One day in November 1973 I was sitting on a Metroliner bound for D.C. I had bought a copy of Newsweek at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, but didn’t even open it because I wanted to finish the book I was reading. This was In My Own Way, the autobiography of Alan Watts, which had come out the previous year

I finished the book, stared out the window for a while, then picked up the magazine — and discovered that Alan Watts had died some days earlier. It was an odd experience, if only because, in the prose I had just been reading, Watts had seemed so very much alive.

I suppose a thrice-married, former Episcopal priest with a drinking problem (”I don’t like myself when I’m sober,” he told a friend) could be regarded as a dubious choice for a guide to religion, but I continue to think that much of what Watts had to say on the subject is worth paying heed to.

In an essay called “The World’s Most Dangerous Book,” for instance, he says something that is very worth pondering. Belief, he says, is “holding to a rock.” Faith, on the other hand, is “learning how to swim.” (By the way, the book referred to in the essay’s title is called the Bible.) [Read more →]

Tags: that's what he said, by Frank Wilson, truth (or something)
No Comments »

No writer is quoted more reflexively than Shakespeare, which is too bad, because Will’s best lines not only repay close attention, but often demand it. Take the advice Polonius gives his son Laertes:

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Spoken like a true courtier, which is what Polonius is — a temporizing careerist whose summum bonum is survival. He is also a “wretched, rash, intruding fool,” as Hamlet — uncharitably, but accurately — calls him after impulsively running the old duffer through in Act III.

It seems safe to say that, for Polonius, being true to yourself means nothing more than giving top priority to your own self-interest. My guess is that, in Polonius’s view, everyone is out for himself, and that this defines the extent to which anyone can trust anybody else — which is to say, hardly at all. It is a supremely cynical outlook, and how exactly it ensures against being false to anyone else is far from clear.

There is another play in which the notion of being true to yourself figures: Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. When Peer visits the trolls, the troll king explains that the difference between humans and trolls is that while, among humans, the maxim is “to thine own self be true,” among trolls it is “to thine own self be — enough.”

But how do those differ, really? In both cases, the standard remains … yourself. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson
2 Comments »

Famous quotes are usually taken out of context. In most cases, this doesn’t pose a problem, since the fact that they can stand by themselves has much to do with why they become famous. But sometimes the removal of context can be misleading.

Such has been the case with the one-liner that has kept the name of the philosopher George Santayana alive in the public consciousness: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Even people who have never read anything else by Santayana — which probably means, unfortunately, most people — are familiar with this vatic pronouncement. It is commonly cited by politicians and pundits as the clincher to reminding us that if we do not remember the lessons of history, we set ourselves up to make the same mistakes our predecessors made. A sound proposition, to be sure, but not what Santayana was getting at.

He wasn’t talking about history. His statement makes no mention of it. He was talking about the past. And while history certainly has to do with the past, it is not identical with it. History is the part of the past that has been recorded.

What Santayana was talking about was progress. [Read more →]

Tags: that's what he said, by Frank Wilson
5 Comments »

Browsing the Internet the other day I came upon a Time magazine story from 40 years ago headlined “Second Acts in American Lives.” It was about people taking up new careers in middle age. Curious, I googled the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote the headline alluded to, and immediately came upon another piece from just four years ago in Wired with a similar headline: “No Second Acts?” It was about … people taking up new careers in middle age.

What is interesting about this is that the authors of both stories not only miss the point of Fitzgerald’s remark, but also don’t seem to know anything about three-act plays. The second act is the one where complication enters and confrontation takes place. It’s the development section. Fitzgerald may well have had in mind the old saying that “the second act is the best.” At any rate, what he was suggesting was that American lives tend toward arrested development. I certainly don’t think he had career changes in mind. [Read more →]

Tags: that's what he said, by Frank Wilson
2 Comments »

I find it disconcerting to realize that it has been more than half a century since I first read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” At least I know I’ve had plenty of time to think it over. I’ve read it a number of times since then, of course, but that first encounter has stayed in my mind with extraordinary vividness. It took place in February 1957. I was 15, a sophomore in high school. But I had stayed home from school that day because of a bad cold — for some reason colds affected me worse when I was young than later on.

The day was very clear and very cold. The bedroom where I sat reading was filled with dazzling winter sunlight. I don’t remember why I decided to read “Self-Reliance.” It was in an anthology of classic American literature that we had lying around the house. I knew that Emerson was supposed to be an important writer, so maybe I just decided to see if he lived up to his reputation.

He sure did for me. “Self-Reliance” hit me like a personal declaration of independence. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds….” “To be great is to be misunderstood.” What bookish adolescent wouldn’t thrill to such words?

Conformism was much talked about at the time. Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit — which had to do with conformity as exemplified by corporate yes men — had come out two years earlier and its screen adaptation hit theaters the year before. Maybe that’s what made Emerson’s essay seem so up-to-date.

At any rate, it was not those famous quotes from “Self-Reliance” that grabbed me so much as this one: [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson
3 Comments »

Some remarks are quoted so often we cease to pay attention to them. The quips of Oscar Wilde, for instance, trip so easily off the tongue and skip so lightly through the mind that we rarely pause to consider their point. This is unfortunate, because there is often more weight to Wilde’s wit than is commonly acknowledged. Two of his best-known epigrams are spoken by Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere’s Fan. Cecil Graham asks Darlington, “What is a cynic?” He tells him it is “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” It is also Lord Darlington who says that “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

These are more than mere witticisms, and they complement each other as the obverse and reverse of the same insight. For those among us in the gutter who disdain to watch the stars are likely to be the same ones who cannot distinguish between cost and worth.

Wilde was the leading figure in what was called the Aesthetic Movement, beneath whose frivolous façade lurked some altogether serious notions. Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism may well be the best book on the subject precisely because it considers it in relation to man’s soul. Wilde understood that the quality of human life is not something you can enter on the bottom line. More precisely, as the aforementioned epigrams make clear, he understood that to be satisfied with the merely quantifiable is also to display a woeful lack of imagination. [Read more →]

Tags: that's what he said, by Frank Wilson
2 Comments »

Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, was killed at age 33 at the first battle of Newbury during the English Civil War — fighting, of course, on the side of the king. Lord Falkland was well thought of by his contemporaries and was celebrated in verse by the likes of Ben Jonson, Edmund Waller, and Abraham Cowley. (Here is Cowley’s “To the Lord Falkland.”) During the parliamentary debate over whether the Anglican episcopacy should be abolished, Falkland — who opposed the measure — is said to have declared that “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

Given all the talk of change these days — from change we can believe in to climate change — this seems an utterance well worth pondering. That in itself is good, because change is one of those things people are inclined to talk about — and do — rather than think about — and perhaps refrain from doing.

Lord Falkland’s remark has the effect of bringing you up short. It reminds you first of all that there are two kinds of change: the kind over which you have some control — and the other kind.  Lord Falkland was obviously referring to the former and, at first glance, his formulation seems unobjectionable. Why make a change if you don’t have to? [Read more →]

Tags: that's what he said, by Frank Wilson
1 Comment »

Michel de Montaigne invented the essay, and could well be the only person to have ever written one. Plenty of things called essays have been written, of course, and many — Lamb’s, Hazlitt’s, Emerson’s — are justly celebrated. But none are exactly like the ones Montaigne wrote.

In a way, they are just the opposite. Montaigne invented the name, too. It comes from the French word essayer, meaning to try or attempt. You could say that to write an essay about something means just to take a stab at it. Montaigne’s began as brief commentaries on favorite classical quotations, but soon expanded into wide-ranging meditations — the quotations became simply a means of triggering a train of thought, which Montaigne would then follow wherever it led.

This is what makes his essays different from those others, most of which have served as vehicles either for exposition or style or both. To be sure, Montaigne’s writing is stylish enough. He invented the plain style, clear and casual as the best talk. But for him style wasn’t an end itself; like a window, it was meant to be looked through, not at.

Montaigne also doesn’t seem to have arrived at any conclusion before he began to write. The point of his writing wasn’t to advance a position, but to record a process of thought. This is writing as an act, first and foremost, of self-examination, not self-expression (though it is that as well, of course). I have long thought a great opportunity has been missed in the failure to explore the essay as a method rather than a form.

But what about journals and diaries? Aren’t they examples of writing as a method of self-examination? Usually, though some, like Gide’s, are pretty clearly private performances meant for public consumption. The difference, however, between what a diarist does and what Montaigne did lies in the indirectness of his method: Montaigne explores himself strictly in relation to his chosen topic — such as one of those classical quotations. This enables him to get to know himself, not by recounting and pondering his quotidian round, but by seeing how his mind works.

Which brings me to the point of this column, in which I plan to try my hand at Montaigne’s opening gambit by riffing on a quotation every week. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson
10 Comments »