Only He Who Attempts the Absurd Is Capable of Achieving the Impossible

Once upon a time, I wrote a blog post about quotes.  I sort of imagined it would end up being a thing I’d come back to again and again over the years, but, suprisingly (at least to me), that post is now over 12 years past.  Oh, sure, I’ve used quotes in many posts since then, but only a few have been really solid “quote posts”: there’s one on individuality, and two focussed on particular human quote generators—one on MLK, and one on H. L. Mencken.

If you didn’t already click on all those, let me just sum up by reminding you that I have a “quote file,” which I curate with any interesting quotes I find, and my computers spit them back out at me randomly.  Recently, I got this quote:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

And I immediately got excited about the possibility of bringing in several other quotes which talk about contradictory thoughts, such as one by Whitman, one by Emerson, and one by Stephen Fry ... and then I realized that I’d already written that post.  Which was a bit deflating.  Reminds me of another quote:

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.  It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

— Mark Twain

Of course, I was somewhat heartened by the fact that the quote that provided the inspiration was not, in fact, used in that post.  Why not, I wonder?  Well, that post was from a while back as well—over 8 years now—so maybe I just hadn’t found the quote yet at the time I scoured my quote file for that topic.

So, were I to rewrite the post without sufficient research, not realizing that I’d already written it, it wouldn’t be the same.  It would have different quotes (at least one more, and probably one or two less as well), but, more interestingly, it would have a completely different point.  That post was about consistency and self-contradiction; the one I was going to write today was going to use the cognitive dissonance of apparent self-contradiction as a back door into the topic of paradox, which is one of my favorite concepts to write about, but which I haven’t done in a while, so it would be a refreshing return to form.  Reminds me of this quote:

You can not step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.

— Heraclitus

Because the quote file is continuously evolving, you see ... as are my thoughts on the meanings of the quotes, and my outlook on life, and all manner of things.  The universe is in constant flux, as this quote reminds us:

With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster 13 in the constellation Hercules—and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress.

— Ransom K. Ferm (an imaginary person invented by Kurt Vonnegut)
opening epigram of The Sirens of Titan (1959)

So I not only get older and therefore more likely to repeat myself, but also I, and the entirety of the world around me, are constantly changing and evolving, meaning that, even when I repeat myself, I’m unlikely to say the same things in the same way.  It puts me in mind of this song:

I remember when the world was a little girl,
Every corner turned leading back to her,
Flowing like a stream on a rolling stone,
Certain there was nothing changing ...

— Alison Moyet, “Changeling” (The Minutes, 2013)

That one’s a bit more abstract, but I think it captures both concepts, and the inherent paradox, quite nicely.

This quote business can become a bit recursive, actually.  How about this one?

If you don’t know where you’re sailing, no wind is favorable.

Here I’m quoting B. Dave Walters, from episode 50 of Writing about Dragons and Shit, from July 6th of this very year.  But, then again, B. Dave is actually quoting Seneca the Younger’s “Letter LXXI: On the supreme good,” from Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, and what he actually wrote was:

errant consilia nostra, quia non habent quo derigantur; ignoranti quem portum petat nullus suus ventus est.

which translates more directly as “Our plans miscarry because they have no aim; when a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind” (at least according to Wikiquote).  And that of course put me in mind of another of my favorite quotes:

A ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships were built for.

Probably just the similarity in nautical themes.  But I can’t take those two and build a blog post around them either: I’ve already written a post centered around the whole ship in a harbor thing too.  Which I of course had also forgotten, that one being about 10 years ago ... I would lament that “I’m getting too old for this shit,” but apparently I already wrote that post too—including another quote, even.  Did I start out this post by saying I hadn’t really written a lot of quote posts?  Man, I really am getting old ...

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

— George Bernard Shaw

Then again, I haven’t really stopped playing.  But perhaps Shaw wasn’t really talking about growing old so much as “growing up,” which is truly a fate worse than death.  If you’ll allow me the indulgence of a self-quote:

”... but then I grew up.” — The good face one puts on when confronted with the tragedy of having irretrievably lost some essential facet of one’s childhood.

Of course, others have put it better.  Here’s one from one of the special features on the Finding Neverland DVD:

Don’t grow up.  Never be a grown-up.  Be an adult; be mature ... but don’t be a grown-up.

— Dustin Hoffman

Finding Neverland, of course, being a movie about J.M. Barrie, who, as the author of Peter Pan, had quite a few interesting ideas himself about “growing up.” Here’s one of my faves:

If I were younger, I’d know more.

— James Barrie

But life goes on, and things keep changing.

The problem isn’t change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.

— Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained

One has to adapt to change.  Adaption is a learned skill; it only comes with age.  Sadly, age can also make it more difficult to be malleable in one’s thinking.  Youth has its advantages:

The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence.

— Lyman Bryson

So I suppose age has its advantages as well.  Age nearly always brings experience; experience hopefully brings maturity; maturity typically brings wisdom.  The key, I think, is to keep on learning.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

— Confucius, Analects 2:15

Of course, the learning has a tendency to lead to paradoxical thinking (so there’s our backreference to paradoxes).

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

— Bertrand Russell

And doubt is ... troubling.

Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

— Voltaire

Voltaire, of course, was a famous philosopher, who is quite often quoted to help us understand our world.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

— Karl Marx

There’s that “change” word again.  This post is a bit circular, I suppose.  Ah, well, as another philospher once said:

You win a few, you lose a few.  Some get rained out.  But you got to dress for all of them.

— Satchel Paige

So, at the end of the day, when I wonder why I keep writing this blog, when I can barely remember what I’ve done already and what I haven’t, I come to the conclusion that I keep doing it because I love writing.  And, as the man who will soon be Maryland’s first black governor once said:

Every day you’re doing what you’re not passionate about, you become extraordinarily ordinary.

— Wes Moore, quoting a mentor of his

Pursuing your bliss is something I’ve striven to do, and striven to instill in my children.  When it comes to children, I’ve always been a bit inspired by Frank Zappa.  His youngest once said:

We were free to say whatever we wanted—there were no “bad words,” except if you used them intentionally to hurt somebody.  We could go to bed whenever we liked, and I would play in the rain for hours in my underwear—it didn’t matter, and it was fun.

— Diva Zappa, to The Guardian
on the occasion of her father’s 70th birthday

And I’ve tried to live by that.

Well, this post about quotes has rambled far and wide, and definitely didn’t end up where it started.  I don’t know if it has a particular message, but it does hit a lot of the important aspects of quotes I’ve touched on before: that they are distillations of wise words, regardless of who originally spoke them; that there are often multiple quotes that say the same thing, or come at the same topic from multiple angles; that they are repeated and transmogrified and requoted.  They come from disparate sources: in this post, I’ve quoted books, songs, interviews (both written and spoken), movies, podcasts, textbooks, and myself.  They often have uncertain attributions—the Vonnegut quote is to this day still often attributed to the entirely fictitious Ransom K. Ferm, while the title of this very post is often attributed to M.C. Escher (for obvious reasons), and occasionally to Einstein (for slightly more obscure motivations), but is actually Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (at least according to the ever-excellent Quote Investigator).  And I’m quite proud of the fact that, even though I once joked that “all quotes in the history of man were either spoken by Confucius, Voltaire, or Mark Twain, and which one your quote was spoken by only depends on how old you’d like to pretend it is,” this post quotes all three of the great luminaries of the quotiverse, and I’m fairly certain that all three are actually attributed correctly.

Still, the lack of an overall message sort of bugs me.  Perhaps I can fall back on a line I heard in an episode of a Japanese anime that I watched once with my eldest child when they were probably around 7 or 8.  One does not expect to find deep meaning when essentially watching cartoons with your kid, but occasionally serendipity and epiphany align.  So, if there is a message here, perhaps it’s this:

We’re all alive for a reason.  Find out why.

— Gojyo (Saiyuki: The Journey Begins, “Where the Gods Are”)