a whaler as in the chamber of a counting house; it is not what one does, but in a manifold sense, what one realizes, that keeps existence from being vain and trivial.—Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (1929), p. 61.

ADVERTISING

It doesn’t feel so much like a leap of faith as something I know in my heart. Strange to hear herself say this, but it’s the truth.

The heart is a muscle, Bigend corrects. You ‘know’ in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex.  What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending to its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things. . . . All truly viable advertising addresses that older, deeper mind, beyond language and logic, I hire talent on the basis of an ability to recognize that, whether consciously or not. It works.—William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2003), p. 69.

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.—Paul Valery (1871-1945)

ADVICE

Sydney Smith’s Prescription for Living:  1. Live as well and drink as much wine as you dare. 2.  Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold—75 or 80 degrees. 3. Amusing books. 4. Short views of human life, not farther than dinner or tea. 5. Be as busy as you can. 6. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you; 7. And of those acquaintances who amuse you. 8. Make no secret of Low Spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely: they are always the worse for dignified concealment.  9. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you. 10. Compare your lot with that of other people. 11. Don’t expect too much of human life.  12.  Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence. 13. Do good and endeavor to please everybody of every degree. 14. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue. 15. Make the room where you commonly sit gay and pleasant. 16. Struggle by little and little against idleness.  17. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, but do yourself justice. 18. Keep good blazing fires. 19. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion. 20. Believe me, dear Lady Georgiana, very truly yours, SYDNEY SMITH (1771-1845)

I could not, at any age, be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. The fatal thing is rejection. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)

Ya gotta be ready for the fastball.—Ted Williams

Some’s bastards, some’s aint, that’s the score.—Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957), p. 120.

Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact they can no longer provide bad examples.—Maxim 93, Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered.—Oscar Wilde

Never answer an anonymous letter.—Yogi Berra

Conceal thy Tenets, thy Treasure, and thy Traveling.—Richard Burton (1577-1640)

Thou should not be on friendly terms

With guys in advertising firms,

Nor speak with such

As read the Bible for its prose,

Nor, above all, make love to those

Who wash too much.

Thou shalt not live within thy means

Nor on plain water and raw greens.

If thou must choose

Between the chances, choose the odd;

Read the NEW YORKER; trust in God

And take short views.—W. H. Auden, Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times

. . . . We have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, but less time.

We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.

We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life;

We’ve added years to life, not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor. . . .—Dr. Bob Moorehead, Paradox of Our Age in Words Aptly Spoken (1995).

Listen to Uncle Shmuck, will you? Things come and go, and you have got to be a receptacle, let them pass right through. Otherwise death will be a misery for you, boy. Wait and accept and learn to pull the hand away. Don’t clutch! —Philip Roth, Letting Go (1962), p. 82.

When you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it—this is knowledge—Confucius

Be engaged for at least six months before you get married.

Don’t judge people by their relatives.

When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling.

Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

Spend some time alone.

Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

Read between the lines.

Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been.

If you make a lot of money, put it to use helping others while you are living. That     is wealth’s greatest satisfaction.

Forgive your enemies; it messes up their heads.

The best sermons are lived, not preached.

Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.

Always drink upstream from the herd.

Don’t interfere with somethin’ that ain’t bothering you none.

Words that soak into your ears are whispered . . . . not yelled.—General Advice

It’s not fuckin fair, Jam said.

Fair? Bev said. Poor baby. Look, you’re really sayin’ that the ways of life are glum and grim and nasty, and I guess you want to turn crybaby about that, but what’s on my mind is, Whoever misled you things were otherwise, hon? What sugar factory spun you out with such silly candy-assed notions?—Daniel Woodrell, Tomato Red (1998), p.101.

You can feel when people are yessin’ you. You can feel the real.—Ike Turner

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if it were possible, speak a few reasonable words.—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-96)

Many receive advice, few profit by it. —Publilius Syrus

Early to bed, early to rise—makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.—Benjamin Franklin 

Go to bed early, get up early—this is wise. Some authorities say get up with the sun; some say get up with one thing, others with another. But a lark is really the best thing to get up with. It gives you a splendid reputation with everybody to know that you get up with the lark; and if you get the right kind of lark, and work at him right. You can easily train him to get up at half past nine, every time—it’s no trick at all.—Mark Twain, Advice to Youth (1882) 

[Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life] informs Paulinus that learning how to live takes a whole life, and the sense most of us have that our lives are cruelly brief is a specious one: It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. . . . If you want a life that feels long, he advises, fill it with philosophy. That way, not only do you keep a good watch over your own lifetime, but you annex every age to your own.

So make friends with the high priests of liberal studies, no matter how distant they are from you. Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus, Aristotle, Theophrastus: None of these will be too busy to see you, none of these will not send his visitor away happier and more devoted to himself, none of these will allow anyone to depart empty-handed. They are at home to all mortals by night and by day.—Zadie Smith, Some Notes on Attunement: A Voyage Around Joni Mitchell, The New Yorker, December 17, 2012.

AFFAIR (See ADULTERY)

Nicole did not want any vague spiritual romance—she wanted an affair; she wanted a change.  She realized . . . that from a superficial view it was a vulgar business to enter, without emotion, into an indulgence that menaced all of them.  On the other hand, she blamed Dick for the immediate situation, and honestly thought that such an experiment might have a therapeutic value.  All summer she had been stimulated by watching people do exactly what they were tempted to do and pay no penalty for it—moreover, in spite of her intention of no longer lying to herself, she preferred to consider that she was merely feeling her way and that at any moment she could withdraw.—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1933), pp. 291-2.

AGING (See MIDDLE AGE, TIME, YOUTH)

The Muse has gone away.  Men feel, as they leave youth, that they have consciously assumed a role by excluding some of the once-present elements from themselves.  But ever after they are haunted by the fear that they might have selected another, better, role, that perhaps they have made the wrong choice.—Lionel Trilling

Age is the bilge

we cannot shake from the mop.—Robert Lowell

She [Janet Flanner] always urged me to visit aging celebrities and question them before they died: Tax their brains, she would say. It’s like lobsters. Go for the head—there’s tasty chewing there.—Kenneth Tynan, Journals, November 15, 1978.

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?—Satchel Paige (1906-1982)

I find that age has bestowed a kind of comfortable anonymity. We are not exactly invisible, but we are not noticed.  Age may sideline but it also confers a sort of neutrality; you are no longer out there in the thick of things, but are able to stand back, observe, consider.—Penelope Lively, Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir (2013)

I don’t feel old. I don’t feel anything until noon. Then it’s time for my nap. —Bob Hope

But now at thirty years my hair is gray—

(I wonder what it will be like at forty?

I thought of a peruke the other day)

My heart is not much greener; and, in short, I

Have squander’d my whole summer while ‘twas May,

And feel no more the spirit to retort; I

Have spent my life, both interest and principal,

And deem not, what I deem’d, my soul invincible.—Byron, Don Juan, canto I, stanza 213. 

Conventional wisdom has it that you don’t grow up until middle age, but old people know that it isn’t growing up at all—it’s giving up.  Just stop fighting and go with the flow, as the hideous saying now goes. Maturity is passivity in fancy dress.—Anne Rivers Siddons, Peachtree Road (1988), p. 545.

Suddenly it was as if she were in the next room, and he had only moments before left her; his hands tingled, as if they had touched her. And the sense of his loss, that he had for so long dammed within him, flooded out, engulfed him, and he let himself be carried outward, beyond the control of his will; he did not wish to save himself. Then he smiled fondly, as if at a memory; it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love.

But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. . . . He could not think of himself as old. Sometimes, in the morning when he shaved, he looked at his image in the glass and felt no identity with the face that stared back at him in surprise, the eyes clear in a grotesque mask; it was as if he wore, for an obscure reason, an outrageous disguise, as if he could, if he wished, strip away the bushy white eyebrows, the rumpled white hair, the flesh that sagged around the sharp bones, the deep lines that pretended age —John Williams, Stoner (1965), p. 250.

Don’t worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you. —Winston Churchill

The compensation of growing old, Peter Welsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last! —the power which adds the supreme flavor to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), p. 79.

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.—Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007)

He is alert to the irony of aging: when time is short, old age takes up a lot of time. There are doctors’ visits, tests to be suffered, results to wait for, ailments and medications to be studied—all distractions from the work.  Old age is like learning a new profession, he noted drily, And not one of your own choosing.—Arthur Krystal, Age of Reason [about Jacques Barzun], The New Yorker, October 22, 2007. [Written when Barzun, close to 100, was finishing his 38th book. His areas of expertise: French and German literature, music, education, ghost stories, detective fiction, language, and etymology. He has written so many reviews and essays that his official biographer is loath to put a number on them.]

And it was possible, too, that age could become her ally, turning her into somebody she didn’t know yet. She has seen that look of old people, now and then—clear-sighted but content, on islands of their own making.—Alice Munro, Deep Holes, The New Yorker, June 30, 2008.

G. Stanley Hall . . . believed that thinking about aging required thinking about dying. . . . Senescence was, for Hall, the flip side of adolescence. Either you’re growing up or you’re growing down. For him there was very little in between. Old age takes everyone by surprise, and no one really ever comes to terms with it. Hall thought this was because old age is the only stage of life we never grow out of, and can never look back on, not on this earth, anyway. He also thought that, because one problem with growing old is that you don’t know where you’re going anymore; what you should do, when you feel yourself getting stodgy, is think about where you came from.—-Jill Lepore, Twilight, The New Yorker, March 14, 2011.

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.—Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) or Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

How much easier it is then, how much more receptive we are to death, when advancing years guide us so softly to our end.  Aging thus is in no sense a punishment from on high, but brings its own blessings and a warmth of colors all its own. . . . There is even warmth to be drawn from the waning of your own strength compared with the past—just to think how sturdy I once used to be!  You can no longer get through a whole day’s work at a stretch, but how good it is to slip into the brief oblivion of sleep, and what a gift to wake once more to the clarity of your second or third morning of the day.  And your spirit can find delight in limiting your intake of food, in abandoning the pursuit of novel flavors.  You are still of this life, yet you are rising above the material plane. . . . Growing old serenely is not a downhill path but an ascent.—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Growing Old, interview with David Remnick.

Hold a baby to your ear

As you would a shell:

Sounds of centuries you hear

New centuries foretell.

Who can break a baby’s code?

And which is the older—

The listener or his small load?

The held or the holder?—E. B. White, Conch

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.—Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

Where will you take me in the fizz of

winter?

Darling, the cork, though fat and

black, still pulls,

new wine floods our prehistoric

Veins—

the day breaks, impossible, in our bed.—Robert Lowell

My hair is grey, but not with years,

Nor grew it white

In a single night,

As men’s have grown with sudden fears.—Byron, The Prisoner of Chillon

I have liv’d  long enough: my way of life

Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf,

And that which should accompany old age,

As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have; but in their stead,

Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath,

Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.—Macbeth, V, 3

. . . . This is my fifty-eighth autumn

and binding me more tightly each year

is the garment made of all the years before.

Is there nothing without its fixed point

on the line of cause and effect, nothing

without some history being hauled

along behind? Geese, grass, and trees,

I perceive them through the filter

of fifty-seven previous landscapes.

A golf cart rounds a nearby oak and stops.

Two men in bright-yellow slacks descend.

Spreading its wings, the lead goose rears up;

intent on their game, the men don’t notice.

To own a thing is to try to freeze it in time;

the men don’t doubt all this belongs to them.

They swing their clubs at the little white ball.

Autumn, autumn, how many will follow?

My sense of wonder is as thin as an old sheet

washed over and over; my sense of consequence

fattens above me feathered and huge.—Stephen Dobyns, Country Club

An unseemly business, sitting in the dark spying on a girl (unbidden the word letching comes to him). Yet the old men whose company he seems to be on the point of joining, the tramps and drifters with their stained raincoats and cracked false teeth and hairy earholes—all of them were once upon a time children of God, with straight limbs and clear eyes. Can they be blamed for clinging to the last to their place at the sweet banquet of the senses?—J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999), p. 24.

Someone asked Maurice Chevalier How does it feel to be 70? Great, he replied, when you consider the alternative.

Why, what blessings are these—that the soul, having served its time, so to speak, in the campaigns of desire and ambition, rivalry and hatred, and all the passions, should live in its own thoughts, and, as the expression goes, should dwell apart! Indeed, if it has in store any of what I may call the food of study and philosophy, nothing can be pleasanter than an old age of leisure.—Cicero, De Senectute [On Old Age], 44 BCE

An obsession with longevity distracts us from our duty to live well.  Acceptance of death is a prerequisite for rising above concern of mere bodily continuance.  Biology confirms what philosophy teaches:  We are social creatures whose lives point beyond themselves, toward children.  Children, says Leon Kass . . . are life’s answer to mortality, and their presence in one’s home is a constant reminder that one no longer belongs to the frontier generation.  Mortality gives life symmetry and an urgency about getting on with good works.—George Will, Facing the Skull Beneath the Skin of Life, Newsweek, March 6, 1994.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.—Shakespeare, Richard II

Leave a mark on the world. Instead,