You Are Part of My Existence… You Have Been in Every Line I Have Ever Read

04/14/2024 / Alexander Atkins

“You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since — on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”

From Charles Dickens’ 13th novel, Great Expectations, published in serial form from 1860 to 1861 and in book form as a three-volume set in 1861. In this excerpt from Chapter 44, the novel’s protagonist, an orphan named Pip, eloquently professes his love to Estella after she has informed him that she is marrying another man [Bentley Drummle], whom Pip considers a “mean, stupid brute.” She explains, “I am going to be married to him. The preparations for my marriage are making, and I shall be married soon… [After I am married, you] will get me out of your thoughts in a week.”

Dickens’ friend, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, an English writer and politician, read an early draft of the book and convinced Dickens to write a happier ending. In a letter to his biographer, Dickens explained, “You will be surprised to hear that I have changed the end of Great Expectations from and after Pip’s return to Joe’s… Bulwer, who has been, as I think you know, extraordinarily taken with the book, strongly urged it upon me, after reading the proofs, and supported his views with such good reasons that I have resolved to make the change. I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration.”

If the name Bulwer-Lytton sounds familiar, it is because San Jose State holds the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst opening sentence to a novel, inspired by Bulwer-Lytton’s famous opening line to one his novels, Paul Clifford, published in 1830. It begins with the infamous sentence: “It was a dark and stormy night.” In addition to that line, Bulwer-Lytton also coined several memorial phrases: “the pen is mightier than the sword,” “pursuit of the almighty dollar,” and “the great unwashed.”

There is no evidence to suggest that Bulwer-Lytton was actually subconsciously echoing the line from another famous work, The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas published in 1844. One of the final chapters begins with the line “C’etait une nuit orageuse et sombre,” which translated from the French means “It was a night stormy and dark.”

ENJOY THE BOOK. If you love reading Atkins Bookshelf, you will love reading the book — Serendipitous Discoveries from the Bookshelf. The beautifully-designed book (416 pages) is a celebration of literature, books, fascinating English words and phrases, inspiring quotations, literary trivia, and valuable life lessons. It’s the perfect gift for book lovers and word lovers.

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An Eloquent Testimony to the Love of Books and the Joy of Book Collecting

03/08/2024 / Alexander Atkins

alex atkins bookshelf books If you walk into any used or antiquarian bookstore and ask to be directed to their books-on-books section and don’t receive a puzzled look, you know you are in the right type of bookstore. Many book lovers and collectors seek out books on books and those that are most coveted and rare can command a very high price. Fortunately, there are hundreds of books on books that are readily accessible and affordable. I encountered one of these, albeit an older one, originally published in the 1971 by Clarkson Potter. The book by British bibliophile Eric Quayle is appropriately titled The Collector’s Book of Books that considers English literature from the perspective of the book collector, educating collectors and would-be collectors what to look for in a book.

It is a rather large book I discovered as I pulled it off the shelf and blew off the blanket of dust that had settled on its head text block, betraying years of what I call bibliohibernation — extended neglect or disuse. I opened the book and began reading the brilliant introduction filled with allusions to the glorious sight and smell of old books. If you are a book lover, Quayle’s eloquent testimony to the love of books and the joy of book collecting will surely resonate with you. The essay has so many great quotable lines; for example, “[Books] have become my faithful and trusted friends and the intimate companions of my everyday life.” Another one is a reference to English poet George Crabbe’s [1754-1832] magnificent poem, “The Library,” published in 1781. Quayle quotes this memorable line: “[Books are] the lasting mansions of the dead.”

As you read this, and you find yourself smiling in recognition, then you are undoubtedly a bibliophile.

From the Introduction to The Collector’s Book of Books by Eric Quayle:

“I am a bibliophile; an otherwise rational member of the community consumed by a love of books. It gives me pleasure to handle any printed work that has something important to say; but most of all I cherish rare editions, finely printed texts, beautifully illustrated books, and volumes scarce and unprocurable except by knowledgeable means.

The mute but articulate ranks of old leather bindings and time-mellowed spines, that climb in order of size from floor to ceiling in the study where I am now writing, exude a sense of ageless serenity and unruffled calm. Looking at the close-packed rows of octavos and duodecimos that top the polished oak shelves, the 18th-century quartos in their blind-stamped russia [leather] immediately below them, then down at the ponderous folios, secure behind their bevelled wooden-boards and coats of sprinkled calf, I am reminded of the decades that have merged into centuries since their original owners unpacked the parcels that brought them home. Now they are here with me, collected in years past from the dispersal of libraries that once knew them as freshly printed books, uncut and unopened (and sometimes for generations unread), waiting their first visit to the binder before the family embrace of book-plate and shelf-mark. They have stood unperturbed through war and disaster, peace and calm, quietly awaiting their next reading. A sense of security pervades old books. George Crabbe called them ‘The lasting mansions of the dead’ [a line from the poem “The Library“]. They have become my faithful and trusted friends and the intimate companions of my everyday life. To part with any one of them disturbs me: to lose them all would translate me to a barren existence and a life lacking its chief intellectual comfort and most relaxing pleasure.

Book-collecting absorbs your interest to an extent that relegates many of the other balms of human existence to second place. Before long you find yourself snatching the illicit half-hour from more mundane concerns, business and domestic, to indulge a passion that the uninitiated deride. For the book lover, once he surrenders to the fascination his hobby exerts over him, begins to resent every leisure hour not devoted to its demands. It becomes an affaire de coeur [an affair of the heart] that deepens with each passing year.

The gradual acquisition of a well-chosen library of first and other important editions of English literature, or in the fields of science or the arts, gives a satisfaction that is difficult to equal in any other sphere. The books offered on the shelves and in the catalogues of antiquarian booksellers assume a personality of their own. You begin to look on certain (long-dead) authors as close friends, and on the binding styles of favorite publishing houses with affection. You gradually become the victim of the least vicious of hobbies, and of a pastime that is financially most rewarding.

Book-collecting need not be only a rich man’s diversion, or a lucrative investment for those in the six-figure bracket. Everyone, no matter what his income, can have at least a shelf or two of personal favorites in the style of binding in which their original writers would themselves have handled the volumes they created. Not everyone can afford to possess a fine library of several thousand books, but there are still many authors whose first editions can be picked up for small sums, and many subjects in which the pioneer collector can acquire all the key volumes before his rivals pick up the trail.

There is no quicker way to be transported through time than by a half-remembered scent or odor. I know all my best-loved books by their smell, that exciting aroma of old paper, book-binder’s glue, and printer’s ink. I have only to nose between their leaves for memories to come tumbling back of their discovery in a favorite old bookshop. The attic of a dead uncle, filled with cobwebs, tea-chests, and parcelled three-deckers; a damp cellar in Ireland with Dickens in parts; the red-winery polish of mahogany shelves in a manor-house library that I saved from the auctioneer’s hammer to establish the background to a specialist part of my present collection; the locations of my first meeting with strange books are remembered as soon as I open any one of them. Dozens were purchased with money that should have been thriftily squandered on the mundane necessities of our 20th-century existence. Some had to be smuggled into my study (one particularly bulky consignment even disappearing for a time through a trap-door leet for inspection purposes into the floorboards). But ‘high-spots’ and rare ephemera so lovingly clothed in effusive adjectives in the catalogues they receive. By his discoveries in forgotten or unexplored territory he may add something worth while to our knowledge of the past and by doing so he will also add to the sum total of human research and endeavor.

This is one of the several ways in which the book-collector and/or bibliophile can influence literary taste. His library reflects his own individual personality. What one man will seek avidly in every bookshop in the land, crouching over hastily opened catalogues while his breakfast cools on the plate, will leave another completely unmoved. Show a collector of 18th-century poetry an almost complete set of the first editions of Charles Dickens in the original cloth, or Ernest Hemingway, or W. H. Ainsworth, or Benjamin Franklin, or any literary figure, great or small, whose work lies outside the magic and esoteric circle of poets from the reign of Queen Anne (give or take a few years) to that of the turn of the century, and he will have difficulty in evincing any but polite interest. It is rather like displaying to a collector of early motoring books a library devoted solely to the works of the restoration dramatists.

This is one of the many aspects that have attracted me to the hobby of book-collecting: the field is so wide and there are so many facets to examine and by-ways to explore that you never have a chance to lose interest. As one door closes another opens. When an author you have been quietly collecting for many years is re-discovered by the critics, you can sit back and relax, fighting any tendency to say ‘I told you so!’ Your perception will pay handsome financial dividends as your fellow bibliophiles seek out what you left and then pester you for crumbs. But once your one-time favorite is promoted to a literary high-spot, with all that means in hard cash, then it is time to move on. Either by collecting in a later century — as I did with early children’s books when the Georgian era was priced out of my market — or by seeking another unknown name of intrinsic worth…

Good books are pleasurable things, whatever they cost. But much of the enjoyment in book-collecting is derived from steering one’s own course. For then you pit your taste and knowledge against the rest of the world, and your library will mirror your own identity, not that of the professional bookseller who made it for you.”

If you enjoyed reading this essay, please share it with a book lover you know. Quayle’s message should reach a wider audience.

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Every Word Was Once a Poem… Language is Fossil Poetry

01/09/2024 / Alexander Atkins

“Every word was once a poem…. The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.”

From the essay “The Poet” published in 1844 by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). Emerson is one of the most quoted American writers — and for good reason. “If Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton and Franklin are our Founding Fathers, Ralph Waldo Emerson is our Founding Thinker,” writes Emerson scholar Richard Geldard. “Born in 1803 in Boston, Emerson became in his lifetime America’s seer and prophet. His collected works, including poems, essays, and extensive journals not only inspired such notable figures as Henry David Thoreau, William James, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and numerous nineteenth and twentieth century poets, painters, and musicians, but also a wide readership of ordinary Americans who found in Emerson a teacher of profound depth and idealism… Emerson was the conscience of his nation and a man of great moral courage.”

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People’s Opinions Make Them Comfortable, Truth is a Secondary Consideration

11/19/2023 / Alexander Atkins

“If you wish to become a philosopher, the first thing to realize is that most people go through life with a whole world of beliefs that have no sort of rational justification, and that one man’s world of beliefs is apt to be incompatible with another man’s, so that they cannot both be right. People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people, is a secondary consideration.”

From The Art of Philosophizing and other Essays (1942) by British mathematician, philosopher, public intellectual, and humanitarian Bertrand Russell (1872-1970. Russell is best known for his seminal work Principia Mathematica that attempted to reduce all of mathematics to logic. He wrote extensively — more than 60 books and 2,000 articles — on many topics, influencing not only mathematics, but a variety of fields: philosophy, linguistics, epistemology, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, education, and politics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1950 in recognition of “his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.”

Russell believed that confession of doubt was the beginning of philosophy. In a lecture titled “Free Thought and Official Propaganda” (1922), Russell argued that all human knowledge did not represent the absolute truth, leaving room for doubt. He wrote: “None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. These methods are practiced in science, and have built up the body of scientific knowledge. Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery; nevertheless, it is near enough to the truth to serve for most practical purposes, though not for all. In science, where alone something approximating to genuine knowledge is to be found, men’s attitude is tentative and full of doubt.”

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A Delightful Collection of Quotes about Books and Libraries

09/13/202309/12/2023 / Alexander Atkins

alex atkins bookshelf books I recently came across a fascinating three-volume work titled Hours in a Library published in 1874 by Leslie Stephen (1832-1904). Stephen was a British author, critic, historian, and early humanist activist. He is not as well-known as his daughter, Virginia Woolf, recognized as one of the leading modernist 20th-century writers, who introduced stream of consciousness as a form of storytelling and founded the highly influential Bloomsbury Group. Hours in a Library is a brilliant collection of critical essays on the work of Charlotte Bronte, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Daniel Defoe, George Elliot, Charles Kingsley, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, and several other British writers. The 3-volume set has been republished several times, most recently by the Folio Society in 1991. Volume 1 contains a special treat for bibliophiles — a delightful collection of quotes about books and libraries from notable authors from Bacon to Shakespeare. The seven-page section titled “Opinions of Authors” follows the table of contents. Enjoy these eloquent testimonials to the printed word.

OPINIONS OF AUTHORS

Libraries are as the shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed. (Bacon, Advancement of Leaming)

We visit at the shrine, drink in some measure of the inspiration, and cannot easily breathe in other air less pure, accustomed to immortal fruits. (Hazlitt’s Plain Speaker)

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to the Bodleian were reposing here as in some dormitory or middle state. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew around the happy orchard. (Charles Lamb, Oxford in the Long Vacation)

My neighbours trunk me often alone, and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes, each of whom communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs quite as intelligibly as any person living can do by uttering of words; and with a motion of my hand I can bring them as near to me as I please; I handle them as I like; they never complain of ill-usage; and when dismissed from my presence, though ever so abruptly, take no offence. (Sterne, Letters)

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes. (Emerson, Books, Society, and Solitude)

Nothing is pleasanter than exploring in a library. (Landor, Pericles and Aspasia)

I never come into a library (saith Heinsius) but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance and melancholy herself; and in the very lap of eternity, among so many divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit and sweet content that I pity all our great ones and rich men that know not their happiness. (Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy)

I do not know that I am happiest when alone; but this I am sure of, that I am never long even in the society of her I love without a yearning for the company of my lamp and my utterly confused and tumbled-over library. (Byron, Moore’s Life)

Montesquieu used to say that he had never known a pain or a distress which he could not soothe by half an hour of a good book. (John Morley, On Popular Culture)

There is no truer word than that of Solomon: ‘There is no end of making books’; the sight of a great library verifies it; there is no end — indeed, it were pity there should be. (Bishop Hall)

You that are genuine Athenians, devour with a golden Epicurism the arts and sciences, the spirits and extractions of authors. (Culverwell, Light of Nature)

He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts. (Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost)

I have wondered at the patience of the antediluvians; their libraries were insufficiently furnished; how then could seven or eight hundred years of life be supportable? (Cowper, Life and Letters by Southey)

Unconfused Babel of all tongues! which e’er
The mighty linguist Fame or Time the mighty traveller,
That could speak or this could hear!
Majestic monument and pyramid!
Where still the shapes of parted souls abide Embalmed in verse; exalted souls which now
Enjoy those arts they wooed so well below, Which now all wonders plainly see
That have been, are, or are to be In the mysterious Library,
The beatific Bodley of the Deity!
(Cowley, Ode on the Bodleian)

This to a structure led well known to fame,
And called, ‘The Monument of Vanished Minds,’
Where when they thought they saw in well sought books
The assembled souls of all that men thought wise,
It bred such awful reverence in their looks,
As if they saw the buried writers rise.
Such heaps of written thought; gold ofthe dead,
Which Time does still disperse but not devour,
Made them presume all was fromdeluge freed
Which long-lived authors writ ere Noah’s shower.
(Davenant, Gondibert)

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. (Milton, Areopagitica)

Nor is there any paternal fondness which seems to savour less of absolute instinct, and which may be so well reconciled to worldly wisdom, as this of authors for their books. These children may most truly be called the riches of their father, and many of them have with true filial piety fed their parent in his old age; so that not only the affection but the interest of the author may be highly injured by those slanderers whose poisonous breath brings his book to an untimely end. (Fielding, Tom Jones)

We whom the world is pleased to honour with the title of modem authors should never have been able to compass our great design of everlasting remembrance and never-dying fame if our endeavours had not been so highly serviceable to the general good of mankind. (Swift, Tale of a Tub)

A good library always makes me melancholy, where the best author is as much squeezed and as obscure as a porter at a coronation. (Swift)

In my youth I never entered a great library but my predominant feeling was one of pain and disturbance of mind — not much unlike that which drew tears from Xerxes on viewing his immense army, and reflecting that in one hundred years not one soul would remain alive. To me, with respect to books, the same effect would be brought about by my own death. Here, said I, are one hundred thousand books, the worst of them capable of giving me some instruction and pleasure; and before I can have had time to extract the honey from one twentieth of this hive in all likelihood I shall be summoned away. (DeQuincey, Letter to a Young Man)

A man may be judged by his library. (Bentham)

I ever look upon a library with the reverence of a temple. (Evelyn, to Wotton)

‘Father, I should like to learn to make gold.’ ‘And what would’st thou do if thou could’st make it?’ ‘Why, I would build a great house and fill it with books.’- (Southey, Doctor)

What would you have more? A wife? That is none of the indispensable requisites of life. Books? That is one of them, and I have more than I can use. (David Hume, Burton’s ‘Life.’

Talk of the happiness of getting a great prize in the lottery! What is that to opening a box of books? The joy upon lifting up the cover must be something like that which we shall feel when Peter the porter opens the door upstairs, and says, ‘Please to walk in, Sir.’ (Southey, Life)

I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading. (Macaulay)

Our books… do not our hearts hug them, and quiet themselves in them even more than in God? (Baxter’s Saint’s Rest.

It is our duty to live among books. (Newman, Tracts for the Times, No. 2)

What lovely things books are! (Buckle, Life by Huth)

Whether the collected wisdom of all ages and nations be not found in books? (Berkeley, Querist)

Read we must, be writers ever so indifferent. (Shaftesbury, Characteristics)

It’s mighty hard to write nowadays without getting something or other worth listening to into your essay or your volume. The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow. (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Poet at the Breakfast Table)

I adopted the tolerating measure of the elder Pliny — ‘nullum esse librum tam malum ut non in aliqua parte prodesset.’ [Translated from Latin: “no book is so bad that nothing good can be had from some part of it.”] (Gibbon, Autobiography)

A book’s a book, although there’s nothing in’t. (Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers)

While you converse with lords and dukes,
I have their betters here, my books;
Fixed in an elbow chair at ease
I choose companions as I please.
I’d rather have one single shelf
Than all my friends, except yourself.
For, after all that can be said,
Our best companions are the dead.
(Sheridan to Swift)

We often hear of people who will descend to any servility, submit to any insult for the sake of getting themselves or their children into what is euphemistically called good society. Did it ever occur to them that there is a select society of all the centuries to which they and theirs can be admitted for the asking? (Lowell, Speech at Chelsea)

On all sides are we not driven to the conclusion that of all things which men can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books? For indeed, is it not verily the highest act of man’s faculty that produces a book? It is the thought of man. The true thaumaturgio virtue by which man marks all things whatever. All that he does and brings to pass is the vesture of a book. (Carlyle, Hero Worship)

Yet it is just
That hero in memory of all books which lay
Their sure foundations in the heart of man,
That I should here assert their rights, assert
Their honours, and should, once for all, pronounce
Their benediction, speak of them as powers
For ever to bo hallowed; only less
For what we are and what we may become
Than Nature’s self, which is the breath of God
Or His pure word by miracle revealed.
(Wordsworth, Prelude)

Take me to some lofty room,
Lighted from the western sky.
Where no glare dispels the gloom,
Till tho golden eve is nigh;
Where the works of searching thought,
Chosen books, may still impart
What the wise of old have taught,
What has tried the meek of heart;
Books in long dead tongues that stirred
Loving hearts in other climes;
Telling to my eyes, unheard.
Glorious deeds of olden times:
Books that purify the thought,
Spirits of the learned dead.
Teachers of the little taught,
Comforters whon friends are fled.
(Barnes, Poems of Rural Life)

A library is like a butcher’s shop ; it contains plenty of meat, but it is all raw; no person living can find a meal in it till some good cook comes along and says, “Sir, I see by your looks that you are hungry; I know your taste; be patient for a moment and you shall be satisfied that you have an excellent appetite!” (G. Ellis, Lockhart’s Scott)

A library is itself a cheap university. (H. Sidgwick, Political Economy).

0 such a life as he resolved to live
Once he had mastered all that books can give!
(Browning)

I will bury myself in my books and the devil may pipe to his own. (Tennyson)

Words! words! words! (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

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Amusing Musings on Language: 2023

08/16/202308/17/2023 / Alexander Atkins / Leave a comment

As word lover Richard Lederer pointed out in one of his books, the English language is crazy. Lederer observes, “to explore the paradoxes and vagaries of English, we find that hot dogs can be cold, darkrooms can be lit, homework can be done in school, nightmares can take place in broad daylight while morning sickness and daydreaming can take place at night, tomboys are girls and midwives can be men, hours — especially happy hours and rush hours — often last longer than sixty minutes, quicksand works very slowly, boxing rings are square, silverware and glasses can be made of plastic and tablecloths of paper… and most bathrooms don’t have any baths in them.” You get the idea.

Lederer’s book inspired Josh White Jr.’s song “English is Crazy” (most people are familiar with folk singer Pete Seeger’s version, played on a banjo). Of course, Lederer’s waggish observations are not lost on comedians who mine the vast English lexicon for words and phrases that make you scratch your head and utter “WTF.” Two of the most brilliant comedians who placed the English language under the comedy microscope are George Carlin and Stephen Wright. Here are some of the most amusing musings on the English language.

How can a fat chance and slim chance be the same thing?

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, “Where is the self-help section?” She said that if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

If a writer writes, does a finger fing?

If a turtle loses its shell is it naked or homeless?

Why is it that “take out” has three radically different meanings — food, dating, and murder?

If con is the opposite of pro, is congress the opposite of progress?

If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth beeth?

If flying is so safe, why is the airport called “terminal”?

If people can have triplets and quadruplets why not singlets and doublets?

If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?

Why don’t hamburgers contain ham?

If the plural of mouse is mice, why isn’t the plural of house hice?

I went to a restaurant that “serves breakfast at any time” so I ordered French toast during the Renaissance.

Is Atheism a non-prophet organization?

Why does an alarm clock go off by going on?

Is it true that cannibals don’t eat clowns because they taste funny?

Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do “practice?”

Why do humans have noses that run but feet that smell?

I saw a sign that said “Coming soon — a 24-hour restaurant.” Why would they open and close it so quickly?

I went to a general store. They wouldn’t let me buy anything specifically.

The reason the mainstream is thought of as a stream is because of its shallowness.

Why is a wise man the opposite of a wise guy?

What’s another word for thesaurus?

Why is it good when something is described as “sick”?

Why are they called apartments when they are all stuck together?

I always wanted to be a somebody… perhaps I should have been more specific.

Why do people recite at a play and play at a recital?

Why are boxing rings square?

If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?

Why do we drive on a parkway but park in a driveway?

Why is it that night falls but never breaks and day breaks but never falls?

In school, every period ends with a bell. Every sentence ends with a period. Every crime ends with a sentence.

Why is “abbreviated” such a long word?

Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?

Why do we ship by truck, but send cargo by ship?

Why is the time of day with the slowest traffic called rush hour?

Why isn’t phonetics spelled phonetically?

Would a fly that loses its wings be called a “walk?”

If you can wave a fan, and you can wave a club, can you wave a fan club?

Read related posts: The English Language is Crazy

The Wisdom of Steven Wright
The Wisdom of George Carlin
Top Ten Puns

For further reading: Brain Droppings by George Carlin
Crazy English: The Ultimate Joy Ride Through Our Languageby Richard Lederer
Lederer on Language: A Celebration of English, Good Grammar, and Wordplay by Richard Lederer

What Qualities Should a Writer Have?

07/23/2023 / Alexander Atkins

“The complete novelist would come into the world with a catalog of qualities like this. He would own the concentration of a Trappist monk, the organizational ability of a Prussian field marshal, the insight into human relations of a Viennese psychologist, the discipline of a man who prints the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin, the exquisite sense of timing of an Olympic gymnast, and by the way, a natural instinct and flair for exceptional use of language.”

Excerpt from an interview with American author Leon Uris in U.S . News & World Report, 1986. Despite being a high school dropout and failing English three times, Uris went on to become a successful author of historical fiction. His best known works are Exodus (1958) and Trinity (1976), both of which were international bestsellers.

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The Wisdom of Edgar Allan Poe

06/02/2023 / Alexander Atkins

alex atkins bookshelf wisdom Edgar Allan Poe is recognized as not only the master of the morbid and the macabre, but also as a masterful short story writer and the inventor of the detective genre. But he also wrote poetry, essays, letters, and nonfiction. (As an aside, the story of Poe’s death is truly puzzling — as if lifted right out of one of his short stories. More than 160 years later, Poe’s death remains one of the most mysterious deaths in literary history. You can read about here.) Recently, the editors of Poe Knows: A Miscellany of Macabre Musings, reviewed the Poe canon to present some of his best musings. In the introduction, they wrote, “Poe was a master of the bon mot… This volume collects more than 200 quotes, aphorisms, and Poesque displays of verbal virtuosity, culled from his [work]… If the quotes compiled for this volume show anything, it is the scope of Poe’s intellect and the brilliance with which he commented on everything from the character of genius to the complexity of coincidence, the speciousness of spirituality, and the perversity of human nature.” Here some notable musings from the master:

That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful. (from The Philosophy of Composition)

Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design. (from Mesmeric Revelation)

The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? (From The Premature Burial)

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream. (From Marginalia)

In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind. (From Berenice)

There are chords in the hearts of most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. (From the Masque of the Red Death)

Near neighbors are seldom friends. (From Metzengerstein)

Most writers — poets in especial — prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy. (From The Philosophy of Composition)

Upon mankind at large the events of very early existence rarely leave in mature age any definite impression. (From William Wilson)

It is a trait in the perversity of human nature to reject the obvious and the ready, for the far-distant and equivocal. (From Loss of Breath)

To the substance of terror he was sufficiently alive, but of its shadows he had no apprehension. (From The Sphinx)

What you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses (From The Tell-Tale Heart)

Poetry and truth are one. (From Eureka)

I make no exception, even in Dante’s favor — the only thing well said of Purgatory, is that a man may go farther and fare worse. (From Marginalia)

The greater amount of truth is impulsively uttered; thus the greater amount is spoken, not written. (From Marginalia)

The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not every thing that should be said. (From Marginalia)

No thought can perish, so no act is without infinite result. (From The Power of Words)

In the few furrows upon his check I read the fables of sorrow, and weariness, and disgust with mankind, and a longing after solitude. (From Silence — A Fable)

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Adventures in Rhetoric: Gish Gallop and the Trump Torrent

05/23/202305/23/2023 / Alexander Atkins / Leave a comment

Although most rhetorical terms are based on Greek words (eg, aphaeresis, anabasis, catachresis, and dieresis), a few are eponymous — like the Gish gallop. The Gish gallop is a rhetorical device utilized in a debate when the speaker uses a rapid-fire approach, presenting a torrent of arguments (regardless of their strength or accuracy) and changing topics quickly to overwhelm an opponent, thus preventing an effective rebuttal of the arguments. The term was coined in 1994 by Eugenie Carol Scott (born 1945), a physical anthropologist and executive director of the National Center for Science Education. Scott named the term after Duane Gish (born 1921), a biochemist and leading member of the creationist movement that rejects scientific explanations (eg, Big Bang Theory, evolution) for the origination and development of the universe, the planet, and all life forms. Creationists believe that the universe and all life forms were created by God, consistent with a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis, the first book in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament). Although an entire library can filled with books about the history of the Bible, most Biblical scholars believe that the Book of Genesis was an interweaving of fragmentary texts from three separate authors (Yahwist: 950 BC; Elohist: 900-750 BC; and Priestly: 5 BC) drawing on creation myths passed on through generations by oral tradition that began as early as 1,500 BC. These legends are hardly scientific or historical fact — they are age-old myths that were created by people from ancient civilizations (eg, the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Persians) to explain some of the world’s mysteries. But we digress…

Journalists keenly noted that Gish relished the confrontations of formal debates with well-known evolutionary biologists at college campuses because he would eschew formal debate principles and consistently overwhelm his opponents with the Gish gallop. Moreover, creationists recruited as many sympathetic students to create a friendly, rally-type audience for Gish to frustrate and demoralize his opponents. In an essay titled, “Debates and Globetrotters” (July 7, 1994), Scott wrote: “Now, there are ways to have a formal debate that actually teaches the audience something about science, or evolution, and that has the potential to expose creation science for the junk it is. This is to have a narrowly-focused exchange in which the debaters deal with a limited number of topics. Instead of the ‘Gish Gallop’ format of most debates where the creationist is allowed to run on for 45 minutes or an hour, spewing forth torrents of error that the evolutionist hasn’t a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate, the debaters have limited topics and limited time. For example, the creationist has 10 minutes to discuss a topic on which creationists and evolutionists disagree (intermediate forms, the nature of science [with or without the supernatural], the 2nd law of thermodynamics disproves evolution, the inadequacy of mutation and selection to produce new “kinds”, etc.) The evolutionist then has a 5 minute rebuttal, followed by a 2 minute reprise from the creationist. Next, the evolutionist takes 10 minutes to discuss an agreed-upon issue, with the creationist taking the next five minutes, and this time the evolutionist gets the final 2 minute follow-up.”

If you watched CNN’s Town Hall (New Hampshure) with former President Trump on May 11, 2023, you had a first-row seat into the master of the Gish gallup. During the 70-minute broadcast, Trump unleashed a torrent of lies, half-truths, disinformation, insults, and boasts — egged on by an adoring and cheering audience on stage and encouraging advisors backstage. Axios reported, “Backstage during the first commercial break, Trump adviser Jason Miller — as if psyching up a boxer in his corner or egging on a bully — showed Trump moments-old tweets from Democrats blasting CNN and saying Trump was winning… Adviser’s advice to Trump in break: Keep doing what you’re doing.” CNN’s host, Kaitlan Collins, who tried to factcheck him in real time in front of a hostile audience, was overwhelmed, and judging by the expression on her face, clearly frustrated.

Critics of the broadcast were not kind, viewing the Town Hall as a disaster for the network and the country. CNN’s media reporter, Oliver Darcy, wrote: [It was] hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN… Trump frequently ignored or spoke over Collins throughout the evening as he unleashed a firehose of disinformation upon the country, which a sizable swath of the GOP continues to believe. A professional lie machine, Trump fired off falsehoods at a rapid clip [textbook example of Gish gallop!] while using his bluster to overwhelm Collins, stealing command of the stage at some points of the town hall.” Linda Qiu, a journalist for The New York Times, wrote: “Former President Donald J. Trump almost immediately began citing a litany of falsehoods Wednesday night during a town hall-style meeting in New Hampshire broadcast on CNN.”

In addition to a wide range of criticism about the disastrous Town Hall from American journalists and media pundits — British journalists were also alarmed. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly wrote: “CNN bosses have defended their decision to host a primetime town hall with Donald Trump, after triggering widespread outrage by allowing the former president to spout lies and disinformation on subjects from sexual assault to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.”

Given this extraordinary performance, the term Gish gallop should be updated with a synonym that is truly fitting: the Trump torrent. Although Scott was clearly going for alliteration, the metaphor — the galloping of lies — is not as powerful or evocative as a torrent of lies. Perhaps this term gets some traction during the 2024 Presidential election.

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For further reading:
http://www.britannica.com/topic/Genesis-Old-Testament
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis
bigthink.com/thinking/how-old-is-the-bible/
http://www.cnn.com/2023/05/11/media/cnn-town-hall-donald-trump-reliable-sources/index.html
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/may/11/cnn-chris-licht-trump-town-hall
http://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/10/us/politics/trump-cnn-town-hall-fact-check.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/debating/globetrotters.html

The Best Graduation Advice: 2023

05/11/202305/11/2023 / Alexander Atkins

alex atkins bookshelf quotations It’s that time of year when excited graduates don their cap and gown and patiently sit on folding chairs on an expansive lawn to listen to the sage advice of the guest speaker invited to their commencement ceremony. Book publishers are very aware of this annual event and publish books that they hope will be purchased as keepsakes of graduates’ academic milestone. Although most books in this category contain complete commencement speeches or long excerpts, Clarkson Potter took a different approach with their recent book, Carpe Every Diem: The Best Graduation Advice from More Than 100 Commencement Speeches. The beautifully-designed, small-format book contains 100 quotations and short passages from speeches of famous academics, actors, athletes, authors, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, poets, politicians, and poets. The book poses the question: “Okay, you’ve graduated. Commencement is over. But how will the rest of your life commence? I should note: advice from real people should be truly cherished because it is only a matter of time when commencement speeches will be written by ChatGPT. Without further ado, here are some pearls of wisdom from true mortals:

Michael Dell: “As you start your journey, the first thing you should do is throw away that store-bought map and begin to draw your own.”

George Saunders: “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded… sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly… As a goal in life… Try to be kinder.”

Toni Morrison: “You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human without wealth. What it feels to be human without domination over others, without reckless arrogance, without fear of others unlike you, without rotating, rehearsing, and reinventing the hatreds you learned in the sandbox. And even though you don’t have complete control over the narrative… you could nevertheless create it.”

Anna Quindlen: “Don’t ever confuse the two: your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “Life is short really means do something… Life is short really means have a purpose. And purpose does not need to be grand. I think that the smaller the purpose, the more meaningful. To be kind. To have empathy. To avoid sanctimony. To think of the humanity of other people — to try.

Steve Jobs: “Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions down out your own inner voice.”

Billy Collins: “The corollary to carpe diem is gratitude, gratitude for simply being alive, for having a day to seize.”

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How To Read and Recognize a Great Book

04/13/2023 / Alexander Atkins

alex atkins bookshelf books “The method I should advise in reading great books is a simple one. I should try, first of all, not to be awed by their greatness. Then I should read without any other preparation than life has given me-I should open the pages and find out how much they mean to me. If I found my experience reflected in some parts of the book and not in others, I shouldn’t worry about those blind spots. They may be the fault of the book in those places-it may be out of date. But it is more prudent of me to suppose, what is just as likely, that my own experience is perhaps a little thin in the regions those parts of the book dealt with. To find out which is so, I should read the book a second time, and a third. Whether or not the repeated readings clear up the difficult pages, they will show me new meanings in the part I already understand.

When we encounter these dead spots in books sup posed to be masterpieces, and when we are humble enough to explain them by some insufficiency in ourselves, the impulse is to go for help to other books, to works of criticism. It is much more profitable to go directly to life. I won’t say that no aid can be had from other people; I couldn’t believe that and keep on teaching literature, or even write these papers. But the best teachers of literature, in my opinion, try to suggest the experience which such passages are designed to reflect; they remind their hearers of experience mislaid for the moment; they can only remind-they can’t impart it. We do as much for each other, far from classrooms, whenever your casual enthusiasms open my eyes to a beauty in art or in nature which I overlooked, but which I am ready to admire. Sometimes I ask a student in class to tell me the plot of the book we are about to discuss. I have never listened to an honest summary of that elementary sort without learning something new about the story; I have seen it now through another person’s life. In fact, there’s no better way to measure personality than to ask for the outline of a story you know well. But most of this experimenting we can do on ourselves. We can c1verhaul our experience, to find the material needed to understand the book; we can open our eyes to life about us, and find the material there. It is fatal to suppose the great writer was too wise or too profound for us ever to understand him; to think of art so is not to praise but to murder it, for the next step after that tribute will be neglect of the masterpiece.

It is advisable to sample as many of the great books as we can, for the first ones we come to may not be those which reflect us most completely. But once we have found our author, we have only to read him over and over, and after a while to read out from him, into the authors who seem kindred spirits. When the reader has found himself in two great authors, he is fairly launched.

But the books should be read over and over. Until have discovered that certain books grow with our maturing experience and other books do not, we have not learned how to distinguish a great book from a book.”

From The Delight of Great Books (1928) by John Erskine (1879-1951). Erskine was an English professor at Columbia University, where he developed the General Honors Course focused on the classics of Western literature, later becoming “Masterworks of Western Literature.” This course was later taught by Mark Van Doren and Mortimer Adler. Their work on teaching this course over many years inspired them to develop the Great Books of the Western World program and the Great Books Foundation. Years later, Mortimer Adler taught the course at the University of Chicago. Alder collaborated with Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago to develop The Great Books of the Western World. The set of books was first published as a 54-volume set in 1952 by Encyclopedia Britannica. The second edition published in 1960 contained 60 volumes. The criteria for inclusion in the Great Books set was threefold: (1) the book must be relevant to the present; (2) the book must be rewarding to read and re-read; (3) it must be part of the “great conversation about the great ideas.” At a publication event in 1952, Hutchins explained the value of the Great Books: “This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind.”

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Conversation: The Most Gratifying Response to Literary Creation

02/22/2023 / Alexander Atkins

“Reading is a privileged pleasure because each of us enjoys it, quite complexly, in ways not replicable by anyone else. But there is enough structural common ground in the text itself so that we can talk to each other, even sometimes persuade each other, about what we read: and that many-voiced conversation, with which, thankfully, we shall never have done, is one of the most gratifying responses to literary creation, second only to reading itself.”

From The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (1989) by Robert Alter. Alter is a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at U.C. Berkeley. Alter is a world-renown scholar of the Hebrew Bible, having published 23 books, including many critically-acclaimed translations, including The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (2018) and The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (2004). His work, The Art of Biblical Narrative won the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought in 2009. Another popular work is The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987) that is frequently assigned in college literature courses.

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Why Humans are Poorer than the Bees

02/19/202302/20/2023 / Alexander Atkins

alex atkins bookshelf wisdom “In Tibet we say that many illness can be cured by the one medicine of love and compassion. These qualities are the ultimate source of human happiness, and need for them lies at the very core of our being. Unfortunately, love and compassion have been omitted from too many spheres of social interaction for too long. Usually confined to family and home, their practice in public life is considered impractical, even naive. This is tragic. In my view point, the practice of compassion is not just a symptom of unrealistic idealism but the most effective way to pursue the best interest of others as well as our own. The more we — as a nation, a group or as individuals – depend upon others, the more it is in our own best interests to ensure their well-being.

Practicing altruism is the real source of compromise and cooperation; merely recognizing our need for harmony is not enough. A mind committed to compassion is like an overflowing reservoir — a constant source of energy, determination and kindness. This is like a seed; when cultivated, gives rise to many other good qualities, such as forgiveness, tolerance, inner strength and the confidence to overcome fear and insecurity. The compassionate mind is like an elixir; it is capable of transforming bad situation into beneficial ones. Therefore, we should not limit our expressions of love and compassion to our family and friends. Nor is the compassion only the responsibility of clergy, health care and social workers. It is the necessary business of every part of the human community.

Whether a conflict lies in the field of politics, business or religion, an altruistic approach is frequently the sole means of resolving it. Sometimes the very concepts we use to meditate a dispute are themselves the cause of the problem. At such times, when a resolution seems impossible, both sides should recall the basic human nature that unites them. This will help break the impasse and, in the long run, make it easier for everyone to attain their goal. Although neither side may be fully satisfied, if both make concessions, at the very least, the danger of further conflict will be averted. We all know that this form of compromise is the most effective way of solving problems – why, then, do we not use it more often?

When I consider the lack of cooperation in human society, I can only conclude that it stems from ignorance of our interdependent nature. I am often moved by the example of small insects, such as bees. The laws of nature dictate that bees work together in order to survive. As a result, they possess an instinctive sense of social responsibility. They have no constitution, laws, police, religion or moral training, but because of their nature they labour faithfully together. Occasionally they may fight, but in general the whole colony survives on the basis of cooperation. Human beings, on the other hand, have constitutions, vast legal systems and police forces; we have religion, remarkable intelligence and a heart with great capacity to love. But despite our many extraordinary qualities, in actual practice we lag behind those small insects; in some ways, I feel we are poorer than the bees…

To me, it is clear: a genuine sense of responsibility can result only if we develop compassion. Only a spontaneous feeling of empathy for others can really motivate us to act on their behalf.”

Excerpt from The Global Community and the Need for Universal Responsibility (2015) by The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. The excerpt also appears in A Conversation with The Dalai Lama on Money, Politics, and Life As It Could Be (2016) by The Dalai Lama with Fabien Ouaki. In 1989, The Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for advocating peaceful solutions based upon tolerance and mutual respect in order to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of his people. The Dalai Lama has developed his philosophy of peace from a great reverence for all things living and upon the concept of universal responsibility embracing all mankind as well as nature… The Dalai Lama has come forward with constructive and forward-looking proposals for the solution of international conflicts, human rights issues, and global environmental problems.”

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For further reading: http://www.dalailama.com/messages/world-peace/the-medicine-of-altruism

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Famous Misquotations: Don’t Cry Because It’s Over; Smile Because It Happened

01/27/202301/27/2023 / Alexander Atkins

If you have attended any event that celebrates an important milestone, like a graduation or retirement, you have heard someone say: “And like Dr. Seuss said, ‘Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.'” And like many memorable quotations, this is found on all kinds of merchandise: posters, coffee mugs, t-shirts, and so forth. But like many quotes found on the internet, there is absolutely no evidence that Dr. Seuss (the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel) wrote it. No, he did not write that. Nor did the Cat in the Hat. He did not say it here or there. He did not say it anywhere. Some websites attribute the quote to Gabriel Garcia Marques or Anonymous. So which is correct? Let me welcome you into the classroom of Famous Misquotations 101, where we will seek enlightenment.

Garson O’Toole, better known as the Quote Investigator and author of the fascinating book, Hemingway Didn’t Say That (2017) joins forces with another quote investigator, Barry Popik, to discover that the actual source of this quotation is a variant of two lines from a poem by German poet Ludwig Jacobowski (1868-1900). Jacobowski lived and worked for most of his life in Berlin. He edited a local newspaper and wrote several volumes of poetry and two novels. The poem that is the focus of our attention is titled “Bright Days” (or “Radiant Days”), published in the August 1899 edition of Das Magazine fur Litteratur, a literary journal. Two key lines from that poem read “Night weinen, weil she voruber! / Lacheln, weil sie gewesen!” Translated into English the lines read: “Don’t cry because it’s over! Smile because they have been!” The entire poem appears below:

Bright Days by Ludwig Jacobowski

Ah, our brilliant days

shine like eternal stars,

They glow past as consolation

for future sorrow.

Don’t cry because it’s over!

Smile because they have been!

And if the days get cloudier,

Our stars redeem!

Fast forward to 1996, when an anonymous contributor posted this line on a Usenet newsgroup under the heading rec.humor: “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” The Wikiquotes page devoted to Dr. Seuss points out that this quotation has also been attributed to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who wrote: “No llores porque ya se terminó, sonríe porque sucedió.” Translated into English it reads, “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” However, there is no source to confirm that Marquez ever wrote this.

The erroneous attribution to Dr. Seuss begins with one individual who was too lazy to do his research: Christopher Roche, the valedictorian at Albertus Magnus High School. In June 1998, The Rockland Journal-News (Rockland County, New York) quoted Roche’s valedictorian speech. Roche claimed that he was paraphrasing some lines from “Oh, the Places You’ll Go: “Like Dr. Seuss tells us, today is our day. We’re off to great places, so let’s be on our way. Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” Yikes. Even ChatGPT wouldn’t make a bonehead attribution like that. Realize how easy it would be to confirm: Oh, the Places You’ll Go is not some sprawling epic novel, like War and Peace — the book has only 56 pages with just a few sentences on each page with lots of large pictures. If Roche had even flipped through it, he would discovered that this sentence or anything with a similar sentiment simply isn’t there.

So the next time you hear someone quote from “Dr. Seuss,” please interrupt them politely and graciously enlighten them: “You mean the obscure German poet, Ludwig Jacobowski, don’t you? Please, don’t cry that you made a mistake; smile that I corrected you — so that you are spared the humiliation of looking like a fool.” Oh, the places you’ll go…

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For further reading: Famous Misquotations: Blood, Sweat, and Tears
Famous Misquotations: A Civilization is Measured by How It Treats Its Weakest Members
Famous Misquotations: The Two Most Important Days in Your Life
Famous Misquotations: The Triumph of Evil is That Good Men Do Nothing
Famous Phrases You Have Been Misquoting

For further reading:
Hemingway Didn’t Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations, Garson O’Toole, Little A, 2017.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/07/25/smile/
http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/dont_cry_because_its_over

To learn more about Alexander Atkins Design please visit www.alexatkinsdesign.com

The Most Beautiful People Are Those Who Have Known Defeat, Suffering, Struggle, and Loss

01/07/2023 / Alexander Atkins

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

From the book Death: The Final Stage of Growth, published in 1975, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), a Swiss-American psychiatrist who was the leading authority in the field of death and dying. Kübler-Ross introduced her theory of the five stages of grief in her seminal work, On Death and Dying published in 1969. The five stages of grief, known as the Kübler-Ross model, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In a work published after her death (Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief” co-authored with David Kessler, 2019), Kübler-Ross adds a sixth stage: finding meaning. Interestingly, Kübler-Ross theory was based on people who were dying as opposed to actually grieving; therefore, perhaps it would be more accurate to call them the “five stages of accepting death by individuals with terminal illness.” More significantly, the theory is not supported by empirical research or evidence.

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For further reading: www.ekrfoundation.org/elisabeth-kubler-ross/quotes/

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You May Not Know It, But You Are Quoting Shakespeare

11/30/202211/30/2022 / Alexander Atkins

alex atkins bookshelf shakespeare As many scholars have noted, Shakespeare had an enormous impact on the English language. In his book, The English Language (1929), British philologist Ernest Weekley (best known for his seminal work, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English) wrote: “Of Shakespeare it may be said without fear of exaggeration that his contribution to our phraseology is ten times greater than that of any writer to any language in the history of the world.” What is astonishing is that due to the influence of his writing, people don’t even need to read Shakespeare to quote it. As Michael Macrone notes in Brush Up Your Shakespeare: An Infectious Tour Through theMost famous and Quotable Words and Phrases from the Bard, “Whether they knew it or not, people had been quoting Shakespeare piecemeal for hundreds of years. Indeed, we have derived from Shakespeare’s works an almost “infinite variety [Antony and Cleopatra] of everyday words and phrases, many of which have become so common that we think of them as “household words [Henry the Fifth].”

Of course, the question of the size of Shakespeare’s vocabulary has fascinated scholars for centuries. To answer that question, all scholars turn to The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare by Martin Spevack (1968, 1974) based on the Riverside Shakespeare (G. Blakemore Evans, 1973). The concordance lists every word used in the published work of the Bard — a grand total of 884,647 words. Spevack also machine-counted 31,654 different words in 1968 and revised that to 29,066 different words in 1974. Using those numbers, different experts use different approaches to estimate the number or words that Shakespeare knew.

According to lexicographer and Shakespeare scholar David Crystal, the entire English vocabulary in the Elizabethan period consisted of about 150,000 words. Turning to the Harvard Concordance, Crystal notes that although Spevack machine-counted 29,066 unique words, that includes variant forms of words (eg, take, takes, taking, took, taken, takest) that are counted as different words. By removing those grammatical variants, the total of different words is reduced to 17,000 to 20,000. Therefore, Crystal believes that Shakespeare had a vocabulary of about 20,000 words (13.5% of the known lexicon). Compare that to the size of the vocabulary of the average modern person (high school-level education) that is 30,000 to 40,000 words (about 6% of the 600,000 words defined in the Oxford English Dictionary). Other lexicographers estimate that Shakespeare’s vocabulary ranged from 18,000 to 25,000 words.

But alas we digress — let us return to the original discussion of quoting Shakespeare even though we may not be aware of it. I was what recently exploring the maze of bookshelves at a quaint antiquarian bookstore and came across this poster, featuring the text of British journalist Bernard Levin [1928-2004], a fan of the Bard and one of the most famous journalists in England, that eloquently and succinctly makes this argument in a single sentence containing 369 words. The essay, titled “On Quoting Shakespeare,” appears in his book Enthusiasms, published in 1983.

ON QUOTING SHAKESPEARE

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare it’s Greek to me, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger; if your wish is father to the thought; if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise -why, be that as it may, the more fool you , for it is a foregone conclusion that you are,as good luck would have it, quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high timeand that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then – to give the devil his due – if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then – by Jove! O Lord! Tut tut! For goodness’ sake! What the dickens! But me no buts! – it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.

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Plato: If You Don’t Vote, You Will be Governed by Idiots

11/08/202211/08/2022 / Alexander Atkins / Leave a comment

Plato (427-347 BC) is considered one of the most brilliant and influential philosophers in history. Plato (his given name was Aristocles; Plato is his nickname, from platos, meaning “broad” since he had a broad physique and forehead) was a student of Socrates and took what he learned to found the influential Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the West. Amidst a beautiful grove of olive trees, Plato taught some very fortunate and intelligent students (including Aristotle who later founded his own academy) philosophy, mathematics, politics, and astronomy. His most famous and influential work, that is still widely studied in universities, is the Republic, where Plato cover a broad (pun intended) range of significant topics: philosophy, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, metaphysics, and of course, political philosophy. It is this last topic that concerns us today as we examine his views on political participation in the context of today’s critical mid-term elections that challenge the fundamental principles of a democracy.

The quote that serves as the title of this post is actually a tongue-in-cheek variation (underscoring the importance of voting in a critical election) of the quote most often attributed to Plato, ubiquitous on the internet: “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics, is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” There are many other variants of this famous quotation. Among them is this one crafted by poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson that appears in Society and Solitude (1870): “Plato says that the punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is, to live under the government of worse men.”

The source of all these variants is The Republic, (Book 1, 346-347), where Plato makes the point that if good, honorable, intelligent men do not to wish to serve in government, then they will be punished by being ruled by those who are bad, dishonorable, and dumb. The actual sentence is: But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule. For those who are curious to partake of the entire discussion of the issue among Socrates (Plato, of course, is speaking through Socrates), Glaucon (Plato’s older brother), and Thrasymachus (a sophist who believes essentially that it does not pay to be just), here is the relevant passage from The Republic:

“Then, Thrasymachus, is not this immediately apparent, that no art or office provides what is beneficial for itself — but as we said long ago it provides and enjoins what is beneficial to its subject, considering the advantage of that, the weaker, and not the advantage the stronger? That was why… I was just now saying that no one of his own will chooses to hold rule and office and take other people’s troubles in hand to straighten them out, but everybody expects pay for that, because he who is to exercise the art rightly never does what is best for himself or enjoins it when he gives commands according to the art, but what is best for the subject. That is the reason, it seems, why pay must be provided for those who are to consent to rule, either in form of money or honor or a penalty if they refuse.” “What do you mean by that, Socrates?” said Glaucon. “The two wages I recognize, but the penalty you speak of and described as a form of wage I don’t understand.” “Then,” said I, “you don’t understand the wages of the best men for the sake of which the finest spirits hold office and rule when they consent to do so. Don’t you know that to be covetous of honor and covetous of money is said to be and is a reproach?” “I do,” he said. “Well, then,” said I, “that is why the good are not willing to rule either for the sake of money or of honor. They do not wish to collect pay openly for their service of rule and be styled hirelings nor to take it by stealth from their office and be called thieves, nor yet for the sake of honor, for they are not covetous of honor. So there must be imposed some compulsion and penalty to constrain them to rule if they are to consent to hold office. That is perhaps why to seek office oneself and not await compulsion is thought disgraceful. But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule. It is from fear of this, as it appears to me, that the better sort hold office when they do, and then they go to it not in the expectation of enjoyment nor as to a good thing, but as to a necessary evil and because they are unable to turn it over to better men than themselves or to their like. For we may venture to say that, if there should be a city of good men only, immunity from office-holding would be as eagerly contended for as office is now, and there it would be made plain that in very truth the true ruler does not naturally seek his own advantage but that of the ruled; so that every man of understanding would rather choose to be benefited by another than to be bothered with benefiting him.”

Tomorrow will decide what kind of government America has. At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, legend has it that as Benjamin Franklin left Independence Hall, he was asked this question: “What have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin responded, “A republic — if you can keep it.” In 1787 as in 2022, this republic is amazingly fragile. Dr. Richard Beeman, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, elaborates: “If there is a lesson in all of this it is that our Constitution is neither a self-actuating nor a self-correcting document. It requires the constant attention and devotion of all citizens… Democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people for their continued good health.”

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For further reading: The Republic by Plato (translated by Christopher Ellyn-Jones)
Society and Solitude by Ralph Waldo Emerson
https://www.thoughtco.com/all-about-platos-famous-academy-112520
https://www.iep.utm.edu/academy/
https://www.iep.utm.edu/plato/

To learn more about Alexander Atkins Design please visit www.alexatkinsdesign.com

Triplets: Castles in the Air

09/23/202209/27/2022 / Alexander Atkins / Leave a comment

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

From Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) by Henry David Thoreau.

Everyone who hears my words and obeys them is like a wise man who built his house on rock. It rained hard, the floods came, and the winds blew and hit that house. But it did not fall, because it was built on rock. Everyone who hears my words and does not obey them is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. It rained hard, the floods came, and the winds blew and hit that house, and it fell with a big crash.

From The New Testament, The Gospel of Matthew, 7:24-27 (written about 66-74 AD), New Century Version.

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. And a psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.

From the Collected Papers of Lord Robert Webb-Johnstone quoted in the Oxford Book of Medical Quotations (2003) edited by Peter McDonald and Familiar Medical Quotations (1968) edited by Maurice Strass. There are many websites that erroneously attribute this quote to Jerome Lawrence, the American playwright, best known as the co-author of Inherit the Wind about the Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925. (Robert Edwin Lee was the other playwright. The play inspired the 1960 film of the same name directed by Stanley Kramer.)

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Revisiting “Falling Man” on the 21th Anniversary of 9/11

09/11/202203/08/2023 / Alexander Atkins / Leave a comment

Richard Drew pressed the camera’s shutter button at 9:41:15 am on the morning of September 11, 2001, capturing an image of man leaping to his death that is paradoxically terrifying and peaceful at the same time. This iconic photograph — “The Falling Man” — depicted one of more than 200 innocent people who fell or jumped to their deaths that morning. It was printed on page 7 of the New York Times on the following day, that haunting image etched forever in the American consciousness as a reminder of that dreadful day. Twenty years later, most survivors and witnesses of 9/11 have noted that the sight of human beings falling to their deaths is the most haunting memory of that tragic day. People began jumping soon after the first jet hit the North Tower (8:46 am) and for the next 102 minutes before the building collapsed. They jumped alone, in pairs, or in groups — most from a height of more than 100 stories. At that height, the bodies reach a speed of 150 miles per hour, not enough to cause unconsciousness during the 10-second fall, but fast enough to ensure immediate death upon impact. One witness described this horrific scene as a woman fell: “The look on her face was shock. She wasn’t screaming. It was slow motion. When she hit, there was nothing left.” Equally powerful was the thought-provoking story that writer Tom Junod wrote about the identity of that lone figure in the September 2003 issue of Esquire magazine, titled “The Falling Man.” When you read the introduction to the story, it is easy to understand why the editors of Esquire consider it one of the greatest stories in the magazine’s 75-year history.

“In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity’s divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet… The man in the picture… is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else — something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man’s posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is… in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.”

Almost 20 years later, reflecting on that photo, Richard Drew states: “I never regretted taking that photograph at all. It’s probably one of the only photographs that shows someone dying that day. We have a terrorist attack on our soil and we still don’t see pictures of our people dying — and this is a photograph of someone dying. “

The Falling Man’s true identity has never been established. The photos reveal that he was dark-skinned, lanky, wore a goatee, dressed in black pants, and a bright-orange shirt under a white shirt. Some believe it was Jonathan Briley, an employee at the Windows on the World restaurant as a sound engineer who worked on conferences and functions held there. Miraculously, the FBI found his body the next day. Juno concludes his article:

“Is Jonathan Briley the Falling Man? He might be. But maybe he didn’t jump from the window as a betrayal of love or because he lost hope. Maybe he jumped to fulfill the terms of a miracle. Maybe he jumped to come home to his family. Maybe he didn’t jump at all, because no one can jump into the arms of God.

Oh, no. You have to fall.

Yes, Jonathan Briley might be the Falling Man. But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky — falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame — the Falling Man — became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.

That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.”

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For further reading:
September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond
Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets
http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0903-SEP_FALLINGMAN
http://www.esquire.com/features/page-75/greatest-stories?click=main_sr#slide-1
http://time.com/4453467/911-september-11-falling-man-photo/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2017091117pm&xid=newsletter-brief
https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2002-09-02-jumper_x.htm

Doublets: Be Happy with What You Have

08/14/202208/14/2022 / Alexander Atkins / Leave a comment

The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach.”

Lin Yutang (1895-1976) was a Chinese novelist, philosopher, and linguist. He moved to America in 1935, where he popularized a Chinese way of life and philosophy. By translating classic Chinese texts into English, he became one of the most influential writers of his generation. In addition to his extensive writing and translation work, Lin was the inventor of the Chinese typewriter after decades of work on the project.

“Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won’t have to hunt for happiness.”

William Gladstone (1809-1898), known as the “Grand Old Man,” is considered by historians as one of Britain’s greatest leaders. His public service lasted over 60 years, including 12 years as Prime Minister. Gladstone was a dedicated bibliophile, with a personal library of more than 32,000 books. He was known to walk in and buy entire sections of a bookshop.

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Signs at Indie Bookstores: Paris, France

07/23/202207/23/2022 / Alexander Atkins

alex atkins bookshelf quotations If you happen to visit Paris, France, you might come across one of Europe’s most famous bookshops: Shakespeare and Company. The original Shakespeare and Company, located on the Left Bank, was founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919. Beach’s bookshop closed in 1941. The existing Shakespeare and Company, also on the Left Bank (adjacent to Place Saint-Michel), was founded in 1951 by George Whitman, an ex-serviceman. Whitman’s bookshop, however, was initially named “Le Mistral.” In 1964, on the 40th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, Whitman changed the name to Shakespeare and Company as a tribute to Beach’s store (before she had died, Beach agreed to allow Whitman to use that name). The bookshop became one of the favorite hangouts of bohemian culture, including Beat Generation writers like William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg as well as other famous authors like Bertolt Brecht, James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Peter Matthiessen, and William Saroyan.

As you wander among the tightly-packed bookshelves in the store, that was once a 16th-century monastery, you will come across several signs, including on above the reading library: “Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise.” As you venture through the stacks you will come across a quote by American author Rebecca Solnit, a champion of women’s, human, and environmental rights. She famously coined the term “mansplaining” in her collection of essays titled Men Explain Things to Me, published in 2014. The quote that appears in the store is from the book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2016): “Inside the word ’emergency’ is ’emerge’; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.”

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So Long as You Write What You Wish to Write, That is All That Matters

06/26/2022 / Alexander Atkins

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”

From the essay A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. The essay, published in 1929, is based on two lectures Woolf delivered at women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge a year earlier. The essay takes its title from the following sentence: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf explores whether women, facing many social and economic challenges in a patriarchal society, are capable and free to produce great literature. During Woolf’s time, women were not encouraged to attend college and obtain a formal education. She cites Austen and Bronte who broke with societal norms: “Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that.”

In this passage, Woolf presents the chasm between how women are idealized in fiction written by men and how women are actually treated:

“Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time. Indeed if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some would say greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room. A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words and profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read; scarcely spell; and was the property of her husband.”

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The Beauty of Literature is that You Discover that You Belong

06/11/202206/11/2022 / Alexander Atkins

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

From a letter written in 1938 by F. Scott Fitzgerald to his lover, Sheilah Graham. During the Great Depression, the popularity of his novels dramatically decreased. He needed to secure a steady income to pay for his wife’s (Zelda) psychiatric treatment for schizophrenia at an asylum, his estranged daughter’s (Scottie) college tuition (Vassar), and support his chronic drinking habit. Consequently, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood in the mid 1930s to be a screenwriter for MGM. In 1936, Fitzgerald met Graham at a cocktail party held at the Garden of Allah, playground for the Hollywood elite (like Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe). For the next four years, Fitzgerald’s reputation continued to decline and his alcoholism got worse. He began work on his fifth novel, The Last Tycoon, where Graham served as his model for the character Kathleen. Graham tolerated Fitzgerald’s drunken binges and verbal abuse and encouraged him to embrace his talent and write. For her troubles, Fitzgerald provided Graham with a college education. Fitzgerald finally achieved sobriety in 1940, claiming that this time with Graham was one of the happiest times of their relationship; he died of a heart attack in December of that year. When he died, he was considered a failed alcoholic and his work was largely forgotten. Graham later wrote about her life and relationship with Fitzgerald in a book titled Beloved Infidel published in 1959.

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The Most Important Thing on a Tombstone is the Dash

05/08/202205/08/2022 / Alexander Atkins

alex atkins bookshelf wisdom Linda Ellis (72) started writing as a child. She left the corporate world after a long career to become a full-time poet. Although she was not well-known, in 1994, the host of a syndicated radio show read one of her early poems titled “The Dash.” The inspirational poem truly resonated with listeners and became an instant classic, shared around the world. The poem inspired several books, including The Dash: Making a Difference with Your Life (2017),” which has sold over a million copies, and Live Your Dash: Make Every Moment Matter (2014). The message of the poem is that what matters most in life is not how long you have lived (on a tombstone that is represented by the date of birth and date of death), but rather how you spent your life (represented by the dash, or hyphen, between the dates). Expressed another way: the most important thing on your tombstone is the dash, it’s what you did while you were here. In short, the poem asks us: did you make every moment and relationship count?

The Dash by Linda Ellis

I read of a man who stood to speak
At the funeral of a friend
He referred to the dates on the tombstone
From the beginning…to the end

He noted that first came the date of birth
And spoke the following date with tears,
But he said what mattered most of all
Was the dash between those years

For that dash represents all the time
That they spent alive on earth.
And now only those who loved them
Know what that little line is worth

For it matters not, how much we own,
The cars…the house…the cash.
What matters is how we live and love
And how we spend our dash.

So, think about this long and hard.
Are there things you’d like to change?
For you never know how much time is left
That can still be rearranged.

If we could just slow down enough
To consider what’s true and real
And always try to understand
The way other people feel.

And be less quick to anger
And show appreciation more
And love the people in our lives
Like we’ve never loved before.

If we treat each other with respect
And more often wear a smile,
Remembering this special dash
Might only last a little while

So, when your eulogy is being read
With your life’s actions to rehash…
Would you be proud of the things they say
About how you spent YOUR dash?

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For further reading: Famous Misquotations: The Two Most Important Days in Your Life
The Wisdom of a Grandmother
Read related posts: Letters to a Young Poet
The Wisdom of Pi Patel
The Wisdom of Hindsight

For further reading: hellopoetry.com/poem/1184764/the-dash-poem-by-linda-ellis/
lifeism.co/the-dash-poem-by-linda-ellis

After the Suffering, You Get to Keep the Lessons and the Pain Goes Away

04/27/202205/01/2022 / Alexander Atkins

“I do have a love-hate relationship with this place [rainforest of Vancouver Island]. You get up in the morning and you confront the realities of your situation. Some days it’s great, some days it’s horrible. But suffering has value. We avoid it at all costs. We would never want to go back and repeat it, but it has value. It’s a part of life and nobody gets through life without suffering, nobody. [The] question is — what do you allow it to do in you? You can allow that suffering to make you bitter, angry, just a wretched person — you know? [Or] you can allow that suffering to eat away at your soul, turn it on itself, and just chew you apart. Or you can look for the deeper meaning it. My philosophy on suffering is that God is trying to teach me something and I know that in the end, I get to keep those lessons and the pain goes away.”

Post-apocalyptic fiction writer David McIntyre (50) reflecting on his experience surviving in the harsh, formidable remote wilderness of Vancouver Island, Canada — deep in black bear, cougar, and wolf territory — for 66 days without any food, water, shelter and without any contact with the outside world. McIntyre won the second season of Alone (History Channel, 2016) by outlasting nine other isolated survivalists who also tested their survival skills by living entirely off the land. The winner gets $500,000 and bragging rights.

The show Alone is billed as “the ultimate test of human will;” however, that is only part of the overall picture: it is also the ultimate test of courage, strength, sustainability, and adaptability. While half of the participants dropped off before day 30 due to a variety of factors, including fear, debilitating hunger, injury, hypothermia, overwhelming longing for companionship and home, and close encounters with deadly predators; the other half endured the torment of profound isolation — a brutal, unrelenting mixture of mental torment and loneliness. With each passing day, each participant moved closer to their own psychological breaking point. Only McIntyre persevered, escaping mental anguish, battling starvation and intense loneliness, by having a positive mental attitude, a healthy self-identity, and focusing on the present: “[I] stressed the importance of now. What you do with your now is the only time you get to do anything. What can you do right now to make tomorrow easier.”

The experience emphasizes that survival skills (ingenuity and resourcefulness), good health, and physical strength and endurance are not enough to survive alone in the wilderness. The greatest challenge for all participants, especially those that break the 30-day barrier, is the powerful effects of extended isolation, which is manifested in tortuous thinking and loneliness. Participants describe tortuous thinking as being tormented by your personal demons — revisiting over and over again every mistake and regret in your life; “every skeleton in your closet comes out and you can’t get away from them” — to paraphrase an old adage “The devil finds work for idle minds.” The loneliness is experienced as profound longing for companionship, for personal connection. Research has shown that protacted isolation and loneliness can negatively impact a person physical, mental, and cognitive health. Adverse health consequences include impaired cognitive function and decision-making, depression, increased anxiety, disrupted sleep, poor cardiovascular function, lower body strength, impaired immunity — and ultimately, increasing the risk of early death.

After their wilderness experience, all participants gain a new-found appreciation of their loved ones. McIntyre adds, “How many dads would run into a burning building for their children, but they don’t put down the [TV] remote. Use this time to take inventory on and invest in the people and relationships that truly matter to you and back away from the ones that are toxic. Learn the lessons that [being alone in the wilderness] has forced upon us.”

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For further reading: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/05/ce-corner-isolation
http://www.history.com/shows/alone
http://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/david-mcintyre-alone-covid-survival-skills-tips/69-9ded7ccd-caf0-407a-b19c-d1fe1d131949

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If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. And a psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.

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The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach.”

“Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won’t have to hunt for happiness.”

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“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”

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