It was such a joy to hear you read last Tuesday! We were all enthralled and entertained by your narration. Please come back anytime and join us on the open mic!
i love your responses. I'll just say that in addition to complacency there is contentment - which clearly is a positive and yet to be content means that your ambition is satisfied, which many people (especially Americans) find an abomination. (also "why do we think" is definitely a thought worthy of carrying with you for an entire lifetime) --
Congratulations, MM. That some of your audience bought your book in addition to flattering you vouches for their sincerity. For my part, last week the New York Times Sunday section had as many Op-Eds from novelists as I can remember it having, which pleased me, but I must say that I didn't find any of them 10% as good as the essays you do here.
As far as marking a day as special and always carrying it with you, I'm going to come off as nuts, but when I was 9 years old, one night I decided to do just that. I logged three thoughts from that day and decided to always remember them. They were
1) Remember when Mrs. Burns called you Harris?
2) Remember when you ate that chocolate chip cookie? (It was an Entenmann's!)
3) Why do we think?
On any given day now, I might not be able to recall these thoughts, but they rushed up to me upon reading your column. I did used to rehearse them pretty often, enough so that they became part of my permanent memory. At the very least, I was in good practice for the first week's orientation activity at Oberlin, which was to say something random about yourself. I did end up growing up to be clinically obsessive-compulsive, but that's another story.
Greek origins aside, my first hypotheses for why the connotation of "rest on your laurels" changed had to do with Christian religion and society. There is such a thing as the Protestant work ethic, but I don't know that that had as much to do with seeking personal glory as striving for good works. I can't really see a Saint Augustine endorsing going after one achievement and then another. If you renounce secularity, you will rest on your laurels, and see that as a positive.
Then one aspect of being in the aristocracy was that you had the time to think and were not toiling. De Tocqueville seemed to see a class system as having pluses and minuses, and one plus was that the aristocracy served a needed function. Doing less brought the upside of having the time to think -- gave the world a "thinking class." I think I could pull out quotes from the Balzac novel I just read, The Magic Skin, that expressed the same idea. The character goes from being in an attic and impoverished and doing nothing but working on his great work all day, to inheriting a bunch of money and gaining a title, and he gains peace in the bargain, not just complacency. (Complacency is another term that can go either way; if defined as "satisfaction," that's a good thing.)
It was such a joy to hear you read last Tuesday! We were all enthralled and entertained by your narration. Please come back anytime and join us on the open mic!
i love your responses. I'll just say that in addition to complacency there is contentment - which clearly is a positive and yet to be content means that your ambition is satisfied, which many people (especially Americans) find an abomination. (also "why do we think" is definitely a thought worthy of carrying with you for an entire lifetime) --
Congratulations, MM. That some of your audience bought your book in addition to flattering you vouches for their sincerity. For my part, last week the New York Times Sunday section had as many Op-Eds from novelists as I can remember it having, which pleased me, but I must say that I didn't find any of them 10% as good as the essays you do here.
As far as marking a day as special and always carrying it with you, I'm going to come off as nuts, but when I was 9 years old, one night I decided to do just that. I logged three thoughts from that day and decided to always remember them. They were
1) Remember when Mrs. Burns called you Harris?
2) Remember when you ate that chocolate chip cookie? (It was an Entenmann's!)
3) Why do we think?
On any given day now, I might not be able to recall these thoughts, but they rushed up to me upon reading your column. I did used to rehearse them pretty often, enough so that they became part of my permanent memory. At the very least, I was in good practice for the first week's orientation activity at Oberlin, which was to say something random about yourself. I did end up growing up to be clinically obsessive-compulsive, but that's another story.
Greek origins aside, my first hypotheses for why the connotation of "rest on your laurels" changed had to do with Christian religion and society. There is such a thing as the Protestant work ethic, but I don't know that that had as much to do with seeking personal glory as striving for good works. I can't really see a Saint Augustine endorsing going after one achievement and then another. If you renounce secularity, you will rest on your laurels, and see that as a positive.
Then one aspect of being in the aristocracy was that you had the time to think and were not toiling. De Tocqueville seemed to see a class system as having pluses and minuses, and one plus was that the aristocracy served a needed function. Doing less brought the upside of having the time to think -- gave the world a "thinking class." I think I could pull out quotes from the Balzac novel I just read, The Magic Skin, that expressed the same idea. The character goes from being in an attic and impoverished and doing nothing but working on his great work all day, to inheriting a bunch of money and gaining a title, and he gains peace in the bargain, not just complacency. (Complacency is another term that can go either way; if defined as "satisfaction," that's a good thing.)