This Article Is Not About 7 Ways To Be Happier, 5 Foods For Vibrant Health Or 3 Tips For Better Sex
Not, by the way, that there is anything wrong with those. Hell, I read articles like that sometimes. It’s just that I usually don’t think I have all this deathless wisdom to impart. I have mostly questions. Which is why I have so often subtitled these Notes From the GratiDude as “An Inquiry Into A Gratitude-Inspired Life.” An inquiry, not a teaching moment.
Admittedly, my last post was called “Three Lessons From George Washington’s Farewell Address.” I didn’t have much to add, but mostly just let GW speak for himself. I used that title because I read some advice about how to make great ones that get noticed but aren’t just click bait. That didn’t work very well. I didn’t get 3.5 K claps and add three hundred followers.
I’ll continue to work on titles that readers might notice among the millions and millions of words sent out into the ether every single day. Meanwhile, I’ll keep asking questions. I’ll keep writing in my journal, with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s example out in front of me.
In his introduction to Emerson’s essay “Experience,” Phillip Lopate (editor of The Glorious American Essay) writes —
“Emerson kept private journals in which he recorded ‘the meteorology of thought’: his practice was to track his consciousness wherever it went, and he quarried these journals for use in his essays. Following Socrates and Michel de Montaigne, he asserted that ‘the purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself,’ and he chose writing as his means to do so, converting every scrap of daily life into speculation and wisdom seeking.”
I am glad to have some kind of record of my own speculation and wisdom seeking during these corona months.
How many amazing journals were kept during the flu pandemic of 1918, ones we’ll never see? Evidence of how lives were lived then, with their fears, attitudes regarding masks and how they went about their business.
Interesting to read in Mark Twain’s essay “The Turning Point of My Life” about how when he was twelve there was a measles epidemic (1847).
He wrote that “in the home there were no cheerful faces, there was no music, there was no singing but of solemn hymns, no voice but of prayer, no romping was allowed, no noise, no laughter, the family moved spectrally about on tiptoe, in a ghostly hush.”
That’s what I mean, daily life. What was going on for my grandparents? What fears, what premonitions? Did they mask up? Did they resist? Did they listen for updates on the radio? There was no TV in the US until 1928. I never heard a word about it, growing up.
Young Samuel Clemens finally decided to deliberately expose himself to measles, so he went to an infected friend’s house and got in bed with him. He did get it and almost died.
“I was a prisoner. My soul was steeped in this awful dreariness and in fear. At some time or other every day and every night a sudden shiver shook me to the marrow, and I said to myself, ‘There, I’ve got it! And I shall die.’ Life on these miserable terms was not worth living, and at last I made up my mind to get the disease and have it over, one way or the other.”
Sickly as a boy, the great writer was coddled and often tested his mom’s indulgence with mischief like that. When she was in her eighties, he once asked her “Afraid I wouldn’t live?”
“No,” she said, “afraid you would.”
That’s where he got his sense of humor, apparently.
