Ralph Waldo Emerson | dual personalities

May 17, 2016

“They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines.”*

by chuckofish

Sometimes the Apartment Therapy blog drives me crazy with their You Need to Do This and Right Now posts, but this and this were right on I thought.

I have been re-using my candle jars–the pretty ones at least–for quite some time.

And in my humble opinion there is nothing so special that you should save it, except maybe that one bottle of Dom Perignon that is waiting for some special announcement down the road.

When you go to as many estate sales as I do, you know how ridiculous it is to save the good linens, starched, tied with a ribbon and still in the original box, for a special occasion. Basically, you are saving them so your children can sell them at an estate sale!

The same goes for your china and all those things you received as wedding presents. Use them! Enjoy them! Everything tastes better on Wedgwood! If you break a plate every once in awhile, so what? C’est la vie.

As Emerson said, “Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.” It might be those pillow cases you finally sleep on!

*Calvin and Hobbes

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February 10, 2016

Mid-week pep talk

by chuckofish

“Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say ‘It is in me, and shall out.’ Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays

Oh man, when in doubt, read some Emerson. Isn’t he just the best?

And, by the way, don’t we all need one of these? Or we could have one made with a R.W. Emerson head.

And here’s a prayer to start the day by William Bright:

O Eternal Light, illuminate us; O eternal Power, strengthen us; O eternal Wisdom, instruct us; O eternal Mercy, have pity upon us; and grant us with all our hearts and minds to seek thy face, and to love thy name; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

(Prayer via here.)

3 Comments

September 18, 2015

“He is rich who owns the day”*

by chuckofish

I had barely gotten my breath after returning from NYC when daughter #2 arrived for a short flyover visit. When it rains, it pours, as they say!

I drove up to the airport yesterday and picked her up and then dropped her off on campus so she cold schmooz with an old professor and hang out for awhile in her old stomping grounds while I finished up at work. I am taking today off so we can have fun, but, of course, thunderstorms are predicted.

C’est la vie.

And just as a reminder…

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt, crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

–RWE

Have a super-duper weekend! Carpe diem!

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June 1, 2015

A cup of blessing

by chuckofish

It was a rainy, overcast weekend–which is kind of nice sometimes. It gives one permission to slow down and read a book instead of trying to get a million things done. You know what I mean?

However, I did manage to do a few things anyway. I saw this weird bug on my garage.

Have you ever seen anything like him? He was big like a cicada, but didn’t look like our typical flyover cicadas. Zut alors!

I found this while going through a bunch of old books in my basement.

According to the sentiment written inside the cover, my mother gave it to me February 14, 1968. She was always trying to encourage me in my endeavors francaise, but it really was a lost cause.

Apres le petit dejeuner, il avait repete sa chanson pour bien la savoir par couer, et maintenant il se la chantait tres gentilment, sans se tromper. Cela donnait a peu pres ceci:

Tra-la-la, tra-la-lere!

Zim-boum-boum, ran-tan-plan!

Brrm-brrm-brrm, la-di-dere!

Pout-pout-pout, zim-pan-pan!

(Sorry, no accent marks!)

I’m afraid Winnie the Pooh loses something in translation!

I watched To Have and Have Not (1943) in honor of Howard Hawks’ birthday on Saturday. It was as good as a Hemingway novel adapted for the screen by William Faulkner can be. And by that I mean excellent. Which Hawks classic did you watch?

I also watched a really terrible movie: Rhinestone (1984) starring Sylvester Stallone and Dolly Parton. I had never seen it, and despite Dolly doing her best, it was pretty awful. Stallone was painfully bad.

It is amazing that Bob Clark, who had directed A Christmas Story the year before, ever worked again.

Sunday night I DVR’d Grantchester and watched The Cowboys (1972) which is the story of a cattle owner (John Wayne) who is forced to go on a cattle drive with only a bunch of underage cowboys to help.

The young boys in this movie are excellent. Indeed, the movie is excellent and well directed by Mark Rydell. And although the Duke (spoiler alert) dies at the hands of some lesser men in the movie, it ends well.

The highlight of my weekend was when my old friend Dick, who was in town from Atlanta for our special event at work this week, dropped by my office on Friday and brought me this:

A Mike Matheny autographed baseball! He asked Mike to sign it when he was in Jupiter for spring training. Wasn’t that thoughtful? It certainly made my day!

Have a good Monday!

*Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting–a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.”

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March 10, 2015

“You’ve got brains in your head You’ve got feet in your shoes You can steer yourself any Direction you choose”*

by chuckofish

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance)

Daughter #2 passed her oral exams with flying colors. We are very proud of her.

*Dr. Seuss

The photo is my grandmother Mira Sargent circa 100 years ago.

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January 22, 2015

Valuing the poet

by chuckofish

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline to repeat my old steps and do not believe in remedial force, in the power of change and reform. But some Petrarch or Arisoto, filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full of daring thought and action. He smites and arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits, and I open my eye on my own possibilities. He claps wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber of the world, and I am capable once more of choosing a straight path in theory and practice.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles

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January 6, 2015

Under the tree: “Big brothers know everything…Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!”*

by chuckofish

My dual personality blogged about her haul of Christmas gift books the other day, so I thought I would follow suit with a list of mine.

My big brother gave me the new biography of John Wayne by Scott Eyman and I dived right in. (Middlemarch was unceremoniously shoved to the back of the bedside table.)

I read the whole thing and enjoyed it very much. It supported my previously held view that old Duke was the greatest. I always knew he was intelligent, hard-working, kind, humble, and dreamy, but it was nice to have that opinion validated. Here is a good review of the book by Peter Bogdonavich in the New York Times.

When everyone goes home tomorrow and I am bereft, I am going to binge-watch John Wayne movies. This is what I call good therapy.

My sister gave me a new book about Raymond Chandler–another favorite of mine–The World of Raymond Chandler in His Own Words edited by Barry Day.

Chandler, as we all know, wrote not about crime or detection, as George V. Higgins once observed, but about the corruption of the human spirit. He is a man after my own heart: “Philip Marlowe and I do not despise the upper classes because they take baths and have money; we despise the upper classes because they are phony.”

As you can imagine, this book is chock-full of great quotes by the master of simile. “Soot…was down-drafted into the room and rolling across the top of the desk like tumbleweed drifting across a vacant lot.” (The Big Sleep)

An old friend (and a reader of this blog) gave me

which is full of good things to remember:

And, of course, I can always count on daughter #2 to give me something intellectually stimulating. This year it was a copy of

I can’t wait to delve into this one! Emerson is one of my favorites and you know I always like to look at the spiritual side of things.

“Travelling is a fool’s paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting identical that I fled from.” (Self-Reliance)

(P.S. I received some wonderful non-book presents and I hope the people who gave me these will not feel slighted that I did not mention them today.)

What are you reading?

*Charlie Brown’s Christmas Stocking by Charles M. Schulz

3 Comments

November 26, 2014

Come, ye thankful people, come

by chuckofish

Raise the song of harvest home!

I am working a half day today. Then I will get ready for tomorrow’s feast.

I have already started to set the table.

I like to mix up my china, using some of my own fine china pattern (Autumn) and some of my mother’s pattern (Nydia)–both Lenox. And I love this vintage Vera tablecloth! So autumnal.

And what would a holiday table be without these guys? Of course.

Have a good day and don’t work too hard.

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food,
For love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

5 Comments

May 23, 2014

Happy Friday–like the blast of a trumpet!

by chuckofish

This Friday has been a long time coming–what a long week! But we have a three-day weekend coming up, so it’s all good.

FYI May has been a big month for birthdays already and this weekend we have two more favorites: Bob Dylan (May 24) on Saturday

and Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25) on Sunday!

Those are two great reasons to celebrate this weekend! One good way to do so would be to re-read Self Reliance, which I have been meaning to do–how about you?

“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

Another way would be to watch No Direction Home (2005)–a film chronicle of Bob Dylan’s evolution between 1961 and 1966 from folk singer to rock star. Directed by Martin Scorsese, it uses archival footage and recent interviews to tell the story of the illusive Bob, who refuses “to be simplified, classified, categorized, or finalized”. And why should he be? He is, like Emerson and those other guys mentioned above, a “pure and wise spirit,” both great and misunderstood.

Dylan and Emerson are certainly on the same page. Here’s Bob:

‘Trust yourself
Trust yourself to do the things that only you know best
Trust yourself
Trust yourself to do what’s right and not be second-guessed
Don’t trust me to show you beauty
When beauty may only turn to rust
If you need somebody you can trust, trust yourself’

How Emersonian can you get?

So enjoy your weekend and trust yourself. Eat cake.

6 Comments

January 27, 2014

Grant us strength and courage*

by chuckofish

How was your weekend?

I started mine off by going to a “Mass of Remembrance” (in other words, a Memorial Service) on Friday for the daughter of a friend of mine–a sad occasion, indeed.

However, I have to say that I, who am not easily shocked these days, was shocked to find out that this R.C. church uses white wine in the Eucharist service! (The explanation was that it is easier to clean and does not stain the linen.) Heavens to Betsy! What is the world coming to? I would sooner drink grape juice with the Baptists than white wine at communion. Gluten-free wafers and white wine. I will spare you more grumbling…but honestly what’s next?

I watched Hondo on Friday night and that cheered me up.

Then I had lunch with the boy on Saturday.

We went to Steak ‘N Shake which never lets you down.

Sunday was the pick day weather-wise with blue sky and temperatures in the fifties! I went to church but skipped our 155th Annual Meeting. I walked around my favorite antique mall and then took a long walk around our flyover town in the afternoon and then did some world-class puttering around our house. I caught up on my “desk work” as my Aunt Susanne used to call it.

All in all, not a bad weekend!

“Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Flyover yard art

* BCP, Post-Communion Prayer

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