Canada's Unfamiliar Quotations

In last week's column, I reflected on the value of quotations and shared some from the "Words" board I kept outside my dorm room when I was a resident assistant at Indiana University.  This week, we will take a look at some specific lines and consider what we might draw from them.

It's not as well known these days, I suspect, but I remember a book called Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.  John Bartlett was not a professor or esteemed writer, but rather a bookseller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the nineteenth century.  Like countless people before him, Bartlett kept something called a "commonplace book," where he began recording — you guessed it — quotations.

Although he was surrounded by a lot of really smart people — Cambridge, after all, is the home of Harvard University, and Bartlett ran the University Book Store — he himself began accumulating some renown as a fountain of information.  In an article in American Heritage magazine, Emily Morison Beck explains:

“He had already developed a reputation for erudition, which caused professors and students alike to 'ask John Bartlett' about a book, an author, or a quotation. He found it useful to keep a commonplace book, which became the basis for a collection of the most popular quotations arranged chronologically and with the sources given.”

Ah, you were a man after my heart, John Bartlett. I, too, keep a commonplace book — or rather a vast array of Evernote files (nearly 2000), including notes on literature, history, art, science, education, and more — and, yes, one of these files contains quotations. Alas, "ask Mark Canada" has not become a meme around my campus, my neighborhood, or even my home, perhaps because the handful of people who made the mistake of asking me about, say, Benjamin Franklin or dictionaries or baseball got a sprawling lecture. Bartlett, I'm guessing, knew when to shut up. I'm going to work on that.

Anyway, the word that strikes me in Bartlett's title is "Familiar." In his preface, as Beck explains, he referred to quotations that were "household words.”

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is still around, now in its 19th edition, and I hope it continues to thrive.  There's something to be said for a collection that preserves classic words of wisdom.  Not all insightful and inspiring quotations are "Familiar," though.  Some of my favorites are ones I have encountered only once.  They deserve a broader hearing, I think.  To this end, I present Canada's Unfamiliar Quotations.

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.  Then quit.  There's no use being a d—- fool about it."

I'm beginning with the line that I quoted in last week's column.  W. C. Fields was a well-known comedian who succeeded on Broadway before making several films, including My Little Chickadee with Mae West.  His line on quitting is, of course, an extension of a famous aphorism, one that expresses a core principle of American culture.  You may remember hearing some version of it when you were a child, perhaps from a parent or a teacher.  Other variations include "Quitters never win, and winners never quit."  The version from Fields is funny because he contradicts something held to be a moral principle, something we would expect of a wise-cracking contrarian.   Comedians often challenge the status quo.  (Think George Carlin.)  The heart of much comedy is, in fact, irony — that is, some form of contrast, particularly between what ought to be and what actually is.  Here, though, part of the brilliance of the line is the truth hidden within it: sometimes quitting actually is a good idea.  I'll bet most of us can think of examples from our own lives.  Perhaps you were once an athlete, musician, or actor with dreams of making it big.  It's a noble aspiration, but not everyone can succeed at the highest levels in these very competitive fields.  I know someone who played a lot of baseball as a youth and aspired to make a career of it.  At some point, he quit playing baseball competitively.  If he had continued, he would not have been a quitter, but he also would not have had the chance to teach thousands of students, lead meaningful initiatives as a university administrator, and write articles and books to help people elevate their minds, their lives, and their world.

"I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision."

As I wrote in last week's column, we often are drawn to quotations that confirm our own beliefs, but the ones that challenge those beliefs are even more worthy of our attention.  When I was young, I used to dislike this one from Eleanor Roosevelt.  To someone driven by a belief in free will, it seemed constraining.  Do we really have to become resigned to some predetermined identity?  Now that I have lived a few more decades, I think Roosevelt was onto to something.  If you have taken a personality inventory, such as the Myers-Briggs assessment or Strengths Finder, you probably have some sense of what your tendencies are.  Mine have told me that I love to learn and to achieve, focus on the future, and so on.  Yep, those assessments definitely ring true.  If, for some unknown reason, I tried to tamp down my love for learning or to stop thinking about the future, I would feel out of sorts, as if I wasn't being myself.  In a word, it would feel unnatural.  Was Roosevelt right then?  As is so often the case, the truth is nuanced.  I believe that, while we have tendencies shaped by both nature and nurture, we also can control our actions and, ideally, channel our strengths.  Even while I prepare for the future, I can remind myself to live in the present.  People who are quick to anger can learn strategies to control their emotions so that they don't become destructive.  Personalities are drivers, but not destinies.

"There is the known and the unknown, in between are the Doors."

I have my friend David Fisher to thank for bringing this great line to my attention.  He shared it with me after reading my Mind Travel column on Janus and the transition between the old and new years.  It's no surprise to me that it comes from a creative person such as Jim Morrison.  As I have written elsewhere, many artists seem to have a special interest in the ineffable, as well as access to it through, we might say, metaphorical doors.  I'm reminded of some relevant lines from another artist, Pink Floyd.  Many of you probably will recognize these lines, sung by David Gilmour in the song "Comfortably Numb":

When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse Out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look but it was gone. I cannot put my finger on it now. The child is grown. The dream is gone.

This notion of something only occasionally (and briefly) visible is what I would expect from an artist.  Indeed, it's right there in Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Alone," where the speaker refers to "The mystery that binds" him.  The American novelist Thomas Wolfe alluded to the ineffable in these lines from the opening paragraph of Look Homeward, Angel: "Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?"

"Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have."

This one comes from the French philosopher Emile Chartier, sometimes known by his pseudonym, Alain. Of course, everyone has more than one idea, but some of us become fixated on a few ideas and allow them to shape the way we think about the world, even the way we perceive it, so that we do not appreciate or even consider contrary or nuanced ideas that do not fit in the channels that these dominant ideas have dug for us. I will take myself as an example. I have spent my entire adult life trafficking in words, first as a journalism and literature student, then as a professional journalist, and later as a writer and a literary scholar. As you might imagine, I hold the First Amendment and the general principle of freedom of speech in high regard. Thanks to my high school journalism teacher, in fact, I memorized part of the First Amendment — "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press" — more than four decades ago, and I can still recite it. (Thanks, Julie!) That channel is so deep in my brain that I have to work to consider exceptions, but I must be willing to think outside the channel, so to speak, to ensure that I appreciate different perspectives that might refine my thinking.

This final line is an appropriate one on which to end, since it brings us back to the value of others' words.  We surely will not — and should not — accept every quotation we encounter, but there's value in considering all of them.