“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Exploring
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Category Archives: Commonplace Book
Contradict
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51
I usually misquote “large” as “vast.”
Proportion
”Sense of humor is ultimately just an acute sense of proportion… the funny person notices stuff first. You walk in a room, the funny person will know, ‘Hey, it’s cold in here.’ Or, ‘What’s that smell?’ You pull a car in front of me, a brand-new car from the showroom, and if it has a little scratch on it… my eye will go right to the scratch, ‘Hey, you got a little scratch here.’”
Eddie Murphy, Being Eddie, 44:45 or so. (Netflix)
I would add context. The more and broader stuff you know, the more cars from the showroom run in front of you.
Beginnings
“Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.” —Sam Shepard
Lippmann and How Close
“It is often very illuminating, therefore, to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion? Was it the man who told you, or the man who told him, or someone still further removed? And how much was he permitted to see?”
“When he informs you that France thinks this and that, what part of France did he watch? How was he able to watch it? Where was he when he watched it? What Frenchmen was he permitted to talk to, what newspapers did he read, and where did they learn what they say?”
Public Opinion, chapter 2
Walter Lippmann
——
One may obviously substitute Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, and Israel here.
Raining
”It’s raining today. I could do tragedy.” — Lucy Huntzinger
Boredom
I remembered Roger Ebert saying this about The Age of Innocence. I was right about the topic; wrong about where. It’s in his review of The Remains of the Day.
“I got some letters from readers who complained (Innocence) was boring, that “nothing happens in it.” To which I was tempted to reply: If you had understood what happened in it, it would not have been boring.”
No stain of cruelty…
“As a man, his character cannot be spoken of too highly; no stain of cruelty or faithlessness rests on him.”
That’s an old fashioned, but quite wonderful, assessment of a life. It comes from the 11th Edition Britannica, discussing Étienne Macdonald, one of Napoleon’s marshals.
(To explain his surprising last name: His father was a Jacobite exile, who was of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s retinue. The elder Macdonald married well, giving his son the background to have a chance to advance in the Army.)
In the Icebox
“Another of this wonderful woman’s wonderful sayings (I told you—I got a million of ‘em; don’t make me prove it) was “Milk always takes the flavor of what’s next to it in the icebox.” Not a very useful saying, you might think, but I suspect it’s not only the reason I’m writing this introduction, but the reason I’m writing it the way I’m writing it.
Does it sound like Harlan wrote it?
It does?
That’s because I just finished the admirable book which follows. For the last four days I have been, so to speak, sitting next to Harlan in the icebox. I am not copying his style; nothing as low as that. I have, rather, taken a brief impression of his style, the way that, when we were kids, we used to be able to take a brief impression of Beetle Bailey or Blondie from the Sunday funnies with a piece of Silly Putty (headline in the New York Times Book Review: KING OFFERS EERILY APT METAPHOR FOR HIS OWN MIND!!).”
— Stephen King, from his introduction to Harlan Ellison’s Stalking the Nightmare
Experiential
I once asked film critic Leonard Maltin how much movie production experience he had. He answered, “You don’t need to be a Cordon Bleu chef to know the omelette needs more salt.”