While book shopping for reading material, I was recently confronted with a three-way dilemma. I had the choice between Volume 20 of “InuYasha,” a book of quotations, and a photo anthology of the First World War: I had enough money to buy one of them. I picked the book of quotations. I do so love books of quotations – though I can’t say as to why – with 20,000 entries, Random House Webster’s Quotationary made a legitimate claim to being the “definitive source” for such things. I mean, it was that or eat 20,000 fortune cookies.
In addition to being a source for quotes for any occasion (it’s set up for alphabetical search), I’ve discovered that this book has other uses too. For one thing, I sometimes suffer from the kind of insomnia that comes from being unable to shut one’s brain down at the end of the day. Enter the magic cure! All I have to do is keep reading the Quotationary until the wee hours of the morning, and call it quits when I can’t understand any of the Aldous Huxley quotes anymore. Then I know that my brain is well and truly overheated, and I should go to bed.
The problem I’ve discovered is that some aphorisms, when you break them down, don’t really make that much sense. (I actually think that I read a quote in here about that, but I’m not going to look for it lest I accidentally give myself some sort of déjà vu nervous breakdown. What’s that, Mr. Huxley? “Things are not what they seem; or, to be more accurate, they are not only not what they seem, but very much else besides”?) A couple of the quoted, for instance, took issue with the commandment that says “Love thy enemy,” including Sigmund Freud.
This is interesting, since each of the Ten Commandments is arguably an aphorism unto itself, and I would have to admit that I agree with Siggy a bit on that one. Deep down, I want to believe that “Love thy enemy” is the result of a transcription error that happened when somebody was translating the Bible between alphabets and dropped a glyph somewhere, sort of like when you buy something cheap that was made in China and the label says “Please not in mouth put.”
Incidentally, the MS Word spellchecker has no problem with “Please not in mouth put,” which troubles me for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with the present subject at all.
Back to loving thy enemy: I’m just not that good. But fortunately the Quotationary has a whole battery of famous people assuaging my spirit with helpful thoughts and insights. It’s like having history’s best and brightest standing next to me and helping me along.
My favorites are, of course, the people who have only one name, like Socrates and Voltaire. It would be cool to be remembered by one name. People with one name always belong to one of two professions: rock stars or philosophers. Since the only two songs I can sing on key are Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” and the closing theme from “The Lawrence Welk Show,” I think I can rule out rock star. But I might have philosopher within my grasp if I can manage to sound vague and omniscient at the same time:
NOW
Guy: Hey, where’s the ketchup?
Me: I think it’s over there.
SOON
Guy: Hey, where’s the ketchup?
Me: Because it should be.
In order to bolster the credibility of my thoughts, I will not only start referring to myself by one name, but I’ll add a bunch of accent marks to it, further exalting my status among the unaccented masses. So I’ll go from being Kevin Paquet to Pãquæt, Foremost Philosopher of Our Times. I never met anybody who could spell “Paquet” right on the first try anyway.
At last, after the blockbuster successes of my first two treatises, “True Tales of Self-Inflicted Accidents” and “Myself as I Know Me,” I shall retire, spending the rest of my life as a hermit in the ruins of an ancient temple, which I will have had retrofitted in shag carpet, on a secluded island somewhere. There I shall spend my days, far, far away from the ketchup, the MS Word spellchecker, Aldous Huxley, and, indeed, anything of any complexity at all.
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