Dangerous Books You Should Read (minicast)

Welcome to another podcast edition of A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett. During the long, hot New York summer, I did a lot of reading, and I must tell you there are two kinds of books you should avoid at all costs. These dangerous, treacherous books are books of quotations and books of aphorisms. If you fail to heed my warning, you will be drawn, as I have been, deeper into spiraling worlds of short, pithy sayings that trigger one aha moment after another.

Here’s where it started. I flipped open the Yale Book of Quotations, where I found that editor Fred Shapiro has traced the expression, the customer is always right. It turns out that César Ritz, yes, the famous hotelier, said in 1908, le client ne mange jamais tort, which actually translates into English as, the customer is never wrong. Being always right and never wrong are not the same thing at all. The former promotes imperiousness, capriciousness, and a monopoly on righteousness. The latter still allows the establishment to be right, even if the customer is also right.

After some long while, after I’d made several lists of a dozen other ways the French and English-speaking worlds vary ever so slightly, but ever so significantly, I realized I still had the quotations book in my lap. One short quote, and off I had gone on an adventure. It was the same story with James Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists. It reinforced my own belief that an aphorism is like a small fruit of which you can eat both the flesh and the hard seed-like truth inside.

I came upon this line from Russian comic actor Fane Aronovskaya. One should live his life in such a way that even bastards remember him. And off I went again, treating it like a forensic exercise very much like doing a crossword puzzle. Did Ranovskaia mean true bastards to children of unmarried parents? Figurative bastards, those men who do ill to the world and then expect dinner at six sharp? What kind of memory? Good? Bad? Outrageous? Was she recommending saintly or dastardly deeds? These are the time-consuming traps Ranovskaia laid for me.

I suppose that is what books like these are good for, the kind of browsing that stimulates forgotten lobes of the brain. Shapiro’s book has the added juice of including ad slogans and even limericks. There once was an old man of lime who married three wives at a time. When asked, why a third, he replied, once absurd, and bigamy, sir, is a crime. That, too, unpacks nicely. It needs an understanding that the by in bigamy means two or twice. It also reminds us of how easily British place names lend themselves to limerick making. For every word you want to end a line with, it seems there is a village name that will rhyme.

Finally, it pokes us with the question as to why having just one wife is absurd. Is it merely to rhyme with third, or is there a deeper message? I must ask my wife. And what to make of the following aphorism from Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna? How quickly they pack suitcases in films. Now, what exactly does that mean? Is it merely an acknowledgement that films are artificial and they can’t be used as things to compare our own lives against? I don’t know.

I’m still considering the question in light of another quotation I found from Joyce Carol Oates. What links us are elemental experiences, emotions, forces that have no intrinsic language and must be imagined as art, if they are to be contemplated at all. In fact, both the Yale Book of Quotations and the guide to the world’s great aphorists play against each other rather well. Almost too well. For every quote, there seems to be an answering aphorism. For every aphorism, there seems to be an answering quote.

There’s this matching pair. Tom Stoppard says of James Joyce that he was, quote, an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized. Then the French writer Madame de Sable replies, instead of taking care to acquaint ourselves with others, we only think of making ourselves known to them. It would be better to listen to other people in order to become enlightened, rather than to speak so as to shine in front of them.

Matching aphorisms and quotes is like taping down the transmit button of two walkie-talkies, laying them one atop the other, speaker to microphone, microphone to speaker, until they’re both squealing with feedback. In the end, each quote and each aphorism must stand on its own. For now, I’ve put both volumes away on a high shelf from where they are leering at me greedily, demanding more time. Perhaps I will pull them down in a few decades after I retire, when I can give them the years and attention they deserve.

For A Way with Words, I’m Grant Barrett. Thank you.