Friday, March 1, 2013
Jerry Harkins
Pete Seeger tells a story about a king who asked his wise men to reduce all the world's knowledge and wisdom to a single book he could use to educate his son. It took them nearly a year and, when they were done, the king challenged them to distill the book down to a single sentence. Five years of intense labor and constant debate followed until, at last, the wise men were able to agree on the sentence, "This too shall pass." Again the king sent them back to the academy. "Find me," he commanded, "the single word my son can live by, the irreducible essence of everything we know." Ten years passed. At length, the sages, old, gray and worn with disputation, returned. "Sire," said their leader, "the one word at the heart of all wisdom, is 'maybe.'"
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The Gentle Joys of Maybe
ReplyDeleteJerry’s Follies
http://jerrysfollies.blogspot.jp/2006/08/gentle-joys-of-maybe-1-jerry-harkins.html
Like all good stories, this one is hard to track down. Pete Seeger used it to introduce “Seek and You Shall Find” on Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs (Columbia Records, CS 9505). He got it from his father, the noted musicologist Charles Seeger. The first half of the story, ending with the line, “This too shall pass,” had previously been used by Abraham Lincoln in a speech he gave in Milwaukee in 1859 and the line appears by itself in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1860 novel, The Marble Faun. As a child, I remember being told that when Caesar paraded in triumph through the streets of Rome, a slave rode with him in the chariot repeatedly whispering in his ear Etiam transebit! This too shall pass! It made an impression.
As long as we’re at it, we may as well save a few footnotes by owning up to the other dubious quotations cited in this paper. Einstein probably never imagined God playing dice but you will find the famous metaphor attributed to him in Philipp Frank’s 1947 biography and it has been repeated so often that the great man should have said it even if he didn’t. Presumably he did say, “Raffiniert is der Herr Gott, aber Boshaft ist er nicht,” roughly, God is subtle but not malicious — because that line is engraved on a mantle piece at Princeton University. For years, it escaped me that this is an elegant pun because Boshaft, malicious, is almost homophonous with Botschaft which, in some contexts refers to the gospels.
Similarly, Rabelais, asked on his deathbed where he expected to go, probably did not say, “Je vais chercher un grand peut-etre” — I seek to go to a great perhaps. Still, it seems perfectly consistent with the character of one of history’s greatest cynics.
Those of us who have never imagined being subjected to the tender mercies of the Holy Inquisition need not inquire as to what if anything Galileo might have or should have said. The sotto voce remark attributed to him is probably a pious fraud perpetrated by admirers who worried that he might seem insufficiently defiant.
Finally, it has been nearly 40 years since I encountered Eugene O’Neill’s remark about the death of god and the failure of science. I think I remember it being in a letter to George Jean Nathan but I have never been able to find it again and have no reference for it.
This too shall pass
ReplyDeleteby FatAlbertTheta
http://everything2.com/title/This+too+shall+pass
Pete Seeger wrote a song called Seek and You Shall Find. In that song he tells a story (along these lines) about a king who has just had a son. The king wants his son to know all the knowledge of the world in order to rule with wisdom and be a good king. So the king tells his wisest wisemen to go out and sum up all the knowledge of the world into a book. And the wise men say, “Oh king, it will take us 10 years to do such a thing, but we will go.”
The wisemen return ten years later and give the king the book of all the knowledge in the world. It was beautiful–gilded pages and leather bound. It was truly glorious thing to behold.
The king is very happy. And then he tells them, “You have done so very well, my wisemen. I have another task for you–I want you to sum up all the knowledge of the world into one sentence.”
And the wisemen say, “Oh king, it would take us 10 years to do such a thing, but we will go.”
The wisemen go, and return ten years later. They approach the king and say, “Your majesty, we have gone out into the world and wondered and worked and have summed up all the knoweldge of the world into one sentence. It is: This too shall pass.”
And the king was merry with such news. He contemplated this sentence for a while, then, since he didn’t have anything else to do with his wisemen, he sent them out to sum up all the knowledge into one word.
The wisemen said, “Oh king–this is a hard task indeed. It will take us 10 years to finish such a task.”
And they left.
And another ten years passed and the wisemen returned. The king was old at this point, and a bit forgetful. The wisemen said, “We have returned oh king!”
And the king said, “Returned, eh? Ohhhh… Returned with the word, I see! What is it!?”
“Maybe.”