This Too Shall Pass

Ever heard the phrase "this too shall pass?" Did you just roll your eyes? I know it has some annoying, new wave, everything is fleeting, Eamonn is going a bit far with this yoga thing, shit like that is why I'll never quit drinking, sorts of connotations.......but it really is a powerful four words.

I spent a lot of time thinking about important stuff like, if I could do my senior quote in high school over what would it say? Or what would I name my first boat? Or what would I name my first dog? Or thinking about what a perfect wish would be if I could only have one wish?.......really important stuff. When things are going well I spend about 10 hours a week running, or riding my bikes or in yoga classes.....that's about 10 hours a week really all up in my own head. It's a lot of time to think.

If you are curious my original high school quote was Shakespeare/Julius Ceaser "Cowards die many times before their death but the valiant never taste of death but once." I'd like a do over there.

I have no idea what I'd name my first boat but my first dog is definitely going to be named Hank Stamper (Sometimes a Great Notion - Kesey).

If I had one wish it would definitely be "The ability to master any skill in a few minutes." Its perfect, think about it.

Over the course of the past couple of years, really since giving up booze, the term "this too shall pass" has become about my favorite. If there is a more meaningful few word mantra I am not aware of it. It is closely tied to living in the moment but has some deeper "we are not who we think we are" shit going on as well. I don't want to get to far into it but it's rad. Anyways.....

Today I was doing some research on a totally unrelated topic and came across a little history on the quote that attributed it (indirectly) to Abraham Lincoln. With interest piqued I dug a little deeper and found out quite a bit more about the history of the quote, all of which made me really happy. I guess I had always figured it was just an old sobriety thing my pops had picked up along the way. He has a lot of those.

On to "This Too Shall Pass."

Abraham Lincoln famously used the mantra in the form of a short story in a speech at the Wisconsin State Fair September 30th 1859 (15 days, 151 years ago). His story and the conclusion of his speech goes as follows:

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! -- how consoling in the depths of affliction! "And this, too, shall pass away." And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away."

It seems that the term also finds roots in the Bible and has been attributed to King Soloman, although it's possible the origins date back even further. In Turkish it looks like this:


Someone should be a pimp and get a tattooed sleeve of that. Seriously, no seriously. Tattoos are mysterious.

Biblical reference:

I Corinthians 10:12

And so finally after many more months of work, all the sages came back to him, and they had come to a unanimous conclusion that the wisdom of the world could be put into a four-word sentence. They told the king that this sentence expresses much. It is chastening in the hour of pride and consoling in the depths of afflictions. And I've reflected on this sentence this week. The sentence of their wisdom was: "This too shall pass."

I love thinking about things that have relevance today and can be proven to have had relevance in ancient history. My inner humanist just eats stuff like that up. How much have we changed?

I'm not going any further with this. It just struck me as interesting, surprised me, and I thought I would pass it on.

Do trust that whatever you have going on, whether good or bad, it won't last forever. It's all ups and downs gangster.

A Tribute to Walker Percy

Who wrote the best book I never finished. Seriously, The Moviegoer is one of my favorite books of all time and I haven't finished it. Not even that close. I don't know why. Maybe it scared me, maybe that's why.

I have to wonder how a guy can know as much as Walker Percy knew and not jump off a cliff. Well maybe it's because he had writing, he could get it all out and leave it there. Anyways, he's brilliant.

Scratch, I just learned more about him in article below. He knew plenty about "jumping off a cliff," but that wasn't what he was about. Really interesting character. It's a shame modern literature has forgotten him.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2010/06/the-booky-man-walker-to-new-orleans.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Percy

Quotes:

"Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion."
— Walker Percy (The Moviegoer)

"--you have too good a mind to throw away. I don't quite know what we're doing on this insignificant cinder spinning aay in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fibre of my being. A man must live by his light and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.'

She is right. I will say yes. I will say yes even though I do not really know what she is talking about."
— Walker Percy

"Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course."
— Walker Percy

"For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.
It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: "In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but--" or "Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However--" and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord."
— Walker Percy

"You say it is a simple thing surely, all gain and no loss, to pick up a good-looking woman and head for the beach on the first day of the year. So say the newspaper poets. Well it is not such a simple thing and if you have ever done it, you know it isn't--unless, of course, the woman happens to be your wife or some other everyday creature so familiar to you that she is as invisible as you yourself. Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise. "
— Walker Percy

"It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon."
— Walker Percy

"Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him."
— Walker Percy

Gilead - Maryilynne Robinson

This is a delicate, almost feminine book that I really really enjoyed but it's a book I wouldn't recommend loosely (I recommended it to my dad and he had no interest). It's very religious and it's very philosophical. That said the writing is incredible, the formatting is original and at moments it's intensely suspenseful. It's also extremely moving.

I read it months and months ago and had not thought about it for sometime until I bumped into a quote page by a guy named Ryan Holiday (www.ryanholiday.net) and saw that he had pulled a few quotes from the book and written them down. These are his selections, not mine, but they give you a sense for the writing. The first quote is incredible.

"In every important way we are secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of a number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable--which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live."
Robinson, Marilynne
Gilead

There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us.
Robinson, Marilynne
Gilead

I think they must also be a preeminent courage that allows us to be brave--that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that previous things have been put in our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.
Robinson, Marilynne
Gilead

From Song O The Day

Alright, Touch of Gray……How many of you read the title and winced? Show of hands. Or maybe the Grateful Dead makes you wince. Or maybe it’s the Eagles (Hotel California?). I know someone here loves Hotel California.

This website is comprised of a group of serious music fans (probably serious art fans in general) and what irks the serious music fan more than a song that takes a great not hugely mainstream band into the mainstream? What drives “serious” music fans crazier than hearing a band they’ve loyally followed for years blasting from the radio of some Kookabear’s Audi convertible at a stop light on Van Ness? Nothing, right? Maybe I should speak for myself. That shit drives me nuts.

And it’s not only music, sometimes its fashion, or literature or the use of slang, or a brand of smokes, a particular cocktail and on and on. Let’s stick with music for now though.

Back in the first couple of years of High School, when drawing all over my binder was a cool and acceptable thing to do, I had THE DOORS scrawled all over my shit. I was in a serious Jim Morrison stage……doesn’t everyone go through a Doors stage, you know, right when you start getting high and just have to be different. That’s when the Doors can really latch on. Actually I think that Jim Morrison just got stuck in that phase and that kind of summarizes Jim Morrison…………I’m digressing some, back to my diatribe on my personal artistic elitism (now do you see where this is going)……..Back in the notebook scribbling stage I remember one specific conversation I had that was replayed in some form or fashion, with different bands/songs, countless times over the years. It went something like this:

Random cute 14 year old girl in Algebra class: “Oh, you like The Doors, me too. I love that song Light Your Fire. That movie was pretty cool, I watched it at midnight last weekend when my parents were drinking wine with the neighbors.”

What a great conversation starter. A girl I only kind of know reads my binder and comments on a potential mutual interest. Not only has she taken an interest in me and what I like but she’s now highlighted that a) she does things here parents wouldn’t approve of and b) she’s down with movies primarily about drugs and lots of random sex. All in one short and innocent, ice breaking statement.

How should a 14 year old E Tuck respond? Be stoked, be nice, suggest re-watching the movie together the next time her parents are getting wasted with the neighbors and maybe, just maybe, get a little titty. Stupid hindsight.

Instead, how does young E Tuck respond:

“Light MY Fire is like the worst song the Doors sing. You probably only have the greatest hits album. You obviously don’t REALLY listen to the Doors” Spoken with contempt as I return to inartistic doodling……What an Asshole.

You see, I couldn’t help it, the Doors were MY band, this girl couldn’t understand. Remember White Men Can't Jump? “You can’t hear Jimmy.”

And it went on like that for years. At the end of High School it was Punk Rock, then Hip Hop, then throwback 80’s jams.

“Oh you listen to punk? Whose your favorite band? Oh Blink 182, Green Day? Right, you’re an idiot.”

“Your into Outkast? You really like that song Mrs. Jackson. Right, you’re an idiot.”

When I moved to the East Coast in Summer of 1997 hearing the Sublime/Sublime album blasting out of dorm rooms on campus made me so angry I didn’t listen to the album again until 2005….at least in public.

My snobbery applied to greatest hits albums, popular radio songs, bands that became exceptionally popular (Green Day was ruined for me….and still pretty much is), popular books (I hated the Kite Runner, refused to read the Davinci Code). I wouldn't go to this bar, eat at that restaurant, where gear of that brand.

At the end of the day it has always been about my ego. How else am I going to keep my edge, to clearly differentiate myself from the people around me, to ensure everyone knows how well read, musically versed, in touch with street style I am?

Over the last couple of years I’ve been making an effort to take the ego out of it, to figure out what I like and what I don’t like regardless of the image I would like to portray. It's getting better I think. You probably still are not going to see me reading the new Michael Lewis novel on a bus or wearing a striped shirt out at night but I think it's getting better. And really, what do I know, Opera’s Book club is reading Joyce’s Dubliners this month.

Back to Touch of Grey. Go on, give it a listen. Admit it. It’s a pretty good track.

From The Doon-Dog Wedding

I Like You by Sandol Stoddard Warburg

I like you and I know why.
I like you because you are a good person to like.
I like you because when I tell you something special, you know it's special
And you remember it a long, long time.
You say, Remember when you told me something special
And both of us remember

When I think something is important
you think it's important too
We have good ideas
When I say something funny, you laugh
I think I'm funny and you think I'm funny too
Hah-hah!
I like you because you know where I'm ticklish
And you don't tickle me there except just a little tiny bit sometimes
But if you do, then I know where to tickle you too
You know how to be silly
That's why I like you
Boy are you ever silly
I never met anybody sillier than me till I met you
I like you because you know when it's time to stop being silly
Maybe day after tomorrow
Maybe never
Too late, it's a quarter past silly
Sometimes we don't say a word
We snurkle under fences
We spy secret places
If I am a goofus on the roofus hollering my head off
You are one too
If I pretend I am drowning, you pretend you are saving me
If I am getting ready to pop a paper bag,
then you are getting ready to jump
HOORAY

That's because you really like me
You really like me, don't you
And I really like you back
And you like me back and I like you back
And that's the way we keep on going every day

If you go away, then I go away too
or if I stay home, you send me a postcard
You don't just say Well see you around sometime, bye
I like you a lot because of that
If I go away, I send you a postcard too
And I like you because if we go away together
And if we are in Grand Central Station
And if I get lost
Then you are the one that is yelling for me

And I like you because when I am feeling sad
You don't always cheer me up right away
Sometimes it is better to be sad
You can't stand the others being so googly and gaggly every single minute
You want to think about things
It takes time

I like you because if I am mad at you
Then you are mad at me too
It's awful when the other person isn't
They are so nice and hoo-hoo you could just about punch them in the nose

I like you because if I think I am going to throw up
then you are really sorry
You don't just pretend you are busy looking at the birdies and all that
You say, maybe it was something you ate
You say, the same thing happened to me one time
And the same thing did

If you find two four-leaf clovers, you give me one
If I find four, I give you two
If we only find three, we keep on looking
Sometimes we have good luck, and sometimes we don't

If I break my arm, and if you break your arm too
Then it's fun to have a broken arm
I tell you about mine, you tell me about yours
We are both sorry
We write our names and draw pictures
We show everybody and they wish they had a broken arm too

I like you because I don't know why but
Everything that happens is nicer with you
I can't remember when I didn't like you
It must have been lonesome then

I like you because because because
I forget why I like you but I do
So many reasons
On the 4th of July I like you because it's the 4th of July
On the fifth of July, I like you too
If you and I had some drums and some horns and some horses
If we had some hats and some flags and some fire engines
We could be a HOLIDAY
We could be a CELEBRATION
We could be a WHOLE PARADE
See what I mean?

Even if it was the 999th of July
Even if it was August
Even if it was way down at the bottom of November
Even if it was no place particular in January
I would go on choosing you
And you would go on choosing me
Over and over again
That's how it would happen every time
I don't know why
I guess I don't know why I really like you
Why do I like you
I guess I just like you
I guess I just like you because I like you.

Credit for Good Work

I have been a fan of Viceland for years now, initially just checking out their do's and don'ts which are sometimes really funny. But over the last couple of months I've heard a lot of buzz about VBS.TV, Viceland's broadcast station.

Last week a friend (thanks Dave) pointed me in the direction of a documentary on VBS about Liberia. I watched it in installments, as they were released, and was blown away. It was fearless, wide open, journalism and the topic was riveting.....if morbid and hugely depressing.

I have been talking up VBS and this documentary since (Vice Guide to Liberia). Today I saw an article on CNN about VBS and their documentary work with a particular focus on a piece they did on North Korea. The journalist is the same guy that did the Liberia piece. Awesome that this guy, whose work blew me away, is now getting international recognition through CNN. I haven't seen the North Korea piece but I am sure it's incredible.

Check it out: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/02/08/vbs.north.korea/index.html?hpt=C1

And if anyone ever reads this blog I'd love to hear some comments and reactions to the Liberia piece and this guys work in general.