In this piece, Peter talks about the enduring power of inherited wisdom and how neglecting it leaves us unmoored.
In a speech delivered in 1858, Abraham Lincoln foresaw the consequences of the ruinous Civil War that was to devastate his nation: “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he said, quoting Matthew 12:25. Thomas Hobbes, the author of Leviathan, used the same quotation in 1651, as did Tom Paine in his 1767 Common Sense. Many public figures and humbler folk over the years have consulted the Bible for advice, encouragement, inspiration and reassurance.
Over these same years, folk wisdom’s culture has also been enriched by contributions from poets and philosophers whose thoughts have now become part of the language of English and its everyday users. The Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard, often called ‘the father of existentialism,’ recognized the truth that “life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” Rudyard Kipling wrote in his famous poem If of the need to bear reverses with restraint and stoic fortitude if one is to be worthy of the name of a “man.” These thoughts are good advice, but the writer’s use of memorable language– “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well-expressed”– lets it live beyond its own time. Space limitations necessarily confine me to but a few examples. Among these is the advice Polonius gives to his son in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Part of it is as follows:
…Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the end of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
In his Sonnet 116 (of 154), Shakespeare warns, in its third line, “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” One’s love is not lessened by the beloved’s illness, disfigurement, or death, or even by his (or her) infidelity. If it does, it is not love. Infidelity? Try forgiveness…
Take the quiz and find out.
“To err is human; to forgive, divine,” Alexander Pope reminds us in his Essay on Criticism. He also admonishes us not to play theologian in his Essay on Man. He warns, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of mankind is man.” He has timely advice for us in his famous poem “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” for, he tells us, it can give us delusions of superiority born of superficial understanding unwarranted by our relative ignorance. There is no fool like an educated fool. Having scaled the heights of “alpine” knowledge, we soon realize that there is always more to learn when we see before us “distant scenes” of yet more mountains ahead: “The increasing prospect tires our wand’ring eyes / hills peep over hills, and Alps on Alps arise.” The beginning of wisdom, it has been said, comes with the awareness of one’s ignorance. As Plato tells us, Socrates famously said of himself, “I know that I know nothing.” Some of us try to be humble, but such humility as his is close to saintliness.
John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), is at once an adventure story and a religious allegory with practical life lessons. At one time, together with the family Bible, it comprised virtually all of a Puritan American settler’s home library, as it chronicles the journey of Christian, a pilgrim in search of salvation in the Celestial City in the next life. With the help at different times of the good companions he meets on the way, among them Help, Faithful, Prudence, Piety, Charity, and Watchful, he survives a fall into the ‘Slough of Despond’ (despair), an encounter with the demon Apollyon, imprisonment in Doubting Castle, and the lure of material excess at Vanity Fair, resisting the trickery of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Mr. Malice, Mr. Liar, and Mr. Money-Love among others, along the way. Today’s Celestial City is undoubtedly the Casino, and its patrons include the Simpletons, Mr. Spendthrift, Ms. Gullible, and Mr. Money-Love, too.
In a largely illiterate society, much folk wisdom, many aphorisms, had to be learned by word of mouth or read aloud, as few could read, books were expensive, and libraries except among the privileged few were unknown. Yet the wisdom of one’s elders was respected, as they were the guardians of the culture, as they continue to be today among indigenous cultures worldwide. They were, and are, memory keepers, repositories of their people’s shared memories. Not so long ago, children in the western world were regularly assigned poems, important quotations, prayers, songs, and anthems to commit to memory. It was one way to transfer the culture to the next generation. Now in the brave new world of teacher training, this is regarded as, at best, a colossal waste of time and effort clearly better devoted to the toxic world of “social media.” Yet the reason why, despite the imposed atheism of a totalitarian Communist orthodoxy in the former Soviet Union, and the destruction of churches and persecution of priests, Christianity did not die in the ruinous wasteland that was the Marxist dystopia. Faith did not die in Russia. The knowledge of its message of hope and love was passed on to children by their babushki, their grandmothers, who risked severe punishment in doing so. Today, the Russian Orthodox Church has survived, and thrives, in spite of a government run by a man now known as a thug and an invading imperialist , and predictably, an ex-KGB operative.
Penelope Lively, a brilliant novelist and short story writer, has, in her memoir Dancing Fish and Ammonites, called memory itself “the vapour trail without which we are undone,” a metaphor that brilliantly summarizes its unexpected appearance but transient existence. She continues, “If you have no sense of the past, no access to the historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.”
What follows is a partial list of common sayings from the hoard of folk wisdom in English that has survived the test of time. None of it, of course, is original. In fact, my parents, proud descendants of East Anglian country folk and both scholarship winners from humble backgrounds, instilled these by mere repetition in my two brothers and me. Many of them reflect the preoccupations of an agrarian rural society that valued frugality, thrift, caution, patience, kindness, charity, and perseverance. These aphorisms, and the wisdom they convey are, Heaven be praised, still with us, still valued by those of us with memories enriched by their frequent recitation.
“Waste not, want not.”
“Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves.”
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”
“Cut your coat according to your cloth”
“Least said, soonest mended.”
“Count your blessings.”
“Take the rough with the smooth”
“A stitch in time saves nine”
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again.”
“Nothing venture, nothing win.”
“Curiosity killed the cat.”
“Charity begins at home.”
This last one is a rebuke to those who prioritize assistance to the poor and destitute they do not know, over help and support for their own families. In Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House, Mrs. Jellyby actively supports and crusades on behalf of a tribe of natives whom she has never met and who live on the other side of the world, thus neglecting her care of her home, described as “untidy” and “dirty,” and ignores her own children, who are deprived of her love, as is her husband, who sits ignored, disconsolate and depressed, beside her as she writes regularly to her dependents far, far away. The folk wisdom that says “the cobbler’s children are the most ill-shod” is a variant on this theme: this shoemaker similarly cares more for the feet of his customers than for those of his own children…
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Contributed by
Peter Scotchmer
