Listing Through Life

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself, for better or for worse, as his portion; that through the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, from A Third Treasury of the Familiar, ed. Ralph L. Woods

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One of the things we have to be thankful for is that we don’t get as much government as we pay for.

C.H. Kettering, from A Third Treasury of the Familiar, ed. Ralph L. Woods

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[In his farewell address, George Washington said,] “The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principals.” In other words, if this country of different states was going to stay together, people needed to focus on what they had in common, not their differences. “There will always be,” he said, “reason to distrust the patriotism of those who in any quarter may endeavor to weaken [the Union’s] bands.

What worried Washington more than anything else was what might happen if a president’s chief priority was to divide rather than unite the American people: “It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasional riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”

from Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick

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Once in Paris I consented to pose for a young man who called himself an abstractionist or a sur-réaliste, or possibly it was an abolitionist. … For five afternoons I sat for him. One might have surmised that he was executing a photographic miniature in which every hair is depicted, so exacting was he, demanding that I stay still as marble and studying me with a piercing scrutiny while he refused to let me see the canvas until it was completed. When he finally bade me look, I was considerably taken aback to confront a picture of a purple chick coop resplendent under a yellow crescent moon. I apparently gasped, for the young man asked me if I could fail to understand it. To my feeble reply that I didn’t realize I looked quite like that he explained, with contempt, that it was a portrait of my soul. Which led me to conjecture what a curious-looking place Heaven was going to be.

from Excuse It, Please! by Cornelia Otis Skinner

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The modes or presentation that work best for TV—stuff like “action,” with shoot-outs and car wrecks, or the rapid-fire “collage” of commercials, news, and music videos, or the “hysteria” of prime-time soap and sitcom with broad gestures, high voices, too much laughter—are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more … well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows it. This might seem benign until we consider that what good old average Joe Briefcase does more than almost anything else in contemporary life is watch television, an activity which anyone with an average brain can see does not make for a very dense and lively life. Since television must seek to attract viewers by offering a dreamy promise of escape from daily life, and since stats confirm that so grossly much of ordinary U.S. life is watching TV, TV’s whispered promises must somehow undercut television-watching in theory (“Joe, Joe, there’s a world where life is lively, where nobody spends six hours a day unwinding before a piece of furniture”) while reinforcing television-watching in practice (“Joe, Joe, your best and only access to this world is TV”).

from the essay E Unibus Pluram in the book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace.

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One might supposed that with cultural influence so thick in the [newspaper] local room all copy would have been free from error, every edition a masterpiece of clear, classic English and typographic excellence. But, alas, it wasn’t. That was why the style sheet decreed that no reporter, rewrite man or copyreader should ever refer to a ship as a “she.” Whatever a ship might be elsewhere she was “it” in Mr. Eastman’s paper. And the reason, yellow and crumbling, was pasted on the bulletin board where all might see … a paragraph out of a society column that in hasty make-up had become mixed with a piece of shipping news:

“Mrs. Henry Garland of the Chicago Beach Hotel writes that she has had a pleasant summer visiting friends in the East. She went first to Bar Harbor, thence to Kennebunkport, Maine.                                                                                                               “After encountering heavy weather off the Virginia capes she put into Hampton Roads to have her bottom scraped.”

from Such Interesting People, by Robert J. Casey

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[Instructions from a newspaper editor to his staff about a minor story] “Not much on this,” he ordered. “Give me half a paragraph.”

from Such Interesting People, by Robert J. Casey

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Once the pundits decided that no story in the Examiner should begin with A, An, or The. And shortly after the promulgation of the rule Mr. Avery was called upon to write a piece about the finding of the body of an unidentified woman in the river. That did not bother Mr. Avery.

“Hello everybody,” he wrote. “Take a look at this! The body of an unidentified woman … etc.” That got into type, and the rule was changed the next day.

from Such Interesting People, by Robert J. Casey

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We always had an information clerk, principally to keep cranks from wandering into the local room. But we never had one that functioned. One of them stopped me every morning for two weeks asking me my business. I would always ask to see myself. He’d go to get me and I’d follow him into the room. It puzzled me not only that he should have failed to recognize me after repeated experiences but that he should have failed to recognize the pattern of the gag.

from Such Interesting People, by Robert J. Casey

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My mother would say, “You know, if you make one wall of a room a mirror people think you have an entire other room.” …

My parakeet would fall for this. I would let him out of his cage. He would fly around and he would go “BANG” right into the mirror. …

Even if he thinks the mirror is another room, why doesn’t he at least try and avoid hitting the OTHER parakeet?

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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We go to the beach, go in the water, put your wallet in the sneaker.

Who’s going to know? What criminal mind could penetrate this Fortress of Security?

“I put it down by the toe. They  never look there. They check the heels, they move on.”

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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Some products are really very candid about their nutritional quality. Certainly those Oscar Mayer cold cuts labeled simply “Luncheon Meat” fall into this category.

Here you have a product where it seems even the manufacturer is not quite sure what it is.

All they’re telling you is “It’s some kind of meat and you should eat it … around noon.”

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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It’s hard to imagine being the head of a household when my life at this point consists mostly of wandering around my apartment, kicking underwear up in the air and trying to catch it.

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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I saw a study that said, the number one fear of the average person is public speaking. Number two is death.

Death is number two! How in the world is that?

That means to most people, if you have to go to a funeral, you would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy.

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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There is a certain critical line of sports enthusiasm where it can get a little uncomfortable … Where people start to act like they are in the game. They say things like, “We won! We won!”

“No, they won. You watched. Just calm down. I saw the whole game. You did not play. It’s one of the main reasons they won.”

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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Players go to different teams. Teams move from city to city. The uniform is the only constant. … We just want our clothes to beat the clothes from the other city.

We’re rooting for laundry.

That’s really all sports is. If a player leaves your team, then comes back and plays against your team? The hostility. “Booo … Different shirt.” Exact same human being. “I hate this guy. He’s in a different shirt.”

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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Went to the track to see some horse racing. …

Do the horses even know that its a race? … I mean, I’m sure the horses have some idea of what’s going on. They probably know that, “This guy on my back is in a huge hurry.” …

But the horse must get to the end and go, (out of breath) “We were just here! What was the point of that? This is where we were. That was the longest possible route you could take to get where you wanted to be. Why didn’t we just stay here?

We would have been first …”

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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The tattoo trend seems like the last gasp of a dying culture, doesn’t it?

So bored now, we’re just doodling on ourselves.

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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A lot of wives complain that their husbands do not listen …

I’ve never heard my wife say this … she may have …

I don’t know.

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

With my father, one never knew what was going to happen from one moment to the next. On one occasion he and I were walking through an uptown street in New  York after dark. In those days Fifty-eighth Street was far uptown. We probably were walking through Fifty-eighth Street from one avenue to another. There were any number of house lots which had not yet been built upon. These lots had board fences to prevent passers-by from falling into the rock pit which most of the vacant places seemed to be. In front of one of these board fences, and in the very dim light of the infrequent gas lamps, a tough-looking specimen demanded money. It really amounted to a hold-up, although no pistol was involved.

My father was an extraordinarily powerful man and as quick as a cat. Before the man had finished speaking my father grabbed him and actually boosted him up on the top of the fence and pushed him over. What he fell into on the other side, how much he was hurt, how he got out, and what he thought had happened to him have filled me with wonder these many years.

— from A Genius in the Family, by Hiram Percy Maxim

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And sometimes just because you could have done better doesn’t mean you’ve done badly.

— Carlton Fisk (addressing his father during his Hall of Fame speech)

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On our way back to the motel and well within the city limits of Tucson, a coyote ran across the road. The coyote is a great favorite of ours. If every town had more coyotes and less people, the world would be a much safer place in which to live. You will understand that my aversion to the human species is not so much that I dislike people as that I can’t stand them.

— Adventures in Birding, by Jean Piatt

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Birding takes one out of doors; it satisfies the craving of every decent person to brush the morning dew from the grass and inhale what is left of our pure air. It is an engrossing pastime and one never wearies of it but only from it. It affords endless hours of armchair debate and exchange of bird lore with like-minded friends. It is exercise, of a sort. It offers an inexhaustible treasures store of knowledge to be assimilated; one never learns the millionth part of all. It helps one meet other people and make friends—if you like that sort of thing. It interrupts your work, which, in almost all cases, is a very good thing both for you and for the work. But more than all this, it is adventure.

— Adventures in Birding, by Jean Piatt

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Not many people would feel impelled to buddy up to Bob Gibson. I suggested that he must be exposed to a good deal of barside baseball expertise at his place of work [Gibby’s restaurant in Omaha], and he said, “Who wants to talk to fans? They always know so much, to hear them tell it, and they always think baseball is so easy. You hear them say, ‘Oh, I was a pretty good ballplayer myself back when I was in school, but then I got this injury …’ Some cabdriver gave me that one day, and I said, ‘Oh, really? That’s funny, because when I was young I really wanted to be a cabdriver, only I had this little problem with my eyes, so I never made it.’ He thought I was serious. It went right over his head.”

—Once More Around the Park, by Roger Angell

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Quisenberry [Dan Quisenberry of the 1985 Kansas City Royals] when pitching invites more similes than stats. His ball in flight suggests the kiddie-ride concession at a county fairgrounds—all swoops and swerves but nothing there to make a mother nervous; if you’re standing close to it, your first response is a smile. … The man himself—Quis in mid-delivery—brings visions of a Sunday-picnic hurler who has somehow stepped on his own shoelaces while coming out of his windup …

—Once More Around the Park, by Roger Angell

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In September 1986, during an unmomentous Giants-Braves game out at Candlestick Park, Bob Brenly, playing third base for the San Franciscos, made an error on a routine ground ball in the top of the fourth inning. Four batters later, he kicked away another chance and then, scrambling after the ball, threw wildly past home in an attempt to nail a runner there: two errors on the same play. A few moments after that, he managed another boot, thus becoming only the fourth player since the turn of the century to rack up four errors in one inning. In the bottom of the fifth, Brenly hit a solo home run. In the seventh, he rapped out a bases-loaded single, driving in two runs and tying the game at 6-6. The score stayed that way until the bottom of the ninth, when our man came up to bat again, with two out, ran the count to 3-2, and then sailed a massive home run deep into the left-field stands. Brenly’s account book for the day came to three hits in five at-bats, two home runs, four errors, four Atlanta runs allowed, and four Giant runs driving in, including the game-winner. A neater summary was delivered by his manager, Roger Craig, who said, “This man deserves the Comeback Player of the Year Award for this game alone.”

—Once More Around the Park, by Roger Angell

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[Politics is] the art of obtaining money from the rich and votes from the poor, on the pretext of protecting each from the other.

—Oscar Ameringer, from A Third Treasury of the Familiar, edited by Ralph L. Woods

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A Bag of Tools

Isn’t it strange
That princes and kings
And clowns that caper
In sawdust rings,
And common people
Like you and me
Are builders in eternity?

Each is given a bag of tools,
A shapeless mass,
A book of rules;
And each must make—
Ere life has flown—
A stumbling block
Or a steppingstone.

R.L. Sharpe, from A Third Treasury of the Familiar, edited by Ralph L. Woods

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You get exactly the same results in Colossians 3:16 when the Word of Christ dwells in you richly that you get in Ephesians 5:19 when you are filled with the Spirit. There is an old rule in mathematics that “things equal to the same thing are equal to one another.” If to be filled with the Word is equal in result to being filled with the Spirit, then it should be clear that the Word-filled Christian is the Spirit-filled Christian. as the Word of Christ dwells in us richly, controls all our ways, as we walk in obedience to the Word, the Spirit of God fills, dominates, and controls us to the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

From In the Heavenlies, by H.A. Ironside.