Being Being Not Labeling
In my younger days I kept two sayings tacked up on my office wall: The composer Igor Stravinsky’s “A masterpiece is all that counts” and the Roman writer Pliny the Elder’s saying, Nulla Dies Sine Linea, “Never a day without a line.”
I’ve always been fond of quotes, the sort of thing that nowadays appears as memes all over social media.
Pliny would have been a master of Twitter. He wrote some serious lines. In addition to “never a day without a line,” he wrote some phrases that are the backbone of Latin 101: Cum grano salis, “with a grain of salt.” In vino veritas, “in wine there is truth.” Fortes Fortuna iuvat, “fortunę favors the brave.” And the slightly longer phrase, Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono. “There is no bad that will not come some good.” He may or may not have written ubi domus, ibi cor — “Home is where the heart is.”
I still practice Nulla Dies Sine Linea. I’ve managed to write something every day for over forty years, excepting those days I’ve been flat on my back in a hospital.
But I no longer agree with Stravinsky that a masterpiece is all that counts. As a matter of fact, I positively and totally disagree with that idea. I don’t think a masterpiece matters much at all in terms of a life. Nowadays I agree with the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset: “Being an artist means ceasing to take…
