Radio Script #4
Little Talk On Common Things
December 5, 1948
What a good, common thing is laughter. Henry Beston, the modern author who does his writing and his herb collecting down on his Nobleboro farm, not far from Route l’ s heavy summer traffic between Bath and Rockland, recently commented on the difference between laughter in the country and in the city.
Only in the rural regions, says Beston, do we still hear the genuine, full bodied laughs that roll folks in the aisles. “On the farm we laugh”, he says, “with gusto of human spirit, while city folks laugh, if they laugh at all, from a tension of nerves. Heaven knows that the times have little to laugh at, though would they had, for laughter is a notable part of humanity, a thing seemingly given to man alone in the whole realm of living things. When it thins down into the trickle of a wise-crack and a sneer, all sense of proportion is gone. The deviltry of this world is the work of people who are too serious.”
How common, yet how little understood, is truth. Pontius Pilate, in judgment over Jesus, was not the only person who ever asked the question, “What is truth?” Through the ages the learned philosophers have quarreled about it. Indeed the word can be used in several senses. Most of us think of it as the opposite of a lie; we think of it as fact in contrast with imagined fiction. But, in its larger sense, the word truth contains the whole meaning of life: man’s eternal search for his place in the universe and his relationship to his fellow men.
Thus, in concrete situations, as we strive to find the truth, are we conscious of the things that stand in our way? If wellish to decide honestly how to vote on a particular political issue, whether or not we ought to contribute to a certain cause, which side we shall take on some burning social question, I wonder if we are usually aware of the barriers that stand between us and the truth. Do we realize how difficult it is to use our reason instead of our emotions? Do we know how easily our prejudices and our fears dominate our minds?
Carl Sandburg, poet and foremost biographer of Lincoln, has just reminded us of these barriers to truth in his new novel REMEMBRANCE ROCK.
A1 though it is a long book — more than 1,000 pages it is well worth a leisurely, careful reading. For it is the story of America, from the coming of the Pilgrims to the end of the Second World War. Through all the years, at Plymouth and Salem and Boston, at Lexington and at Valley Forge, at Gettysburg and Shiloh, in the prairie schooners bound for the West, there were always men and women struggling against fear and prejudice to find the truth. So Sandburg depicts some one character in each of these periods in his novel as having possession of a metal plaque on which were carved what old Roger Bacon had called the four stumbling blocks to truth. Roger Bacon, philosopher and monk, had lived in England more than 300 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock and more than 600 years before our own time. These, said Friar Bacon, are the four stumbling blocks to truth:
1. The influence of fragile and unworthy authority. How often have you believed and repeated something because someone told you it was true? What about the really important things you believe to be true? Do you have them on sound or on fragile authority?
2. custom. “It was good enough for grandfather;it is good enough for me.” Be
careful of reasoning like that. Tradition has its values, but the mere fact that we have done something for a long time is not a sound argument for our continuing to do it.
3. The imperfection of undisciplined senses. No one denies the tremendous power of the emotions, the response of our senses to things about us. OUr problem is not to avoid emotion, but to make our emotions more reasonable. At least we can try not to let fear and prejudice and hate do our thinking for us. Our senses can be disciplined, and not to discipline them is to set up within ourselves a serious
barrier to truth. That is what Roger Bacon meant by the imperfection of undisciplined senses.
4. Concealment of ignorance by ostentation of wisdom.
When a politician promises, in return for your vote, a quick solution to a difficult social problem, he is concealing ignorance under a pretense of wisdom. When a teacher is contemptuous of pupils’ options, the contempt may be a show of dogmatic assurance to hide ignorance as well as tolerance. Indeed it is a very human failing to make a show of a little knowledge, and the less certain the knowledge, the louder we are likely to voice our opinion.
Strange, isn’t it, that man has.learned so little in 600 years? The monk, Roger Bacon, died in 1294, two hundred years before Columbus opened the pathway to our new continent. Yet they remain with us today, these four stumbling blocks to truth: unworthy authority, tradition, emotional prejudice, and ignorance covered by a show of wisdom.
Now for a word about common stories. Some of the best stories in the world are the oldest — Mother Goose, the fables of Aesop, the Bible narratives — these stories never die. Among . such is a collection that made news in the daily papers a week ago. I refer to the stories we call the Arabian Nights. How well we remember Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp. It was 250 years ago that the French scholar, Antoine Galland, introduced these fabulous tales to the Western World under the title of THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. A few months ago the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago discovered, among a miscellaneous col.1ection of papyrus rolls in Egypt, a portion of the Arabian Nights at l.east 650 years older than any previously known manuscript of the work. The oldest copy hitherto known was dated 1536, but here are portions dated as early as 800 AD. And they reveal. that the original. title was A THOUSAND NIGHTS. The name was apparently changed to A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS, not because any story or any night was added, but because during the time of the Crusades the Arabs developed a superstition against round numbers.
Many persons wrongly believe that the title, whether 1,000 or 1,001, comes from the number of stories. Not so. The title refers to the number of nights that the heroine, Scheherazade, kept herself from being killed by the vengeful Sultan, through the clever expedient of stringing out the stories night after night. Sometimes one would take a whole week, and always when she ended one story, she began another on the same night. And one story led into the next with curiosity-whetting detail. She was a grand story teller, that slave girl, Scheherazade, and she deserved to live, pardoned by the Sultan when the thousand nights came to an end.
Now let us think. a bit about a common but troublesome thing suspicion.
Snake that it is, none of us want to do wholly without it. If one thing hurts our pride more than anything else, it is.to be considered a sucker, an easy mark for either the crooked gambler or the honest, high pressure salesman. No one likes to be .made a gullible fool. Hence we build up barriers of wariness and caution, and step by step we increase the barriers until we become suspicious of everything and everybody. We always want to know what the other fellow has up his sleeve, what axe he has to grind.
So general is suspicion in disputes between labor and management that, if not curbed, it may some day wreck our industrial foundations. It is just as bad on one side as on the other. Too often both sides feel that nothing can be assured and no one can be trusted unless everything is written down with every T crossed and every I dotted in a contract. Now anyone who has ever built a house or even had a simple job done knows that it is impossible to for see in advance every contingency that will arise. Those unforeseeable things must depend upon what we call good will, the intention to deal honestly and fairly with each other.
Is it not barely possible that the good relations between labor and management in Maine, in comparison with the constantly strained relations in other parts of the country, exist because the leaders of both management and labor have learned that, important as are contracts, more important still is a trust in each others spoken promises, a faith in each others honest intentions?
Of course controversies will continue; certainly the two viewpoints will conflict; assuredly contracts must frequently be revised. Yet the surest way to preserve industrial peace and continued production is by having as leaders of both management and labor the kind of men who can trust each others word.
Another common thing is the evidence of nature’s mighty forces. Long before this atomic age we have often been reminded of the tremendous power of nature. Twice within the past decade southern New England has been visited by devastating hurricanes. That awful power of wind and tide leaves man defeated and helpless. Man can erect his dikes and levees, lash down his buildings in cement and steel, build his cyclone cellars. He can heroically battle the elements, as do the Gloucester fisherman in Jim Connolly’s stories. But there are times when discretion is indeed the better part of valor.
We had recent reminder of such an occasion when the Portland Associates held their last meeting on the tip of Cape Cod, then disbanded forever. They had organized 40 years ago, just because ten years earlier a brave sea captain had shown that he had better courage than judgment in the face of nature’s angry whim. On the afternoon of November 27, 1898, the steamer Portland had left her berth at India Wharf in Boston, loaded with Thanksgiving vacationers returning to Maine. Hit by the worst northeast hurricane the coast had seen for decades, she went down with all of her 176 passengers and crew. Many a Maine home was a place of mourning on that Sunday after Thanksgiving.I was a boy of seven at the time, and I remember the true thanksgiving at my grandmother’s home in a little Maine village because her youngest son,my uncle, who, unable to come home for Thanksgiving i had promised to come home by way of the steamer Portland,but at the last minute had taken the train instead. And I recall that, on that day after the .storm, the drifted snow in the dooryard was well above my seven year old head.
For 47 years no one knew what happened to the Portland, although bits of what seemed to be her furnishings were from time to time washed ashore on Cape Cod. Then, three years ago, the Portland Associates with the help of Boston’s famous harbor historian, Edward Snow, conducted diving operations on a wreck nearly covered with sand 150 feet below the surface, four miles off the tip of the Cape. It proved to be without question the old Portland, blown fifty miles off her course clear across Massachusetts .Bay. The mystery now solved, the Associates, made up largely of relatives of those lost in the disaster, decided to hold one last ceremony on the fiftieth anniversary of the storm. So a week ago they unveiled a memorial tablet at Highland Light, the nearest shore point to the spot where the Portland went down .–. a permanent reminder that man is not master of all he surveys. He can only make truce with nature; he cannot conquer her.
Now to words again. Common expressions provide this topic. As the fine old sayings of rural Maine become less and less common, we are in danger of losing them altogether. The American Dialect Society is doing its best to preserve a record of those expressions, proverbs and sayings. Some of them are expressive common comparisons: slower than cold molasses; homelier than a stump fence; thick as spatter; like a bump on a log; no more peace than a toad under a harrow. Some are phrases such as “took a hist” for had a fall; “she looks kind of peaked” or “she’s feeling pretty slim” for sickly; “he’s lost his gumption”, “he was all beat out, but yesterday he perked up some”.
Then there are hundreds of simple combinations like a good-living day, the shank of the evening, the whole kit and caboodle, just a step and a straddle, a lick and a promise, a hind-end start.
Year: 1948