Author: James Geary

London is remarkable for the variety of wildlife to be found on its streets. Our neighborhood is practically seething with foxes, for example. You see them skulking around trash cans late at night, or hurrying across the road in a flash of headlights. I always imagined foxes as sleek and elegant animals, but that was before I had any direct experience of them. On closer inspection, they are really pretty mangy creatures. Maybe that’s the price they pay for living in the city. London also supports a wide variety of birds and amphibians, partly because so many homes sport little ponds in the gardens. Ponds is perhaps giving these tiny bodies of water too much credit; they are really nothing more than glorified puddles. It is no doubt from one of these that the frog I saw on my street the other day had wandered.

I was walking my daughter home from school when we saw it on the sidewalk, leaping determinedly along a garden wall. It was totally unperturbed by our presence, its sides gently pulsing with respiration. We stopped and watched it for a while. I wanted to put it back on the other side of the wall, where it was less likely to be run over by a car or become an impromptu science experiment for a group of local boys. I tried to get it to leap into my daughter’s lunch box so I could toss it over the wall, but it refused to co-operate. I grew up in the suburbs, so it never occured to me to actually pick it up with my hands. But a builder who happened to be working nearby strolled up, grabbed the frog and clasped it to his chest, showed my daughter one last time and dropped it over the wall, where it plopped into the grass.I’ve only ever had one other close encounter with an animal in a city. It was in San Francisco and this time it was a reptile, a snake. At the time, I was studying Buddhist philosophy and psychology and was walking home from a lecture at the San Francisco Zen Center, which was located just a few blocks from where I lived. The Zen Center was in a pretty dodgy neighborhood, so I was always very alert to my environment on my walks home, especially at night. This time, though, I remember I was completely lost in thought, still immersed in the ancient Buddhist texts we had been discussing. As I walked up the street, completely oblivious to my surroundings, I was astonished to see a snake writhing and hissing right at my feet, right in the middle of the sidewalk. This was no grass snake, though, slender, scared and harmless. It was long and it was thick and sinewy, and for a moment I was scared witless. The snake seemed just as startled to see me, and it quickly slithered off, first into a patch of weeds and then under a parked car. I think it eventually climbed up into the wheel well.

I just stood there dumbfounded for a minute. Where could a snake like that have come from? I didn’t imagine they would occur naturally in a neighborhood as urban as this. I thought maybe it had escaped from someone’s aquarium, or maybe some bored kid got tired of it and just decided to let it loose. But those Buddhist texts were still in my head, and in Buddhist mythology snakes are very auspicious creatures, symbols of wisdom rather than evil as they are in the West. So it occured to me that encountering this snake on the sidewalk was a very good thing, a sign that I was on the path to wisdom, a road that I desperately needed to travel at the time. I walked the rest of the way home in a very good mood.

So what did this frog on the sidewalk symbolize? Well, at the moment my daughter is very much into fairy tales. One of the games we often play together is Sleeping Beauty. She pricks her finger on the side of her bed and then swoons dramatically, pretending to fall asleep on the floor, with a huge grin on her face. I then kiss her and she wakes up. But when she wakes up she’s not a princess, but a very angry lion who roars and brandishes her claws. The only defense against this lion is tickling her. I don’t think my daughter has come across the story ofThe Frog Prince yet. But every time I peck her cheek and she wakes up, I do indeed feel like a king.

And here’s the only aphorism I can think of at the moment that pertains to amphibians. Happily, it is irrelevant to the rest of this posting. It’s from Chamfort, who clearly must have kissed some unpleasant frogs in his time:

A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over.

First of all, it’s nothing like going to a bookshop. That is always a slightly distressing experience, for me at least. I am invariably overwhelmed by the sheer number of books published, probably close to a million a year at least, and that’s just in English. The vast majority of these I would never want to read, of course, but that still leaves thousands and thousands of books that I just might be interested in. New non-fiction titles, new collections of poetry, new novels–how can I possibly keep up? I don’t normally think all that often about Schopenhauer, that curmudgeonly old bastard, but one of his aphorisms frequently pops up when I’m browsing in a bookshop:

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

And then there’s the sad realization that my book is one of these titles competing for shelf space; it’s literarally one in a million but a mere drop in this vast ocean of paper. In his wonderful memoir and rumination on the art of writing, Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly described his ambition “to write a book that will hold good for ten years afterwards.” A book that people would still want to read ten years after it was written, now that would be an accomplishment. Scanning the shelves in a bookshop I always wonder which titles will still be there in a decade. Will mine be one of them?

But going to the library is somehow much more like receiving a present. I’ve been going to the British Library a lot recently as part of my research for my encyclopedia of aphorists. When you think about it, going to the library should be a far more depressing experience for me as an author than going to a bookshop. In a bookshop, there are merely thousands of authors jostling for attention and literary longevity. In a library, particularly in the British Library, there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of authors, all entombed inside their works, gathering dust in the Library’s vast storage areas. Samuel Johnson was searingly correct when he quipped:

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

But I always get a kick from going to the library. Part of my enjoyment has to do with the way you order books in the British Library. First, you find a seat. Then scan the electronic database for the books you want and order them electronically. Depending on where the books are actually physically located, they arrive within 70 minutes or 48 hours. A little light goes on at your desk asking you to come and collect them. So you walk up to the desk, show your library pass, the librarian retreats into the shelves and emerges with a pile of books stacked up like Christmas presents. Then back to your desk to unpack your treasures.

What is encouraging about a library, I guess, is the tantalizing sense that at any moment I could make an incredible discovery: a brilliant new aphorist whom nobody has heard of, a great new source for aphorists from languages and cultures that are strange to me. This is similar to the feeling I get in used bookshops, when I never know if the next beaten up old hardback without a dust jacket will turn out to be that edition of Hart Crane’s poems I’ve been looking for for years. Discoveries can be made in shops that sell new books, too, but there it often feels like someone else is in control of the possibilities. It feels as if there is less room for chance, partly because of the unrelenting stream of new books that are constantly appearing. Very quickly, it’s out with the old and in with the new.

I guess it’s a sense that libraries are like wildlife sanctuaries for books. A book may not survive long in the wild Darwinian competition of a bookshop. If it’s not adapted to the commercial environment of the moment, it will be whisked off the shelves within weeks. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. The writing, publishing and selling of books is a business, and only the strong deserve to survive in the marketplace. But in the marketplace of ideas a book must be judged by more than just its sales figures; its content might be priceless even though its sales are meagre. That’s why libraries are so important; that’s where books are not permitted to become extinct, where idea shoppers can roam the endless aisles inspired by the hope that they will eventually find the right product for them. That’s where a timeless book like Enemies of Promise, first published in 1938, can thrive for much longer than a mere ten years.

The other day at breakfast my younger son asked, “Dad, have you ever been 100% happy?” (My son has a way of asking impertinent philosophical questions at unexpected times.) I took a minute or so before I answered, because I wanted to give him a considered reply but also because I was a bit concerned about why he would be asking a question like that anyway. Finally I said that the times when I had been 100% happy were times when I was completely absorbed in some activity that I really liked. I had recently bought him a bag of 100 plastic soldiers, which he had been playing with obsessively for the past few days. “It’s like playing with your soldiers,” I said. “Aren’t you 100% happy when you’re doing that?” Then I discovered the reason he had asked the question in the first place. “Yes,” he said, “but then I remember I have to go to school and that spoils it.”

“Can I say ‘annoying’?” That’s the question my daughter has been asking me of late, as she explores the boundaries of the new vocabulary she is learning. “Yes, you can say ‘annoying,’” I reply. “Can I say ’shut up’?” she asks. “No, you can’t say ’shut up.’” “And I can’t say ’shit’,” she states matter-of-factly. That’s right, she already knows she can’t say ’shit’ but she still gets a tremendous kick from just quickly confirming that fact with me because to do so, of course, means getting to say ’shit’ all over again without fear of punishment. It’s like the joke my son told me the other day, warning me ahead of time that it contained a curse: A 6-year-old boy was scolded by his parents for still talking like a baby. ‘Why don’t you use more grown-up words,’ they said. So the next day, when he got home from school, his parents asked him what he had done in class and he said: ‘We read a book called Winnie the Shit.’

Words have an awesome power, and there’s no clearer example of that than when children deploy new vocabulary to see what effect their words have on the world. My daughter, for example, wields the word ‘annoying’ all the time now, using it to describe anything and everything that elicits her displeasure. My son, who’s eight, enjoys using mild curse words in safe contexts, like in a joke. He hears other kids using them for real in the schoolyard and can see the mixture of shock and admiration their use evokes in other children. My kids are learning that words are not just airy nothings; they have a very real and dramatic impact on the world—they can make other people laugh or cry, they can help get you what you want, they can get you into or out of a lot of trouble, too.

Adults are usually unconscious of the latent power of language, but you can feel it in full force again when learning a foreign tongue. One of Austrian philosopherLudwig Wittgenstein’s best aphorisms is:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

I felt my linguistic limits extended when I learned Dutch about 17 years ago. Each language has words in it that don’t exist in any other tongue, and one of the greatest joys of speaking another language is stretching your mind to encompass this new vocabulary.Gezellig is a word like that in Dutch. It has so many nuanced meanings that it’s impossible to find a simple English equivalent. Indeed, thereis no single English equivalent since gezellig is a word that expresses a distinctly Dutch state of mind. It means different things in different circumstances. An evening with friends can begezellig, meaning friendly and intimate and fun. But inanimate objects can also be gezellig, like a room with a roaring fire in the fireplace, meaning cozy and inviting. But an individual can also be gezellig, meaning that he or she is warm and welcoming. It was not until I learned Dutch, and came to understand the meaning of this word, that I was able to recognize the quality of gezelligheid when I saw it. This not only added a new word to my vocabulary; it added a new experience to my world.

And so it is with my daughter. At almost four years old, she is intrepidly exploring the world of words, experimenting with language to see which words cause happiness, which words cause pain, which words make people laugh, which words make them cry. By trying out words like ‘annoying’, ’shut up’ and ’shit’ on me, she’s testing to see if they cause the desired effect. This is something we never stop doing. What American poet John Hall Wheelock wrote is just as true of adults as it is for children:

Thought for the day: Why is every public building in Britain so stuffy and overheated while every private home is so draughty and underinsulated? Take our house, for example. You could drive several small turbines on the chill wind pouring through the enormous gaps between our windows and their fittings. We could probably generate enough electricity that way to heat the house for a year. But last week, while waiting for the man in J. Shiner and Sons to retrieve my brass caster from the basement of his shop, I was practically sweating to death. My throat was parched. I was just about to start peeling off the layers I had piled on to protect me from the biting March wind when he reappeared and I knew that soon I’d be back in the refreshing cold again.

I had gone to J. Shiner and Sons to pick up a new caster for a footstool that my wife, a painter, textile designer and increasingly skilled upholsterer, was refurbishing. There were two other people ahead of me in the shop but just the one man to take care of them. He was a small, frail-looking man whose polite, professional manner didn’t quite seem to match the tight-fitting football shirt he wore. Each of the customers before me had a very specific request—they needed a brass fitting of a particular size and shape—and, strangely, they each needed casters like myself. The man behind the counter (presumably a descendant of J. Shiner, who founded the shop on this site in 1879 or thereabouts) listened patiently to their descriptions and then disappeared to the basement. I heard the sound of his footsteps fade away as he walked downstairs, then silence. I didn’t hear anything from him again for several minutes until the clomp, clomp, clomp that signaled he was coming back upstairs. When he did reappear, he held in his hands several shiny brass casters carefully wrapped in white tissue paper. Each time it was exactly what the customer wanted.While the man was gone, I had plenty of time to wait (and become increasingly oppressed by the air in the stuffy, overheated shop). Waiting is a strange business. It happens so often, and often so imperceptibly, every day. There are mundane forms of waiting–for your browser to load, for your child to finish swimming lessons, for the lights to change. And there are existential forms of waiting: for an opportunity, for a sign, for a second chance. Waiting should never be a wasted, though, which is why this aphorism from John Milton’s Paradise Lost appeals to me so much:

They also serve who only stand and wait.

What purpose was I serving as I waited for my brass caster in J. Shiner and Sons? Well, it was a poignant reminder of the overwhelming amount of stuff in the world and the amazing fact that somewhere someone out there is an expert in all of it. The shop was festooned with fixtures, and looking around I saw different types of letterbox, dozens of doorknobs, a clutch of knockers next to a row of drapery rods, the occasional lamp or lantern, a run of house numbers in different sizes and fonts, and boxes and boxes of variously sized screws–all of it in brass. No casters on display, though; they must all be in the basement. And the guy behind the counter knew absolutely everything about all of it. When he gave me my caster, for example, he explained that they didn’t make the model I needed anymore (the footstool is pretty old) and the one he gave me had a larger wheel but would still fit the leg of the stool. He even provided the tiny screws I needed without me having to ask. He had similar stories to share with his other customers, either some technical detail about the casters or an anecdote about how the neighborhood around his shop was changing. In my haste to escape the sultry shop–as well as the more general hurry in which I too often rush to get things done–I was reminded that such friendly, informative little encounters are always worth the wait.

The idea is to make your upper body evaporate while your lower limbs thin into twin javelins. First, commit yourself totally to this risk. Then run as fast as you can, straight ahead. Don’t look back. Don’t look over your shoulder for the ball that may arrive before you. Launch yourself into space just as you near the base; the final leg of this journey must be a leap of faith. Lean back and enjoy it. But stay close to the ground. Hit the dirt like a flat stone skimming the surface of a lake. Sometimes, it’s wise to dissemble: slide to one side of the bag and hook it with your foot as you pass. Perplexing your opponent is never a mistake. As you fall, throw your arms into the air; time to surrender and say one last prayer. You’ve had your chance and taken it. The outcome is out of your hands.

Is this not a metaphor for life, good advice for getting out of a scrape, for surviving a close shave? You’re out there on your own. You’ve managed to find a safe place, however precarious. But you’ve got to move on. Often, someone coming up behind will give you a lift. But if not, you’ve got to do it yourself. In the act of stealing second base, you make it wholly your own. Miraculously, no one expects you to give it back. They respect you for it. Stand up, brush off the dirt, and look around. You’re already halfway home.

Last Saturday night I watched The War of the Worlds with my sons. This was the 1953 George Pal version, not the recent Spielberg remake. The boys were very excited. We had prepared a little cinema in the living room, dimmed the lights. I even allowed them to eat chocolate while they watched, an unheard-of luxury. My younger son’s glasses had been slightly mangled in a sword fight with his brother earlier in the evening, so they rested dramatically askew on his nose as if he was posing for a Picasso portrait.

I’ve been enthusiastically sharing—and consequently, rediscovering—my love for science fiction with the boys as they get older. It’s tremendous fun to share with them some of my favorite flicks, especially the classic B movies I used to watch every Saturday and Sunday afternoon as a kid: Earth versus the Flying Saucers, When Worlds Collide, Destination Moon and The Day the Earth Stood Still, which to this day remains one of my most beloved films. I even turned them on to The Prisoner, the cult 1960s British spy series, which used to be on PBS late at night after Monty Pythons Flying Circus when I was I teenager.The War of the Worlds is a truly awful film. It is filled with all the romantic and jingoistic cliches of the 1950s without any of the veiled anti-McCarthite symbology. The hero is as stiff as a board, and the heroine never appears without screaming or bursting into tears. But I’ve always loved the film because of the devastating death ray and those sleek, elegant Martian spaceships (of which I am reminded every time I see an art deco Paris metro station), and because it occasioned my first real confrontation with authority.

I was in the second grade at a Catholic primary school, so I was about eight years old. (The same age at which I discovered aphorisms in Reader’s Digest.) I had just seen The War of the Worlds on television, and somehow the subject came up in Sister Edmunda’s class. I was terrified of Sister Edmunda. She was a mean and unpredicatable teacher. She was very elderly and would often repeat things in class or contradict something she had just said or teach us things that even we as eight-year-olds knew were wrong. Of course, I didn’t realize at the time that she was senile. I just knew that she was a bit crazy, really scary and I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of her.

Anyway, somehow The War of the Worlds came up in class and Sister Edmunda asked: Why did the Martians die? My hand shot up immediately because I had just seen the film and that final image—the dying Martian’s moist green limb, with three suction cups for fingers, creeping from the spaceship and then falling still—was so vivid in my mind. But Sister Edmunda called on someone else, and that person offered meekly: Because of prayer? Yes! Sister Edmunda announced. Because God answered the people’s prayers. This didn’t sound right to me, though, so I tenatively raised my hand and Sister Edmunda acknowledged me with a slight nod. I think the Martians died because they were poisoned by something in the atmosphere, I said. Sister Edmunda’s face darkened. She strode toward my desk in her stooped way and fixed me with her furious, baleful gaze. No, she barked, glowering above my chair. The Martians died because of prayer. Then she went on to lecture me on how God is all-powerful and all-loving and how he vanquished those nasty Martians for us. She then made me stand facing the corner in the front of the classroom as punishment for my heresy.

But I knew she was wrong. The climax of the film comes as the defeated humans cower in a church praying for a miracle, but the Martians died because their immune systems couldn’t withstand our earthly bacteria. That’s a preposterous oversight for a race so technically advanced, but there you have it. The narrator does say at the very end that God in his wisdom provided these bacteria for just such a purpose, but I didn’t believe it. They died because the bacteria got them, and that was it. I never forgot or forgave Sister Edmunda for the humiliation she put me through for saying what I knew to be true. It makes me think of Henry David Thoreau’s dictum:

Say what you have to say, not what you ought.

Nobody, especially kids, should ever be taught anything else. When I asked my sons what they thought of the film, I was very glad to hear them say they thought it was great but a little too “holy.”

Being an addendum to my Feb. 10 posting entitled ‘On Roads’…

I have a little black book in which I write down or paste in all the aphorisms I read and want to remember. It’s vaguely organized by aphorist, but I usually know where in the bulging book to look for something, usually even if I’m not sure who wrote it. While reading some Friedrich Nietzsche sayings in search of something I thought he wrote about iconoclasm, I came across this, which really belongs with the posting on roads:

One day we reach our goal—and now we point with pride to the long journeys we took to reach it. In truth we did not notice we were travelling. But we got so far because at each point we believed we were at home.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… A violinist is performing a fiendishly difficult solo at Carnegie Hall. His bow arm is a blur; sweat is pouring down his brow. He finishes with a flourish and the crowd goes wild. “Encore! Encore!” they shout. So he plays the same piece again, and when he finishes the second time the crowd once again erupts into applause and demands more. They’re insatiable. So he plays the same piece again. When he finishes the third time, and the crowd again calls for an encore, he demures. “I really should finish now,” he says. Then a voice comes from out of the crowd: “No, you’ll play it til you get it right!”

I’m certainly no virtuoso violinist, but so often over the past few weeks I’ve felt like an absolute beginner, an amateur. I periodically used to feel this way as an editor. Someone would suggest a new angle to a story, another editor would add a deft touch to a piece, a designer would select a great picture I had overlooked—and I would think: Why didn’t I think of that? You would suppose that after practicing the same craft for nigh on 17 years, I would have perfected it by now. But there’s never nothing left to learn. And familiarity doesn’t breed contempt as much as complacency. You do something every day so you think you know how to do it. But sometimes a lot of experience just gets in the way. Nowadays I feel like a beginner because I’m at the beginning, of a new phase in my career at least. That long, lonely walk back to the drawing board concentrates the mind wonderfully. You have to face the possibility that you really don’t know much after all.There are black spots, for sure. The prospects, or lack thereof, often seem daunting. Sometimes, I think I’m too old for this shit. But in my better moments I know that’s not spoken in the spirit of a true amateur. Rudyard Kipling wrote:

As soon as you find you can do anything, do something you can’t.

That’s good advice if you want to be a perpetual beginner, a professional amateur. The job description has less to do with what you do than how you do it. The word amateur is derived from the Latin amator, or lover, and its original meaning is: to do something for the love of it rather than the money, the perks, the prestige, the distraction from other things you’d rather not think about, or whatever. To be an amateur is to be in love with what you do. It’s not bad work if you can get it. I find I’m doing more and more of something I love—writing. (Now I just need to figure out how to get paid for it.) And that’s why Kipling’s little admonition is always in the back of my mind. As soon as I’ve written anything, I want to write something I can’t—or at least, something I haven’t written yet. You gotta love that.

A friend recently told me this story. He was driving through rural Vermont a couple of years ago when he came to a crossroads. There were two signposts, each pointing in a different direction but both bearing the name of his destination. So he pulled the car over, got out and approached a local man who was leaning against a fence. “Does it matter which way I go here?” he asked. “Not to me it don’t,” the man replied.

Crossroads isn’t the right metaphor for the point I’ve reached since losing my job. There are too few potential turning points at a crossroads. This feels more like a node on the Internet, with hundreds or thousands of avenues branching off it. Too many, in fact, to make a choice feasible. It’s like the plasma ball my son got for Christmas. The generator shoots arcs of static electricity, dozens of them, against the sides of the crystal. But when you touch the glass they all coalesce and stream toward your finger in a single, bright blue mass. At some point, probably sooner rather than later, I’ll have to start channeling all those bristling possibilities into a handful (at most) of real opportunities. But not just yet. It’s exciting, and frightening, to see all those options flashing.Even so, I’ve already begun to narrow things down. A few days ago, I passed up the opportunity to edit another magazine. It would have been a great job, making a magazine on a very timely and interesting topic. But it would have meant moving to another continent, something I’m just not prepared to do at this point. After declining the job, I suddenly felt a surge of anxiety. What had I done? Why did I pass on the chance to edit a magazine again and regain financial security? It would have been the safe, maybe even the smart, thing to do. And that’s part of the reason I didn’t do it. If I’m ever going to explore any of the roads that have opened up since I was made redundant, I’ll have to resist the temptation to go down the first road that looks familiar. You can’t expect a change of scenery if you never veer from the beaten track. But it’s hard (is it stupid, too?) to willingly remain in uncertainty, whether it has to do with your job or anything else in life. It’s difficult to stay on a path when you can only see a few steps in front of you. And there is always the risk that the road you finally end up choosing will lead nowhere, and you’ll always regret not taking the more traveled way.It put me in mind of an aphorism by Antonio Porchia:

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

No one has criticized the road I’ve been on since losing my job. In fact, I’ve received far more congratulations than commiserations since it happened, especially from people like me who are in their forties. I was surprised to hear how many people secretly wish it would happen to them. But there is a very strong voice inside my head berating me for not going back to what I know. I remember walking through the Japanese garden in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in 1989, just a few days before I left the North American continent for the European one. I laughed when I saw a sign that read: KEEP ON THE PATH. I had just finished selling the few things I owned to finance my trip to Europe. I was heading into the great unknown. If there was a path, I sure as hell didn’t see it. But I instinctively felt I was going in the right direction. Just like now. To a large extent, you make your own road by travelling on it. And you only really know where you’re going when you get there.