I harbor a distinct antipathy toward what a friend of mine used to call “the bumper-sticker mentality,” which disdains thinking and settles instead for sloganeering.
You’ve probably seen this one: “Arms are for hugging.” This isn’t wit. It’s plain old-fashioned equivocation — taking a word that has multiple meanings and pretending it only has one. Whoever came up with this should run out right now and hug a howitzer.
But slogans aren’t only to be found on stickers attached to bumpers. They also decorate t-shirts. I saw one the other day that I thought epically bizarre: “Pain is temporary. Pride is forever.”
Putting aside the fact that how temporary pain is pretty much depends on the cause of said pain, all these two short sentences seem to amount to is a colossal non sequitur. Pride is no more necessarily everlasting than pain is necessarily temporary, and what the one has to do with the other is anybody’s guess.
“After great pain a formal feeling comes,” Emily Dickinson wrote. I don’t know about that either, but I think that, given the circumstances, a formal feeling is more likely than a great surge of pride. My own experience has been that cessation of notable pain is followed by one hell of a sense of relief.
Anyway, what’s so great about pride? Last time I checked, it was still the headliner among the seven deadly sins, it still goeth before a fall, and remains the cause of a tragic hero’s undoing.
I’m not proud of much myself. I love my country. I think it’s the best anywhere ever, in fact, but I can’t say “I’m proud to be an American.” After all, I was born here. To be proud of being American would be like being proud that I was born with a head.
I’m not proud of my accomplishments, either, such as they are. They give me a sense of, well, accomplishment, the satisfaction that comes of having done something as best one could.
There used to be a mural at Broad and Lombard — part of Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program — that always got on my nerves. It declared that “if you can dream it, you can do.” This, of course, is arrant nonsense. I can dream all I want about being a concert violinist, it ain’t gonna happen. Ever. There’s a reason we distinguish between dream and reality.
I suppose all of this stuff derives from the latter-day preoccupation with self-esteem. Current wisdom seems to be that it’s a good thing to think highly of yourself, that it’s better to overestimate yourself rather than the opposite. It seems to me that the best approach when it comes to estimating yourself is to aim at accuracy.
One of the best attempts I can think of is Somerset Maugham’s estimate of his place in literary history. He thought he would be found, ultimately, to occupy a seat in “the very front row of the second-rate.” This is by no means as modest as it sounds, the first-rate being people like Shakespeare, Dante, and Tolstoy. Maugham thought he deserved to be counted among the best of the also-rans. I tend to think he was right, if only for his short stories.
By the way, just so nobody thinks I’m equivocating, “taking pride in your work” doesn’t mean standing around thinking what a great guy you are; it simply means being a responsible worker, someone who always tries to do the best job he can, whatever that job is.
And, speaking of jobs, a composer friend of mine told me some years ago of a call he got from someone who wanted to study composition with him. He asked the caller what instrument he played and when the caller told him didn’t play any instrument, my friend asked him if he could read music. When the answer turned out to be no, my friend kindly explained that he didn’t think the caller was ready yet for the level of instruction my friend had to offer.
What my friend wanted to know was why anyone who didn’t play an instrument or read music would want to be a composer. I told him that the fellow probably thought that writing symphonies and concertos sounded more interesting than fixing toilets or laying floors.
Problem is, how many artists of any kind does a society need? My guess would be only the ones who can safely be regarded as at least second-rate. As for plumbers, carpenters, and the like, one always prefers that they be first-rate.
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Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [5])
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