Fire and Knowledge

We didn’t call it the kitchen in our house. We called it the Burns Unit.

“It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something – a much-loved pet perhaps – salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh.

Happily, this all suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes – burned and ice cream – so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.

–Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (2006), p. 15

Then [old Lillian] introduced me to [her date,] the Navy guy. His name was Commander Blop or something. He was one of those guys that think they’re being a pansy if they don’t break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you.

–Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), p. 113

Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy. It means refashioning the pelvis into a full load-bearing instrument. To preserve the required strength, the birth canal in the female must be comparatively narrow. This has two very significant immediate consequences and one longer-term one. First, it means a lot of pain for any birthing mother and a greatly increased danger of fatality to mother and baby both. Moreover, to get the baby’s head through such a tight space it must be born while its brain is still small – and while the baby, therefore, is still helpless. This means long-term infant care, which in turn implies solid male-female bonding.

–Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), 394-5

A treaty is a document that is generally regarded as so untrustworthy we feel we must hold arms in order to make sure we’re not disadvantaged by its being broken.

–E. B. White, “Unity” (1960) in Essays of E.B. White (1977), p. 103

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

–E. B. White, “A Report in January” (1958) in Essays of E.B. White (1977), p. 47

Katherine Rosman has written an interesting perspective on Blackberry-mania, and is worth reading. An excerpt:

As hand-held email devices proliferate, they are having an unexpected impact on family dynamics: Parents and their children are swapping roles. Like a bunch of teenagers, some parents are routinely lying to their kids, sneaking around the house to covertly check their emails and disobeying house rules established to minimize compulsive typing. The refusal of parents to follow a few simple rules is pushing some children to the brink. They are fearful that parents will be distracted by emails while driving, concerned about Mom and Dad’s shortening attention spans and exasperated by their parents’ obsession with their gadgets. Bob Ledbetter III, a third-grader in Rome, Ga., says he tries to tell his father to put the BlackBerry down, but can’t even get his attention. “Sometimes I think he’s deaf,” says the 9-year-old….

Emma Colonna wishes her parents would behave, at least when they’re out in public. The ninth-grade student in Port Washington, N.Y., says she has caught her parents typing emails on their Treos during her eighth-grade awards ceremony, at dinner and in darkened movie theaters. “During my dance recital, I’m 99% sure they were emailing except while I was on stage,” she says. “I think that’s kind of rude.”

Emma, 14, also identifies with adults who wish their kids spent less time playing videogames. “At my student orientation for high school, my mom was playing solitaire,” she says. “She has a bad attention span.” Her mother, Barbara Chang, the chief executive of a nonprofit group, says, “It’s become this crutch.”

Safety is another issue. Will Singletary, a 9-year-old in Atlanta, doesn’t approve of his dad’s proclivity for typing while driving. “It makes me worried he’s going to crash,” he says. “He only looks up a few times.” His dad, private banker Ross Singletary, calls it “a legit concern.” He adds: “Some emails are important enough to look at en route”….

Still, like teenagers sneaking cigarettes behind school, parents are secretly rebelling against the rules. The children of one New Jersey executive mandate that their mom ignore her mobile email from dinnertime until their bedtime. To get around their dictates, the mother hides the gadget in the bathroom, where she makes frequent trips before, during and after dinner. The kids “think I have a small bladder,” she says. She declined to be named because she’s afraid her 12- and 13-year-old children might discover her secret.

Perhaps more depressing than friendships changed by economic inequality are those having to do with inequality of cultural attainment. This becomes most poignant when it strikes at old friendships. The euphemism to cover this division is “we’ve grown apart in recent years,” when what is really meant is that one friend has developed wider interests, or has become more penetrating about the world, or has become more bookish than the other. When this occurs, all that old friends seem to talk about are former days, which is to say, the paradisiacal times when their interests, far from being divergent, were congruent.

–Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 147-8

Here’s a tip I’ve never used: I understand you can learn a great deal about girldom by reading Pride and Prejudice, and I own a copy, but I have never read it. I tried. It was given to me by a girl with a little note inside that read: What is in this book is the heart of a woman. I am sure the heart of a woman is pure and lovely, but the first chapter of said heart is hopelessly boring. Nobody dies at all. I keep the book on my shelf because girls come into my room, sit on my couch, and eye the books on the adjacent shelf. You have a copy of Pride and Prejudice, they exclaim in a gentle sigh and smile. Yes, I say. I do.

–Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (2003), p. 140