Tag Archives: little bits and pieces

January 15, 2013 · 5:26 pm

“There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.”–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today, my post takes off (at least, I hope  it will fly) from the topic of manners to a general discussion of the best ways of doing things.  Doing things, that is, so as to be not only understood but also loved and valued by those around us, and not only appreciated for our best qualities but also forgiven for our worst.  And it all starts with a little exemplum or fable told to my brother and myself by our mother when we were small.  Not that I am necessarily an example of the best way of doing things, though I often aspire in that direction, but that these things are usually best inculcated when people are young and just learning their first steps of behavior in social settings (and what are any of our settings but social settings, since we are social beings first and foremost, as we have been often told by social scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and the like?).  Here’s how the story goes:

There was once a very rich and fashionable hostess who loved to give extravagant dinner parties and afternoon teas alike.  Everyone who was anyone came to her parties, and had the time of their lives, even though the parties were somewhat formal and even occasionally a bit stuffy.  They discussed her behind her back with a great deal of indulgence for this formal, stuffy quality, loving it too because they loved her.

At a certain party, when a host of literary lights were in attendance, one guest in especial was watching our hostess and her arrangements, a society page writer who lived just on the edge of penury, but who was usually asked as a particular act of kindness toward the hostess’s cousin, who was a good friend of his.  In looking around the table, he noted who was there, what was served, and made mental notes of the sparkling conversation, planning his column carefully for the next day, and modestly determined to give the hostess as good a write-up as possible, in exchange for tolerating his humble presence at her party.

Everything went along just fine, until the very end of the main course, when the salad was served (European style, instead of before the meal, American style).  Aswim in a sea of positive emotions and not a little of wine, the writer looked down to discover that there was a huge fat worm in his salad!  What to do, what to do?  At the very next moment, while he was pondering his dilemma, he noticed that the hostess, with a carefully disguised expression of horror on her face, had noticed exactly the same thing, the worm in his salad.  Their glances crossed.  He hesitated only a second.  Heroically, he pronged a fork into exactly the bite of salad with the worm, placed it in his mouth, and chewed and swallowed.  He was rewarded the next minute by the hostess’s warm and glowing smile radiating down the table and bathing him in its effulgent glow.  It all seemed worth it, though the worm had tasted a little bittersweet.

He really had reason to think it was worth it, however, six months later, when the hostess passed away and left him as her only heir.  And he never told a soul what it was all about, though many people speculated that he had been an autumn romance of hers, or that she had left him money in exchange for his article about her dinner parties as a whole, which really wasn’t even a probable motive.

Now, one might feel that in the telling this story appealed too much to a child’s (nearly innate) “get-rich-quick-by-being-a-suck” tendency, except for the manner in which the story was told.  For my mother was quick to point out that it was only good manners not to tell, and that ordinarily no one could expect to be left potloads of money in exchange for merely obeying the dictates of good manners.  In vain I pointed out that the writer could merely have surreptitiously lifted the worm out onto the table or floor; yet I too was cognizant of his magnanimity in actually eating the worm and thus hiding it from all eyes.

And perhaps here’s the lesson (I always cozy up to a good moral):  when we find a fault, while pointing it out may be meritorious in the sense of keeping to exactitude, sometimes hiding a fault (in someone else) is far more honorable, and may have unexpected and not-to-be-calculated-upon benefits besides.  These benefits extend not only from others to us (in which case they appreciate us more because we hang fire and don’t criticize them for qualities or acts which perhaps they can’t help), but from us to us ourselves (in which case we learn to judge ourselves more generously as well, knowing that we held our fire).  As Shakespeare’s Portia from “The Merchant of Venice” has it, “The quality of mercy is not strained….”  And that’s my post for today.

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January 6, 2013 · 6:28 pm

The tenets of friendship–(it has no tenets, only a soul.)

This is the time of year for lists of things, or at least this is the time of year when people are persuaded that it’s good to follow a list of things:  New Year’s resolutions, for example.  And there are dieting checklists, and exercise checklists, and lists of types of behavior to follow in the quest for a successful job interview.  There are even checklists to follow in choosing the new family pet, the new family car, and the most recent repair people to visit the house.  We are simply inundated with lists of organized considerations for how to do, how to ask, how to be.  Is it any wonder that it occurs to me to write a list (or at least to think that it’s once again time for someone to write a list) of the tenets of friendship, the more especially as this is the time of year when we are reevaluating things and people in our lives, and deciding which ones will continue to “do,” and which ones simply won’t?

The problem is, as I am sitting here typing, it occurs to  me that in the deepest sense, friendship has no tenets, but only a soul (because if you have to make rules, it means you’re playing a game, not living a life).  And I ask myself, what is the best way to conceive of the love of friendship, without setting out a whole host of considerations for tying tight knots and binding others in uncomfortable ways which speak more of the ardors of Fifty Shades of Grey than of a loving and equal relationship?  And it follows that I find myself thinking of some of the nicer and more resonant things said by writers and poets about friendship.  Here’s a few of them:

As George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron once wrote, “L’Amitié Est l’Amour sans Ailes” (Friendship is Love without his wings!”).  A moment’s thought and a brief factoid about Byron’s private life will inform the average reader that this means that while Love may fly away, true Love (Friendship) doesn’t, in the poet’s august opinion.  Certainly, Byron was an authority on Love with women flying away, whatever he was on the subject of Friendship.

As to the unknown features of what makes friendship tick, as Ibycus said in 580 B.C., “An argument needs no reason, nor a friendship.”  Thank God, that saves us making another list, a list about what makes friendship! (Though I suppose I’m coming close to doing so in this post.)  Probably this will remind most people of the friendships they formed either while young in age or young at heart, those friendships that just seem to depend on a certain proclivity for the other’s company that isn’t easy to explain.

Speaking for the vitality and occasional storminess of friendship, the Marquise de Sévigné once said, “True friendship is never serene.”  I suppose that means that a living, growing friendship keeps us always on our toes, because as it grows we have to grow and change with it, to accomodate its differences and the changes of the other person(s).  Ralph Waldo Emerson expatiated even more on this thought by saying in his Uncollected Lectures:  Table Talk:  “Keep your friendships in repair.”  Not a bad thought, though I hope it doesn’t make you feel tired when you are hovering here on the brink of a new year and just getting started with another winter season.

Following from the last paragraph above, I think of one of my own favorite poetic disquisitions on the difference between friendship and enmity, by William Blake, called “A Poison Tree,” based on the metaphor of boys stealing apples from others’ orchards.  I’ll quote it in full, from David V. Erdman’s Doubleday Anchor edition of The Poetry and Prose of William Blake:

“I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end./I was angry with my foe;/I told it not, my wrath did grow,/And I watrd it in fears,/Night & morning with my tears:/And I sunned it with smiles,/And with soft deceitful wiles./And it grew both day and night./Till it bore an apple bright./And my foe beheld it shine./And he knew that it was mine./And into my garden stole,/When the night had veild the pole;/In the morning glad I see;/My foe outstretchd beneath the tree.”  This poem is a bit overbalanced by the “poison apple” motif (which of course like evil or negative outcomes in other poetry and fiction is more “dramatic” and so gets more “airplay” than the good and the happy), but the first two lines contain the true moral of the story, not the “twisted” moral which is the subject of examination in this poem as it is contained in Blake’s “Songs of Experience.”  “I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end” is the happy ending of the poem, though it occurs at the beginning, and Blake gives us a “taste” of the poison of the apple festering in the speaker’s soul so that we are also “outstretchd beneath the tree” if we don’t see that.  Of course, we’ve probably all had situations in which we’d like gleefully to see a “foe” at a disadvantage, and temptation being what it is, I can’t deny that the negative part of the poem has a real force to it, but having written my share of poetic and literary broadsides about people who’ve offended me in some way or other, I can tell you that I generally prefer sharing anger straightforwardly with friends to letting resentment build up for months or years and getting even with persons who’ve become enemies instead of friends.  This is because focusing on anger and negative emotions I’ve felt toward enemies causes me to “taste the poison” again too, and I would far rather be “keeping my friendships in repair” than revisiting old quarrels (though quarrels are so very good for fiction and poetry that I am occasionally inconsistent).

Finally, the timing of friendship’s formation is an uncertain measure, more like a sea (and a boundless soul) than something from a checklist of characteristics.  As James Boswell said, “We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed.  As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”

The factors listed above are some of the things I would consider important when attempting to suggest what I think the soul of friendship is.  But there’s one more thing that I consider valuable, and that is that my friends (and many of you who respond to my writings, whether by this blogsite or by e-mail, are friends)–my friends are those who encourage me when they see me at my best, who may shake their heads privately at me when they see me at my worst but still bear with me, and who tell me what they think, even when I offend or irritate them.  They are people who are working at keeping their friendships in repair and who don’t plot to feed me poison apples, and they are worth loving for those features alone, though they have others equally endearing.  So this is my time to say “Thank you” to all of you who have participated in reading and/or commenting on my blog for the last six months, since July 4 when I started writing here on WordPress.com.  Thank you for being first willing readers then interested acquaintances, then finally friends who tell me what they’re up to and who also give me good reads on their own sites and in their own forums to keep me going.  I appreciate all your comments, and hope you will keep reading and continuing to “feed” the soul of friendship by keeping them coming!

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January 4, 2013 · 12:23 am

The love of death and the death of love, and how they are connected in one sad story.

I’m about to do something I don’t ordinarily do, and that is to write about real people.  Real people, that is, as opposed to characters based on real people.  For you see, I always like to protect the privacy and feelings of actual persons I know by soft-peddling, and disguising, and rewriting to cover up people’s identities.  It doesn’t seem fair, somehow, to put my own impressions about people and their vagaries down on paper for all the world to see when sometimes those same people don’t have an equal opportunity to respond about me.  And of course, I don’t want to give them the chance to respond about me, because I like to think that I am as sensitive as they are, and as likely to be hurt.  But now that years and years have elapsed since these people were in the same constellation of social stars (not movie stars, because we all have a tendency to believe that they in some degree deserve what they get, for putting themselves out there for everyone to see)–now that years have passed, and these people are doubtless doing other things perhaps nearly as foolish as what they once did, but with different people in tow, or perhaps some of them have learned how to do otherwise, it’s high time to comment on what I believe is the essence, philosophically speaking, of what drew them to each other, and what tore them apart.  That’s a promising start for a love story, isn’t it?  Telling you what’s going to happen before the ending comes.  But since what I’m concentrating on isn’t the drama or the plot or the setting, but the philosophical underpinnings of their connection, perhaps you will find that you don’t mind so much.  Consider it a free and edifying if not very exciting short story, if you like.  And if it keeps you from making similar mistakes, you can give me a mental footnote someday!

First of all, there was a young man, a man in his mid-twenties, who had read a few too many cranky old philosophers like Schopenhauer and who found them “romantic,” though he would never have used this expression to himself, because that would’ve been “sentimental.”  And if there was one thing this young man didn’t want to have a reputation for being, it was “sentimental.”  No, he was a hard thinker, to his own mind, and liked to pose a bit (more than a bit, actually) as a philosopher himself.  He was very fond of bringing up about Nietzsche, when lecturing (for he was a lecturer in a large university, a teaching assistant, in fact) that Nietzsche had had syphilis, and was crazed as well as inspired.  It’s not, of course, that no one needed to know that, because like all facts about authors and philosophers, it’s fair game.  It’s rather that he liked alerting his mostly youthful students to the facts of life, of which syphilis is certainly one, and that he liked to flirt with dangerous ideas, such as whether or not being crazed and inspired were actually the same thing.  Nor is it that he wanted anyone to think that he himself had syphilis (which in one light would explain his obsession with talking about it) but that he was himself inspired and just a bit (romantically) crazed was something he didn’t mind having people think, if they really insisted upon thinking about him, which it was certainly agreeable that they should.  It was even more unusual that Nietzsche should come up so often, because the young man–we’ll call him Walter–wasn’t a lecturer in philosophy, rather he was a teaching assistant in English.  The students had of course heard of Nietzsche in their philosophy classes, history classes, and psychology courses in passing.  But Walter’s students were tempted to titter after a few times of hearing quotes from Nietzsche applied to other texts:  “Oh man, here we go again,” about summed up their reaction.

Now, if there was one thing that Walter was in love with more than Nietzsche and syphilis, it was death.  He didn’t think of it as a dangerous thing to be in love with, because of course so many of the great authors were in love with it too, or gave the appearance of being.  The fact that they were great and he was small and insignificant by comparison didn’t occur to him, because of course when Walter read the great authors (aloud to his students, particularly), he participated in their greatness, became as great and as noble and as dark and depressed as they themselves were, and that was all to the good, because being in love with death made life worth living.  And there was an added feature of appeal:  it made Walter’s young wife Isobel angry with him when he quoted from the great depressives, and it made his young female students fall in love with him.  And those two things taken together were a heady combination!  Why, death was the ticket to fame and fortune and love and all those other things Walter sat in his carrel in the library and dreamed about when he was supposed to be marking papers.  It was Death personified who dictated a good number of those forbidding remarks and rejoinders Walter penned in black marker on the papers themselves, remarks and rejoinders that put his students in their respective places in the order in which Walter figured they understood about things that he himself valued, with Death at the top of the list and his least significant student at the bottom.

There was, however, one student who took Walter a little more seriously than the rest, and she (for it was a she) was determined to join him in his celebration of darkness and despair.  She even had a motive for her feelings, a genuine motive of the heartfelt sort which Walter lacked, for Walter was worshiping Death as a concept, and Ilse (we’ll call her Ilse) had a more emotional motive for putting Death in such high regard, and it was that Walter was already taken and not available for late-night coffee klatches and romantic (there’s that word again!) walks by the pond below the campus, and–but wait!  As it turns out, Walter was available for these things, only he observed a due amount of circumspection in making himself accessible to Ilse (or at least he thought he was circumspect.  The fact that I can tell you about this couple lets you know that they weren’t as circumspect and proper in public and private as they thought they were being, or no one else would ever have found out).

And finding out was of course what Isobel did too, because Walter, in the wallowing in despair which he foisted upon everyone included in the situation, talked a long time about Death and sadness and lack of enjoyment of life and more about Death, until finally Isobel flattered his ego enough to pry out of him exactly what was on his mind (which wasn’t really Ilse, though he pretended it was, but was in fact only Walter himself).

Ilse’s respect for Death came about only after much suffering and sorrowing and the realization that Walter wasn’t worth the psychic and emotional “paper” he was written on, whereas Death was a real thing, a real foe, something to be feared and fought off until it could be no longer fended away.  And that’s where the death of Love comes in.  Because Ilse, after having experienced the love of Death second-hand through Walter, now experienced the death of Love.  Which, now that I come to think about it, makes this a happy story after all, not a sad one, since it would’ve been far sadder to remain in love with Walter than to lose all interest in him, as Ilse, and later Isobel, to judge by their later courses of action, certainly did.

I’m sorry for having promised a sad story and having in fact delivered the very opposite, but since Ilse and Isobel are two happy people at this date and Walter is still alive (though still Walter), you’ll have to figure for yourself that if you want a sad story, you’re going to have to ask Walter for his version:  people who fall in deep love with Death demonstrably have little or no sense of humor.

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