Category: Philosophy, Axioms, and Pretty Good Advice

      Some jokes make you laugh, some make you groan, some make you cringe–and most of them give some insight into the mind of the person telling it (“That was supposed to be funny?”). The best jokes, the ones that stand the test of time, make you think, often by showing you a bit of truth that was hidden in plain sight; once it’s revealed, you discover that you see it everywhere, and life looks a tiny bit different forever after. Jokes made rich men of Milton Berle and Johnny Carson, but the world will much longer remember the work of humorists like Mark Twain, Lenny Bruce, and George Carlin.

I wish I knew the author of one particular joke, because I’d gladly thank him or her for the philosophical seed it planted in my head. It’s very old (as you will easily tell from its details), and arguably not all that funny, but ever since I first heard it, I’ve pondered a truth probably unrecognized by its creator, yet as vital and full of wisdom as any utterance by any guru on any mountaintop. And now, here’s the joke already:

Whenever Billy’s parents had visitors, they would bring him out and introduce him. “Our son is such a humble child,” they exclaimed in full parental pride, “that if you were to offer him a choice of two coins, he would always take the one of lesser value, because we’ve raised him to have modest tastes and never to act out of greed.” And inevitably, one of the guests would hold out a hand to the child and say, “Billy, here’s a nickel and a dime. Take whichever one you like.” And Little Billy would reach for the nickel, saying a quiet “Thank you” to the suitably impressed visitor. This scene was repeated again and again over time. So it happened that one day Billy’s friend Mikey heard about this unusual behavior, and decided to ask him about it on the playground. “You do know, don’t you, that a dime is worth twice as much as a nickel?” Mikey asked. “Oh yeah,” replied Billy, “and I also know that the first time I ever pick the dime will be the last time anyone makes that offer ever again!”

I won’t dwell on the narrative of this jest, because even in the most skillful hands what starts as analysis of humor can quickly end up as an autopsy, completed by pulling a sheet over it and rolling it into a cold dark drawer. Instead, I’ll concentrate on the soul, if you will, of this story. This is the lesson that, with the help of good light and a great bartender, transforms this mild diversion into a (somewhat) modern parable:  If you accept moderate fortune now, your total reward is all the greater.

Yes, there’s probably a more concise, more elegant way to state that, though I won’t labor to find one at the risk of cutting it to the quick. (As Sydney J. Harris unironically put it, “Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell probably belongs there.”) The idea has been around for centuries. The fabulist Æsop taught the lesson at least twice: once, in the tale of the goose that laid the golden eggs (in which an impatient man slaughters the goose for all the eggs inside, only to find nothing, and no more to come), and again in the example of the boy who got his fist stuck in a jar of filberts (at which point a passing adult told him that if he didn’t try to grab so many at once, he could actually extricate his hand and enjoy his snack). The idea of eternal reward coming only through moderation and sacrifice is fundamental to numerous religious doctrines. The human folly of greed and shortsightedness is a regular leitmotif of both Homer and Shakespeare, and since then in such popular venues as The Twilight Zone, Fantasy Island, and (I’d be willing to bet) Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s almost a cliché, and probably should have become one after the numerous times that not learning it prevented Gilligan & Co. from getting off that damn island.

Some people with whom I’ve shared this revelation have viewed it with a cynical eye. I think it was my brother Jay who said that it seems to rationalize getting away with more by staying under the radar, pointing out that embezzlers are often caught only when they get greedy and steal more than a moderate amount at one time. And I do acknowledge that the path followed by many of these tales could take a sudden turn and end up at a sign reading “Know your place, underling!” If there’s reasonable moderation, then there must also be unreasonable (immoderate?) moderation. How far do we go before “’Tis a Gift to be Simple” fades out and in its place we hear Langston Hughes asking about a dream deferred?

It’s the positive applications that have more meaning to me. Four decades ago in high school, I realized that I enjoyed (and craved) the company of female people. I learned by accident (and crippling shyness) that girls were far more willing to talk to me if I wasn’t adhering to the playbook of Every One a Potential Conquest. As much as popular culture–and my hormones–were telling me otherwise, I found that restrained respect was the better road; although it bypassed some possible girlfriends, it led me to numerous likely women friends. As years passed, I appreciated that all the more. And now: I have an intimate companion of three decades, and numerous women who smile and say hello when they see me, and everyone seems to be happy with the situation. (You might say that in this case, I got the dime and still collect the nickels.) I can understand the difference between short-term profits and long-term yields. I can appreciate that, by foregoing first-class airfares and four-star hotels, I can spend more time getting to know actual destinations. (Alas, this last example is almost entirely theoretical for me. I’ve never in my life flown first-class. Besides, I probably wouldn’t like it anyway—damn you, Æsop! You and your stupid fox and the stupid grapes…)

I said earlier that I hesitated to sum up this idea in brief. Fortunately, a decent job of this was done over a century ago by Ambrose Bierce, who along with Dostoyevsky and a few others sit at the “Authors I Enjoy Reading But Wouldn’t Want to Have Known Personally” table. In his Devil’s Dictionary, under the heading of “old saws fitted with new teeth,” he included this nugget:

“Half a loaf is better than a whole one if there is much else.”

That’s not a bad rendering, really. By definition, there is always much else in life, the universe, and everything. And if you stop at half a loaf, then there’s still room for something from the dessert menu. Or the filbert jar.

#moderation #filberts

     My first exposure to Russian storytelling (not counting Peter and the Wolf) arrived by means of the Junior Great Books program. We read the folk tale “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” which contained the standard frightful elements of such stories: young, plucky girl; evil step-relatives; bloodthirsty witch; supernatural assistance (in this case a wooden doll that offers advice after being given food and drink, which is arguably the creepiest aspect of the story). As usual, the villain is the most interesting character. Baba Yaga is a ghastly crone who lives in a “hut on fowl’s legs,” and who is assisted in her chores by a pair of knife-wielding floating hands. Vasilisa has been sent by her proto-mean-girl stepsisters to fetch fire from Baba Yaga, who agrees to supply it only if Vasilisa performs some hugely difficult tasks, such as separating good kernels from bad in a huge sack of corn. The wooden doll somehow does the work for her overnight, the witch is bested by the plucky girl, who returns home with fire in a skull, which then consumes her step-family, reducing them to ashes that the doll will probably clean up after a small dinner. Moral: unrelated women are evil to each other, and men who remarry tend to make terrible choices.

In the years since I first read this story (1972, or perhaps earlier), one phrase has stayed in a corner of my brain. Each night, when Vasilisa tearfully tells the doll about the next impossible thing she must accomplish before breakfast, the doll assures her that all will be well, and sends Vasilisa to bed, with the admonition, “The morning is wiser than the evening.” I subconsciously brooded over this sentence for years, until at last it hatched into an idea I could appreciate: the person I am in the morning is usually wiser than the person I am in the evening.

I’ve touched upon this adage in another essay, but I feel it deserves a spotlight of its own. The clear, simple truth of it made so much sense to me, that I was puzzled when others I shared it with didn’t seem to get it. From a college classmate: “Do you mean, how your judgment seems so much clearer when you wake up to a strange face on the next pillow, or with a pounding hangover and a car full of lawn ornaments stolen from who-knows-where?” Or, from possibly the same source, “Is that the reasoning behind scheduling the goddamn SAT at goddamn eight o’clock on a goddamn Saturday morning?” Some adults I knew with less colorful lives (and language) were a bit closer, suggesting that this is the same sentiment as “sleeping on it,” where “it” is a decision requiring careful, or at least time-consuming, consideration.

What I realized it that it’s not the time required for clear thinking, but the actual sleep. Essential as it is for sentient life, sleep gets only slightly more respect than bodily excretion (though with much nicer attendant furnishings). Little kids speak wide-eyed about a future in which they may stay up as late as they want. Captains of industry credit some of their success to being able to “get by” on only four hours of sleep, with the subtext that anyone who indulges in more than that lacks ambition and grit. In his delightful essay “On Going to Bed,” Christopher Morley portrayed one’s approach to imminent bedtime as tantamount to facing mortality itself, a heroic effort that, at its inevitable conclusion, leaves one “an unsightly object and a disgrace to humanity.” Indeed, Dylan Thomas strengthens the metaphor in the other direction, begging his father not to “go gentle into that good night.” We venerate the night life, the dancing until the wee hours. Nights are for parties, for weddings and celebrations; mornings are for funerals and the goddamn SAT.

Early in life, perhaps not long after meeting Vasilisa, I realized that I am a member of that reviled race, the Morning People. The advantages were many: I could be first to the shared bathroom, first to the cereal box, first to the choice parking space. My productive hours spanned until lunch, and if they waned thereafter, the people attuned to a later time zone were there to pick up the slack. True, it also meant that I frequently walked in a world of zombies, or more often acted in solitude, with no one to share another splendid sunrise. And I found myself avoiding the company of those who tended to schedule dinner within minutes of the time when I was wont to be brushing my teeth and fluffing the pillow.

It was in college that I discovered the evening/morning dichotomy. Many of my friends followed the traditional pattern of pulling all-nighters when studying for big exams (or completing papers due the next day). I tried that once, armed with No-Doz and a legal pad, working on a short story for a class. After scribbling until six and then sleeping until eleven, I looked at my work and found that the quality (for that matter, coherence) plummeted after about midnight. Perhaps that same semester I discovered that if I needed last-minute work in writing, or especially in studying, my best results came from going to bed early and then rising early to do the work. The morning was more clearheaded than the evening.

There is no question that people’s moods and levels of functionality will vary greatly in the course of a day. And it’s also clear that some people are happier, livelier, and even more productive at later hours of the day. Frank Sinatra always scheduled his recording sessions for the evening, when he was more relaxed and feeling in better control of his craft. The specific hours of anyone’s activities are not the point; mornings and evenings are constantly shifting with the turning of the globe. The point is the consequence of sleep, or the lack thereof.

Sleep deprivation is a tried-and-true method of torture; without sleep, people become less inhibited, less guarded, more suggestible. Recent brain studies show that during sleep, the brain is physically repairing damage to the myelin sheathing on nerve cells and connections; a night’s rest is also a night’s reconstruction. It could be said that you truly are a somewhat different person after a few hours’ slumber.

The morning is wiser than the evening. Sure, it’s tempting to try to finish that project before turning in, especially if the deadline looms large. (Old college joke: Rome wasn’t built in a day, but knowing architecture majors, it was designed in one night.) And even in her grave, Dear Abby is wagging a skeletal finger and warning us Not To Go To Bed Angry. And sometimes circumstance does not allow you to choose. But if you can, if you can weigh your options and pick your battles, isn’t it better to do it well-rested? Sleep on it and get back to me.

[This piece is the epitome of a “work in progress” for me. I will almost certainly revisit and revise it in the future, when I can view it with fresh eyes. In the meantime, I post it now to get it out of my head so that I can attend to other writing. As always, comments are welcome.] 

It begins. It ends.

There, in four words, stands one of the fundamental pillars of my life. As long as I keep in mind the knowledge that everything, everything has a beginning and an end, I can start to put my problems, my achievements, all aspects of my life in some sort of proportion. I know that some things are large. I know that some things are small. They’re all finite, and I don’t even have to be able to see the beginnings or ends of things to appreciate that.  We’re told that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. That’s only half of it; we should also remember that eventually, at some point, a final step will bring the end of that long journey.

To be sure, some measurements will require handling numbers that are big, no matter how one chooses to define the word. How do we do that? In a story by Isaac Asimov that I read long ago, a character states that “The mind cannot conceive of a number greater than five.” The idea is that any larger amount can be represented by a system of numerical notation, and thereby manipulated, calculated, and recorded, but that the mind is not able to “picture” more than a literal handful of fingers. Presumably our ability to abstract far greater numbers is one thing that distinguishes us from other animals, and we treat this ability so casually that we allow flexibility and inexactness just for effect: “There were a million cars on the expressway, and it took ages to get home.” Do you suppose that any other creatures practice hyperbole? For that matter, why would they?

A popular notion for expressing inconceivable time is that of eternity. We sing romantically of eternal love, threaten sinners with eternal damnation, consign the bodies of our dead to eternal rest. It’s a powerful concept. Remember being told in school that any infractions would go onto your permanent record? One pictures a packet of documents in a manila expandable folder, stored safely away but ready to be called up at any moment until the subject’s death, at which point it ends up in St. Peter’s hands.

That pearly segue leads to the concepts of Heaven and Hell, two places where people check in and never check out. Heaven is spacious, relatively cool in temperature (though some northern tribal doctrines paint it as a warm place, for obvious reasons), and blissful, eternally blissful. This seems to go against a tenet of human nature, in which we value more the things we have for only a short time. If you have an unlimited amount of something good, whether it’s money, TV channels, or Paradise, you tend not to appreciate it so much.

That’s why it seems ironic to me that the defining point shared by both Heaven and Hell is their eternal nature. A Heaven that is eternal is unchanging. Something that doesn’t change over time is by definition monotonous, even boring. Whose idea of Heaven is that? More likely, that would describe the concept of Hell, but even there, you arrive at the larger question of purpose. If Hell is so horrendous as the Puritans and Jack Chick tracts claim it to be, why must it be unending? Wouldn’t a century, a single year, or even five minutes of it be enough to punish the sinners? Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov questioned why Hell would exist at all; if one is condemned to Hell for torturing and killing children, he ponders, how does that in any way relieve the suffering of those children? That’s a question for another essay.

Back to Life, which, try as we might to ignore the fact, is finite. This applies to all of it, the good and the bad. Perhaps you’ve heard those other four words on the subject, “This too shall pass.” Supposedly they were spoken as a comfort to some ancient Persian ruler (or to King Solomon, depending on whom you ask). Taken in that sense, it means that the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are temporary, and at some point a more natural state of Good Things will be restored. But isn’t that only one half of the equation? If the bad times are temporary, so are the good ones. The cycle continues, sometimes visibly like a pendulum, sometimes less so like the motion of the hour hand.

Is this depressing? That’s up to you. And maybe those four words carry as much weight as the four that began this essay. The good things and the bad things in life tend to be intertwined. You might not like your job, but it does give you money, and that cute person in the next office does make you smile. Doing laundry is a mind-numbing chore, but Linus was not wrong when he said “Security is a drawer full of warm socks.” Yes, the work day ends, and it begins again tomorrow. Yes, the clothes will get dirty and need to be washed again. But yes, you’ll get paid again, and yes, you’ll have clean clothes again. Whether you concentrate on the bright side or the dark side of things, the empty half or the full half, is largely your choice. The magnitude of the joys, and the enormity of the sorrows, are partly the result of how you choose to measure them.

It begins. It ends. Sometimes those words give me solace. Sometimes those words make me wistful. But they provide a good lens for focusing my sense of balance in life. And if putting the good and bad things into perspective is no one’s idea of Heaven, then lacking that perspective is all the Hell anyone would ever need.