Other People's Words

I just returned from my Sun Valley class and I am dead cronked. I don't even know what that means, but it's how I feel. I've still got whatever evil bug has invaded the systems of my family (the children are resistant, their parents strangely not), I taught for three and a half hours, and I drove for something like five hours today, much of it hopped up on decongestant. So if you want the funny, go take a gander at this or this, the delightfulest sites on the net.

In lieu of my own thoughts, I offer you some quotes from that book I've been on about. For starters, a couple from H.D. Thoreau, gloomiest and preachiest of the Transcendentalists:

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Wise words. If only there were some sort of blueprints for that.

If a man advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.

I like this one as well. Sorry, ladies--this maxim is only for the fellas.

Next comes Cyril Connolly (whom I know only through Monty Python's "Eric the Half-a-Bee" song--who the heck is this?), who appears to be channeling my thoughts directly:

The books I haven't written are better than the books other people have.

So very true. My unwritten books are pure gold, baby. Pure gold.

John Gardner, author of the interesting Grendel (and which I thought was only interesting to a few of us; do teachers really assign this to students? Poor things), brings us the pragmatic this:

What can be more satisfying than to be engaged in work in which every capacity or talent one may have is needed, every lesson one may have learned is used, every value one cares about is furthered?

I don't know. I hope I have the chance to find out. I think it far more interesting to have to rely on talents one doesn't have and lessons one hasn't learned yet are needed. Nothing like taking on something far beyond your ability to make you rely on God.

Finally, the truest word about writers I've yet read, from Logan Pearsall Smith:

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

Some of us just have less control over him than others.

Look out! Here he comes!