Countless readers, noting that the Lautens screed idly appears here only every two weeks, must wonder how I spend my idle time.
Idly, is the answer. I began a notebook in 1960 (now 16 of them) aiming to build a chrestomathy, and with high summer here and suspending serious matters like West Van politics, here are excerpts – some uncomfortably revealing, some subversively droll. A prize to the reader who can tell the difference:
I would trust no man who doesn’t talk baby-talk to his dog.
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We are worms, but in our slithering toward something better there is also something brave, noble, even in its parts beautiful.
Nostalgia: Anguish for a past without seriously examining whether one would actually want to return to it.
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Almost everything I once thought clever, wasn’t.
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Political talk is underrated as a stimulus for sex.
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Has no one any compassion for those who triumph over their privilege and good fortune?
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A radio voice reports the words – in the vocabulary of all political leaders – “open and frank discussion.” How often that proves more destructive than discreet silences.
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Variant on the foregoing: A marriage succeeds not through the loving openness but the thrifty secrecy of the partners.
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Forgiveness is the hardest yet the most self-serving of gestures, because the deeper beneficiary is not the forgiven but the forgiver.
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I suspect our [my wife’s and my] morning tea ceremony is more insidiously destructive of my character than gin or sloth.
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Flowers and dogs. Spirit-lifters.
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Today [March 25] a long-delayed start at sorting out and throwing away stuff. It’s like you die, and you still have to clean up your room.
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We expect too much of life – of our own small life. Left alone, it may grow without design.
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Not least of the legacy to my children is that they haven’t grown up in the shadow of their father.
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Happy the couple who can’t remember the reason for the quarrel.
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I was never able to fall from the working class into the intellectual class.
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My wife Elizabeth, putting in her hearing aids: “I’m going into the kitchen, where I can’t hear you.” Me: “If I were you I’d spend more time in the kitchen.”
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There are few greater satisfactions like pulling rank with visible success.
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I wish every day wasn’t a test of character. It isn’t taking the test, it’s the preparation for it that’s the killer.
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Writer, n., a person who does not suffer in silence.
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Truth is stranger than fiction, which is why it makes such bad fiction.
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There are many unsolved mysteries in life, such as: Did Shakespeare ever write drunk?
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Our society has been cleverly designed to make life for the individual free, but discontented – to keep him buying.
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Ignorance is the womb of change.
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The present has been around so long it’s worn out its welcome.
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Most touching in the painting The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1667-70, by Bartolome Esteban Murillo: A little white dog on his hind legs, leaping on the son in recognition.
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Nothing is fully understood until later. And usually too late. Love above all?
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Myth is the only truth, the Great Unfact. [British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge’s grand cry: “Truth, not facts! Truth, not facts!”]
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Nothing inspires confidence about history more than a total lack of personal encounter with the subject matter.
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Driving today [Nov. 20, 2017] on East Point Road [Saturna Island] we saw two black cows with calves, and my heart leaped at the sight.
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The press’s/media’s greatest power is the power to omit.
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Difficult though it is, never let the sweetness of life be spoiled by success.
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In one’s 80s, unhappiness can be avoided only by an almost criminal level of high spirits.
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On our last (always depressing) morning preparing to leave Saturna I was glumly making the only, menial, contribution I’m capable of – packing up – and complained “What a humiliation for one who wanted to be the Canadian Voltaire!” Elizabeth, as always doing more than I, made some slight remark and continued her labours. A minute later she stopped and stood up, holding an unopened bag of peanuts I’d brought up, and asked: “Should we take home these peanuts, Voltaire?” A soulless woman.
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I am weary of my self-centredness, self-pity, self-criticism, and dispiritedness. But subtracting them, what then is left?
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I said: “Your crudités are keeping me alive.” Elizabeth said: “Now I know how to kill you.” [Give me credit: Unlike most scribblers, I give my wife many of the best lines.]
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How to spend one’s day is more challenging than how to spend one’s life.
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George Bernard Shaw, in an epilogue of one of his plays: “Let those who complain that it was all on paper remember that only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.”
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