Maynard flails.
(Be warned that what follows has nothing to do with politics or current events, and will be of interest only to navel-gazing pseudointellectuals and lunatics.)
In 1963, I stumbled onto the road that would inevitably carry me to a meeting with Montmorency almost half a century later.
I don’t suppose you know who Montmorency is? You get points if you do. Life is all about points. Really!
Here’s how it works. First you find the dots. Then you connect the dots. And then you think about whether the connections you’ve drawn make any sense.
Maybe you got it all wrong and you’ve got to backtrack. Or maybe you’re missing some crucial dots.
Have you ever stood in a library and looked at the rows and rows of books? And you realized how much information there is in the world, and how tiny your skull is? And how little time you have.
And the more time you spend stuffing the world into your skull, the less time you have to do anything with all that knowledge.
It’s overwhelming, isn’t it? You might as well just give up.
And then there’s the question of wisdom. Knowledge doesn’t necessarily equal wisdom. Nor does it equal morality.
On the other hand, you can’t get wisdom or morality without first getting some knowledge. Knowledge is foundational.
My head is spinning. What was I talking about?
Montmorency!
It’s time to introduce a solid fact. Montmorency is a dog. He is initially described thusly:
When first he came to live at my expense, I never thought I should be able to get him to stop long. I used to sit down and look at him, as he sat on the rug and looked up at me, and think: “Oh, that dog will never live. He will be snatched up to the bright skies in a chariot, that is what will happen to him.”
What’s this about being snatched up in a bright chariot? Maybe a reference to that old movie, Chariots of Fire?
Connect it, people! You’ll get points!
The prophet Elijah. 2 Kings 2:11:
As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind.
Elijah is one of the select righteous whom God spared from physical death. Thus Elijah was carried heavenwards in the Lord’s fiery chariot.
Whoever has so described Montmorency must have initially thought most highly of him. You broadly understood this without knowing the background. But now that you’ve got the reference (assuming you didn’t get it right away and collect the points), you understand it better.
Without the connection, your ears hear it. And you thought you had it, but you didn’t. You missed something that you didn’t know existed. With the connection, you get it. Your soul feels it.
You get enough stuff in your head and you start seeing things you didn’t know could exist. Once the process starts, you want to keep it going. But how do you get it started?
At this point in my life, I can only offer a not-very-helpful answer: We find the path by accident. I don’t know how to show you the way.
I also don’t know about the paths I haven’t found. There’s probably a lot of stuff I’m oblivious to that I should be observing. I can only hope that future serendipitous accidents open my eyes further.
I have just met Montmorency. I’m not saying he’ll be a major player in my life; in fact I rather doubt it. But the accident that made our eventual meeting inevitable happened in 1963. I believe I mentioned this already.
This was the first “real” book I ever read. “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel”. It was one of Robert Heinlein’s “juvies” (meaning his novels for juveniles; especially young boys). (Heinlein was a subtle subversive, and put a lot of seditious ideas into our young heads. For this reason he is derided and shunned by all right-thinking people (by which I mean Communists). But I digress.)
“Have Spacesuit, Will Travel” opens with these words:
You see, I had this space suit.
How it happened was this way:
“Dad,” I said, “I want to go to the moon.”
“Certainly,” he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which he must know by heart.
I said, “Dad, please! I’m serious.”
This time he closed the book on a finger and said gently, “I said it was all right. Go ahead.”
“Yes… but how?”
“Eh?” He looked mildly surprised. “Why that’s your problem, Clifford.”
You see how subversive Heinlein was? Right off the bat, an adult is compelling a child to think. This will likely lead to an eventual crisis of self-esteem. (To be fair, Heinlein wrote this story in 1958, before psychologists had learned how important that self-esteem was, and that a child should never taste failure or be told he’s wrong about anything.)
Sooner or later we all (that is, we who were seduced and brainwashed) follow up on everything Heinlein recommended, however implicitly.
Connie Willis (an author of speculative fiction) certainly followed up. Her acclaimed novel, “To Say Nothing of the Dog”, is dedicated:
To Robert A. Heinlein
Who, in Have Space Suit, Will Travel,
first introduced me to Jerome K. Jerome’s
Three Men in a Boat,
To Say Nothing of the Dog
We’re zeroing in on something here. Lord knows if anyone should care. But it must be important, or my predecessors wouldn’t have paid it such heed.
And this is part of the answer to the problem of the library with more books than you’ll ever be able to read: Take a clue from those that have gone before; those you respect and revere. They’ve blazed a trail for you; go and find what they found! Sure, you’ll want to blaze your own trail too. But pay attention to the footprints of the masters.
Thus, we arrive: “Three Men in a Boat”. Amazon describes it:
“Three Men in a Boat” is the story of three Englishman who pile into a boat with food, clothes, and a fox terrier named Montmorency and set off on the Thames to see the English countryside. “Three Men in a Boat” is a first-class comic masterpiece. As the three well-to-do upper class gentleman set out on their excursion they are beset by a series of comic mishaps. Jerome K. Jerome masterfully weaves a tale that is a hilarious critique of the self-centered behavior of the English upper classes so typical of Victorian England.
There’s that Montmorency again! It seems we have finally caught up with him, elusive dog that he is!
But our quest is not ended. No, not by a long shot. There’s so much more to say; so much more to do. But I think, for my own sake and for the sake of the one or two people that have read this far, I must pause here. Or should I say “paws”?
For no reason other than I was bored:
Chariot
from Hebrew
rekeb
1) a team, chariot, chariotry, mill-stone, riders
1a) chariotry, chariots
1b) chariot (single)
1c) upper millstone (as riding on lower millstone)
1d) riders, troop (of riders), horsemen, pair of horsemen, men
riding, ass-riders, camel-riders
——————————————————————————–
from 7392; a vehicle; by implication, a team; by extension,
cavalry; by analogy a rider, i.e. the upper
millstone:-chariot, (upper) millstone, multitude (from the
margin), wagon.
Fire
from hebrew
‘esh
1) fire
1a) fire, flames
1b) supernatural fire (accompanying theophany)
1c) fire (for cooking, roasting, parching)
1d) altar-fire
1e) God’s anger (fig.)
——————————————————————————–
a primitive word; fire (literally or figuratively):-
burning, fiery, fire, flaming, hot.
Do continue another day, Maynard.
aha! the name did ring a bell, but unfortunately I don’t get points since I couldn’t place it until you mentioned 3 men and a boat — just happened to reread it not too long ago.
The journey of life is amazing. Looking back at some of the dots I chose to connect, I couldn’t ever imagine being where I am today. I think I was pretty lucky about some of the dots I chose to connect. And while I can wonder about the dots I didn’t pick, a see a lot dots out there and I’ll keep jogging along, pencil in hand, connecting up with a bunch more.
i always look forward to your posts Maynard. They’re always thoughtful and thought-provoking.
Maynard-read your post more than once. My left-brain stumbles over the dots in a quest for points. Downloaded an audiobook version of Three Men in a Boat – been piqued to find out more about Montmorency (is he the paws that refreshes?). Kept a yellowed copy of THIS CARTOON for years – it’s what your post has done to my dogbrain. I need my MOTHER-THING.
Ru, it’s not just about record players (whatever those are). Your cartoon explains why your master’s car requires a differential. In case you were wondering.
I think Heinlein and Clarke and Burroughs and Verne and Asimov and the other wonderful Sci Fi and Fantasy writers I enjoyed so much as a youth opened my mind. They are the reason I can accept that we are entering a period of global cold that is most likely for 70,000 years. There may be a Dalton Minimum or a Maunder minimum related “little ice age” style event first. But “renowned Croatian Physicist” Vladimir Paar, who has studied the ice age in Europe for decades, says we are going into the real thing very soon, for tens of thousands of years. People will one day walk from England to Ireland on the ice. France will be buried in ice as will Germany. I think our current global cold snap is the leading edge, but the figure Physicist Vladimir Paar gives is 5 years. Ice core science from samples taken to a 2 mile depth in Greenland indicate onset can be in as little as 3 years. Since 2002 or 2003 Earth was in a cooling phase. The typical precursor of a warmer phase occurred right on schedule and ended about 1995 with no warming since. One physicist who believed this will be a global cold snap, Timo Niroma, has developed a very convincing theory of his own having to do with a correlation of solar activity cycles with the Jovian year as Jupiter comes nearer then swings away from the sun. It seems to me it’s all cycles with the sun being affected, then the Earth getting warmer or colder for a length of time depending on the cycle. Short cycles are 100 to 300 years nominally. The long one that we normally think of is referred to as the Milankovitch cycle. It is both a “solar wobble” orbit and a distancing and tilt \ angle change of the Earth to the sun and a decrease of primary output from the sun and (I think) gravitational and inter-magnetic effects upon Earths tectonic plates, molten core, its magnetic pole. So we see more quakes, geothermal activity, volcanic activity, and geomagnetic excursion such as NASA announced recently that can lead to pole flip, North to South reversal. We had our normal interglacial intermission now, of 10 or maybe 11.5 thousand years. Now lawns in England are going pink from “snow fungus” and people in Mongolia are taking the few animals that have not starved or frozen right into the family shelter. They say “we have no skills”, “these animals are our lives” how will we take care of our children?” We should pray for them and help as we can and put more agricultural effort into cold resistant plants such as quinoa. We can use more nuke power though it will use up the uranium in maybe a hundred years. It’s time to get aware and start adapting.
“Have you ever stood in a library and looked at the rows and rows of books? And you realized how much information there is in the world, and how tiny your skull is? And how little time you have.
And the more time you spend stuffing the world into your skull, the less time you have to do anything with all that knowledge.”
Maynard,
As a “navel-gazing lunatic” I am convinced that you have winterized my forehead with new low-e glass windows through which you spy upon the very thoughts that torment me, day after day after day (BTW, thanks for the tax credit, Mr. President). Even now, as I am surrounded by the murmuring clutch of books that natter and nag me to finally pay attention to them all, I agonize that so much wisdom lies beyond my capacity to glean each and every tasty morsel from their leaves as my sheaf of moments upon this good earth is endlessly battered, tattered and scattered by the ceaselessly cruel winds of time.
Sorry, I just turned 50 and I still can’t believe it.
And, like all those who have commented here, I anxiously await your posts and it is, as ever, my great pleasure to savor every word you write.