I first heard of the Abbé Mugnier (1853-1944) in an essay Somerset Maugham wrote about the journals of the French writer Paul Léautaud. The Abbé, in his shabby soutane, was a fixture in Parisian literary circles.  He knew everyone and just about everything about everyone. Leautaud was outspokenly anti-clerical and, finding himself in the company of the gentle abbé, took advantage of the situation to mouth as loudly as possible all manner of blasphemies. Unperturbed, the Abbé Mugnier whispered to him. “God will forgive you, M. Leautaud, because you have loved animals.” Leautaud at once became silent, embarrassed to realize the Abbé knew that the cranky atheist often went without food in order to feed stray dogs and cats. [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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Thanks to the Maverick Philosopher I have become familiar with a Turkish proverb: “He who knows the road does not join the caravan.” It came to mind last week when I was pondering the course this column has so far traced. In particular, it caused me to wonder about the fellow who doesn’t know the road, but doesn’t want to join the caravan, either, who wants to discover the road for himself.

In real life, of course, that could prove dangerous. Luckily, marauding brigands pose no threat for mental excursions. So the premise of this column — to follow a train of thought (a mental roadway if you will) and see where it leads — seems safe enough. Nevertheless, I am almost always surprised to find where I end up.

The quotes I choose for my point of departure are usually ones I think I agree with or at least understand. But writing about them makes it necessary to think about them and thinking about them often leaves me wondering about them. By the time I got to the end of the column I wrote about Lord Falkland’s dictum — “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change” — I wasn’t at all sure that was always such a good idea.    

Perhaps even more interesting — at least to me — is the direction in which the sequence of columns has taken me. After all, one quote often leads to another and the choice is bound to reflect my own preferences and predilections. But one is not always as conscious of those as one might suppose. The columns I have so far written make plain that certain leitmotifs govern my thinking.

I am suspicious of systems of thought. [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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I had never heard of Gaston Bachelard until a few weeks ago, when I read an article by David Cooper called “Art, Nature, Significance.” What Cooper says about Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, as well as the quotes from it, sounded so interesting that I immediately ordered a copy of the book from Amazon and am now slowly reading it. (I am reading it slowly not because it is difficult, but because it is too beautiful and thought-provoking to read any other way.)

Before the book arrived, however, I had come upon something Bachelard had said in another book, The Poetics of Reverie: “Man is an imagining being.”

Classical philosophy defines man as the “rational animal.” This has always seemed to me a self-serving definition — serving the self of the philosophers. [Read more →]

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Words are sounds, and as such may mean something besides what they denote. Azure, indigo, ultramarine are more than blue. They echo, somehow, the sound of the infinite.

Not surprisingly, those who are fond of poetry — and poets themselves, of course — seem peculiarly sensitive to words as sounds. One Saturday night, when I was in my early teens, I read all of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. During the night I found myself waking up with snatches of his poems still running through my head, and the next morning there were some I just couldn’t get out of my  mind — the way it is when you keep hearing a tune over and over.

This was especially true of “Romance.” Certain phrases from it — “a painted paroquet … eternal condor years … trembled with the strings” — just wouldn’t go away. And it was the sound of them, not the sense — after all, what exactly are “eternal condor years”? — that enthralled me. Earlier, nursery rhymes had had the same effect. “Hey, diddle, the cat and the fiddle …” — I could repeat that one to myself endlessly. There is a phrase from Keats’s  “Ode to a Nightingale” — “O for a draught of vintage!” — that from the first time I read it to this very day casts a magic spell over me, transporting me simply by its melody and rhythm to a sunny day in a sunny clime in a time of romance.

W.H. Auden says somewhere that certain lines of poetry transcend language, that you don’t have to know the language or what the words mean in order to know immediately that they are poetry. [Read more →]

Tags: language & grammar, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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Last week, I posted on my blog a link to a piece by Gene Callahan about the British philosopher and historian Michael Oakeshott called Michael Oakeshott on Rationalism and Politics. According to Callahan, Oakeshott’s view was that “the rationalist, in awarding theory primacy over practice, has gotten things exactly backwards.”

This brought to mind something Nietzsche says in Twilight of the Idols: “I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” What reminded me of this was the realization, while I was reading the piece on Oakeshott, that rationalism is the foundation of every so-called system. Or, to put it another way, every system is an exercise in rationalism. [Read more →]

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“And it is all so sad and yet so sweet to muse over the past.” So wrote the composer Tchaikovsky to his “beloved friend” and patron, Nadezhda von Meck.

Theirs was a peculiar relationship. They never met, but poured out their hearts and souls to each other in their correspondence. The reference to the sweetness and sadness of musing over the past occurs in a letter he sent in connection with his fourth symphony, which he wrote when he was 37 and dedicated to von Meck.

I think the age factor is significant. I was perhaps most conscious of time passing and time past when I was in my 30s, and I suspect that is not unusual. But I was aware of Tchaikovsky’s letter long before that, thanks to the liner notes on the 1958 recording of the fourth symphony by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, which was one of the first classical LPs I owned.

I first heard the symphony when I was a junior in high school, not long before the Bernstein recording was released. I knew what the critics thought of Tchaikovsky’s music. But what they complained about — bombast and emotional excess — is precisely what put it so much in harmony (as it were) with my own adolescent Sturm und Drang. [Read more →]

Tags: getting older, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” I came upon this remark of G.K. Chesterton’s last week by accident. Someone commenting on a blog had quoted it. I can’t remember now what blog it was, or what the post and comment were in reference to. But I had copied the quote because I thought I might want to write about it. And the more I pondered it, the more disturbing it seemed.

This did not surprise me. Chesterton can be that way. Though often dismissed by critics as the glib deviser of facile paradoxes, there is more weight to his writing than the surface levity suggests. Had Chesterton’s barbs been aimed, as his friend Shaw’s were, at fashionable targets rather than used in defense of what he called orthodoxy, Chesterton would be taken every bit as seriously as Shaw.

In fact, there is often a great deal more depth in Chesterton than there is in Shaw (there is a reason why Shaw is now better remembered for My Fair Lady than for Pygmalion). In Chesterton, as in the paintings of Fragonard, games are being played, but looming clouds are likely to be casting ominous shadows. [Read more →]

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“It is a good thing for an uneducated man,” Winston Churchill declared, “to read a book of quotations.”  It is certainly a good way to grow familiar with much that Churchill had to say. If the book is the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations (Oxford University Press, $18.95), you will even learn what he didn’t say.

One of the more famous things attributed to him is a remark about De Gaulle: “Of all the crosses I have had to bear in this war, the heaviest has been the Cross of Lorraine.” That, however, was originally said not by Churchill, but by Edward Spears, a British soldier and diplomat. But Churchill knew a good line when he heard one and accordingly appropriated Spears’s quip later on. (What has the Cross of Lorraine got to do with De Gaulle? Originally associated with Joan of Arc, the heraldic Cross of Lorraine — which has two crossbars, one shorter than the other — was adopted as a symbol by the Free French forces, which De Gaulle led.)

Churchill’s remark about books of quotations comes from a 1930 volume of his titled My Early Life. He goes on to say that “the quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”

Of course, all of us, whether educated or not, miss plenty of things, or don’t pay proper attention to them, or forget them. So we can all use a volume of quotations from time to time. But apart from their utility, such books are just fun to have around. If I were still commuting on public transit, the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations would routinely make its way into my briefcase. [Read more →]

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During a debate in the House of Lords on Nov. 5, 2002, one Lord Chalfont said the following:

I have heard some very strange statements tonight … I can only say that, in listening to some of the contributions, I have been reminded of the statesman who once said, “I wish I could be as certain of anything as he is of everything.”

I have seen the statement that Lord Chalfont quotes attributed to Churchill. I have also seen it spoken of as referring to Churchill. But my friend Dave Lull, affectionately known as the Omnipresent Wisconsin Librarian (OWL), did some checking for me and found the quote attributed in an edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations to the English statesman William Windham, though in a slightly changed form: “I wish I were as sure of anything as Macaulay is of everything.” Dave noted, however, that the quote had also been attributed to another English statesman, Lord Melbourne, again in a slightly different form: “I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything.”

I wrote back to Dave suggesting that he may have unearthed an error in Bartlett’s: William Windham died in 1810, when the future historian Thomas Babbington Macaulay was but 10 years old. [Read more →]

Tags: that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

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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 by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

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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 →]

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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 →]

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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 →]

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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 →]

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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 by Frank Wilson
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