Skip to main content

Be Kind


There is an old story about novelist Henry James. I am a bit surprised I haven't mentioned it in this blog or its precursor before now. 

The story is that Henry James was once speaking to his nephew, William James Jr., the philosopher's son. tete-a-tete, when "Billy" was a child, and told him there are three important rules in life. ...

Be kind, be kind, and be kind. 

---------------------- 

This story is an example of the old "rule of three" One says something three times to make it memorable. Four or more times and one has simply made one's self a bore.

What are the three most important considerations in real estate: location, location, and location!   

A priest, a rabbi, and a minister go camping together. [You can include "and an atheist" in that joke, but it generally will involve dropping out one of the other three, keeping the number of campers constant.)

The above story appears in Leon Edel's magisterial biography of Henry James, and Edel atributes it to an interview he did with the nephew.   

Fred Rogers, the television show host, included the quote in a published essay, saying that it was something the uncle said to his nephew when the nephew was about to go to school for the first time.  I'm afraid there was a little bit of emendation on Mr. Rogers' part here: the conversation appears to have taken place in 1902, around the time Billy turned 20. 

Forgivable fibbing in the neighborhood.  I'm being kind. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...
1 comment
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...
Post a Comment
Read more