Unfamiliar Quotations
To get you through the day
Like most people, I have my familiar quotations — the 23rd Psalm, the Lord’s Prayer — but I rarely use them. I rely mainly on a small collection of private quotes, proven effective for getting through the day. None shows up in a google search — these are stray sayings, scraps of poems or conversations, possibly misquoted or misattributed, but tried and true. So here they are.
- “Most mistakes that people make aren’t that important.”
This was the last line of a poem, a lost poem from a defunct little magazine of the 1960s, written by a teacher of mine. The poem was about a bric-a-brac shop full of useless items. It ended something like, “We should be grateful for these things, because they teach us/ Most mistakes that people make aren’t that important.”
The author was Sheldon P. Zitner, professor of English at Grinnell College. A Brooklyn native sojourning on the prairie, he later drifted north to the University of Toronto where he became known and loved as a “Canadian poet. ” When I knew him he was an intense young poet and playwright, and a brilliant teacher of literature. For Sheldon, every class was a performance — a theatrical improv with students serving as props, foils, dunces, and occasionally co-teachers. One day he seemed to be holding forth as usual when he slammed his fist on the desk and apologized: “I just can’t teach today.” He couldn’t abide anything less than brilliance. The poem may have been an act of kindness — forgiving himself for not being perfect. When I’m furious with myself in that way, I mumble the last line, savoring its calm rhythm, its modest internal rhyme, its soothing sentiment.
2. “Now is not the time to be in a great hurry.”
This is from another beloved teacher, Zen Master Soen Nakagawa from Japan. In the 1970s he would fly in to lead intensive retreats for the Zen Studies Society, bringing zest and inspiration to the often plodding practice of American Zen students. I loved the personal interviews he gave at our Zendo in the Catskill mountains. His dokusan chamber was on the second floor. We would line up at the foot of the stairs, and go up one by one as he rang his little bell. At one sesshin I had so much to say that I would tear up the stairs as if the place were on fire, making a terrible racket. On the last day, when the work was done, I tore upstairs again. But this time he sent me back, to walk up calmly and quietly: “Now is not the time to be in a great hurry.”
3. “He knows the heart for the famished cat it is.”
This is another last line of a lost poem, from a little magazine in the 1960s. All I remember is that line, and my image of a cat skulking through alleyways, desperate for food. I have no idea who “He” is in the poem, except that he knows the heart for the famished cat it is. That lets me know I’m not the only one, in fact, we are legion. “Everybody’s got a hungry heart,” says the pop song, but I prefer this feline image: inarticulate, driven, not just needy but exhausted, famished.
4. “Steer in the direction of the skid.”
This is from Driver Education in high school — what to do if your car slips out of control on ice or snow. It was re-purposed by Alan Watts as a way to deal with temptation. When you feel drawn to one of the seven deadly sins, don’t try to yank yourself back in the right direction. You’ll just continue to skid or spin out of control. Instead, set out to fulfill your desire — and you will immediately see the consequences you’d been trying to ignore. Only then can you make a reasoned decision to sin or not to sin.
5. “There is nothing in the world so beautiful as a healthy, wise old man.”
Here is a Chinese proverb, from a culture that respects old age. I’ve seen old men whose wizened features glowed with vitality and joy. Sometimes I feel that way; it’s all in the eyes. W.B. Yeats makes a carving of two ancient Chinese men come alive in his poem Lapis Lazuli: “..One asks for mournful melodies;/ Accomplished fingers begin to play./ Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,/ Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.”
6. “What do poets do between poems? We prepare for our death.”
This last one I associate with Gilbert Sorrentino, another Brooklyn poet from the '60s and '70s. He was supposedly asked that question at a cocktail party and gave that answer. The radical simplicity of this lifestyle — he doesn’t even mention eating, drinking, or sleeping — feels uncompromised.
The founder of Soen’s teaching line, Hakuin Ekaku, had an even briefer summary. I saw it in an exhibit of his calligraphy at Japan Society — -a one-word koan, the character for “death.”
And that’s all he wrote.
— Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips
