Will you come to see me Jack
     When I’m old and very shaky?
Yes I will for you’re my dad
     And you’ve lost your last old lady
     Though you traveled very far
To the highlands and the badlands
     And ripped off the family car
Still, old dad, I won’t forsake you.

Will you come to see me Jack?
     Though I’m really not alone.
Still I’d like to see my boy
     For we’re lonesome for our own.
     Yes I will for you’re my dad
Though you dumped me and my brothers
     And you sizzled down the road
Loving other fellows’ mothers.

Will you come to see me Jack?
     Though I look like time boiled over.
Growing old is not a lark.
     Yes I will for you’re my dad
     Though we never saw a nickel
As we struggled up life’s ladder
     I will call you and together
We will cuddle up and see
     What the weather’s like in Key West
On the old-age home TV.

— Grace Paley, “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute”

My son and I are in the kitchen looking for something to eat. He finds a bag of Pepperidge Farm Verona cookies (I prefer the Raspberry Milanos myself), holds the bag up to my face, and says

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean
Two hours traffic on our stage blah blah blah

Then he eats the cookies.

So who says Shakespeare has no relevance for the modern student?

The dictator and the useful idiot

Keep before you the swift onset of oblivion, and the abysses of eternity before us and behind; mark how hollow are the echoes of applause, how fickle and undiscerning the judgements of professed admirers, and how puny the arena of human fame. For the entire earth is but a point, and the place of our own habitation but a minute corner in it; and how many are therein who will praise you, and what sort of men are they?

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV.3

I’m reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations when my son, referring to the cover photo above the author’s name, says, “Who’s that? Zeus?”

“No,” I say.

“Caesar?”

“No. It’s Marcus Aurelius.”

“Hmmm. That seemed too obvious.”

And often you asked me,
“What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?”
I am out of your way now, Spoon River,
Choose your own good and call it good.
For I could never make you see
That no one knows what is good
Who knows not what is evil;
And no one knows what is true
Who knows not what is false.

— Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, “Seth Compton”

‘Now it might be a very romantic sight to some chaps, a light burning in a tower window. I knew a poem about a thing like that once. Forgot it now, though. I was no end of a one for poetry when I was a kid — love and all that. Castle towers came in quite a lot. Funny how one grows out of that kind of thing.’

— Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.

 

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

 

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

 

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

 

Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?

 

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him.

 

The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.

 

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it.

 

A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

At the time the book [Brave New World] was written this idea, that human beings are given free will in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other, was one that I found amusing and regarded as quite possibly true.

— Aldous Huxley

New additions to the First Lines and Last Lines quizzes:

First Lines

Call me Ishmael.

It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.

Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden–Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West.

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

Last Lines

He loved Big Brother.

At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.

Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

Even if you’re not a fan of the “young woman with a weak heart” plot — and who is? — “On the Gulls’ Road” by Willa Cather is a splendid short story.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

— George Santayana

“Is that a fact?” she said. “Well–I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten.”

“Santayana was a famous philosopher at Harvard,” said Slazinger, a Harvard man.

And Mrs. Berman said, “Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect on me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

 

Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions, I myself was intact. The world was intact.

 

If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality.

Identify these two well-known novels from the first and last lines. Answers are in the comments. More lit quizzes here.

Book One

First line

We were using the old blue china and the stainless steel cutlery, with place mats on the big oval table and odd-sized jelly glasses for the wine.

Last line

I said: “It’s the color of the sky.”

Book Two

First line

The insuperable gap between East and West that exists in some eyes is perhaps nothing more than an optical illusion.

Last line

“The only proper action,” Colonel Green agreed.

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily . . . and threw them out the window in disgust.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

That book made a powerful impression on me. After reading it, I decided that I, like Thoreau, would travel light along the road of life, and stop dragging so much useless junk around with me.

Unfortunately, that was almost 20 years ago and I still haven’t been able to carry it off.

Not yet, anyway.

But I still think the concept is valid . . .

But in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after their morning round of golf and start to crow, “It doesn’t get any better than this,” they may be a lot closer to the truth than Leo Tolstoy ever was.

 

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.

 

He had learned the worst lesson life can teach — that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one’s history.

 

This is how successful people live. They’re good citizens. They feel lucky. They feel grateful. God is smiling down on them. There are problems, they adjust. And then everything changes and it becomes impossible. Nothing is smiling down on anybody. And who can adjust then?

 

Here is someone not set up for life’s working out poorly, let alone for the impossible. But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy — that is every man’s tragedy.

 

The students in her class at Montessori school were asked ten questions about their “philosophy,” one a week. The first week the teacher asked, “Why are we here?” Instead of writing as the other kids did — here to do good, here to make the world a better place, etc. — Merry answered with her own question: “Why are apes here?” But the teacher found this an inadequate response and told her to go home and think about the question more seriously — “Expand on this,” the teacher said. So Merry went home and did as she was told and the next day handed in an additional sentence: “Why are kangaroos here?” It was at this point that Merry was first informed by a teacher that she had a “stubborn streak.”

 

The final question assigned to the class was “What is life?” Merry’s answer was something her father and mother chuckled over together that night. According to Merry, while the other students labored busily away with their phony deep thoughts, she — after an hour of thinking at her desk — wrote a single, unplatitudinous declarative sentence: “Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.” “You know,” said the Swede, “it’s smarter then it sounds. She’s a kid — how has she figured out that life is short? She is somethin’, our precocious daughter. This girl is going to Harvard.” But once again the teacher didn’t agree, and she wrote beside Merry’s answer, “Is that all?” Yes, the Swede thought now, that is all. Thank God, that is all; even that is unendurable.

 

“You talk about what I’m dealing with as though anybody could deal with it. But nobody could deal with it. Nobody! Nobody has the weapons for this. You think I’m inept? You think I’m inadequate? If I’m inadequate, where are you going to get people who are adequate . . . if I’m . . . do you understand what I’m saying? What am I supposed to be? What are other people if I am inadequate?”

From a 1955 interview with Nelson Algren in The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER: How about this movie, The Man with the Golden Arm?

ALGREN: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have anything to do with the script?

ALGREN: No. No, I didn’t last long. I went out there for a thousand a week. and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday. The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday.

Is it all a dream, yes, perhaps a dream. . . . Death, its closeness. . . . Was I in prison once? I cannot remember. At the end of what is necessary, I have come to a place where there is no road.

— Iris Murdoch, Jackson’s Dilemma

From Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn:

• You Fucking Mooks
• The Chocolate Cheeseballs
• Tony and the Tugboats
• Jerks from Nowhere
• Free Human Freakshow
• Bucky Dent and the Stale Doughnuts

In the case of Mann and his diaries, what strikes one most is that he obviously felt that absolutely everything that happened to him was worthy of being recorded. . . . [The diaries] give the impression that Mann was thinking ahead to a studious future which would exclaim after each entry: ‘Good heavens, so that was the day when the Great Man wrote such and such a page of The Holy Sinner and then, the following night, read some verses by Heine, that is so revealing!’

— Javier Marias, Written Lives

What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while. … What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye