1461. “His jokes are no trifles”
They are always, though uttered with audacity, and equally free
with the Lord and the Peasant, they are always substantially
and weightily expressive of knowledge and experience.
Blake on Chaucer’s Host, from
A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures
Telling is the felt need for the Apology: all good jokes share the power of seeming trivial to those who really enjoy them, and to those who really don’t.
1476. “Ms. Arthur”
Tina Fey
I do not suppose that I am alone in associating Bea Arthur, the distinguished comedian whose recent passing we remark with something more than simple sadness, and Samuel Johnson, the redoubtable and voluminous patriarch who defined, and defines still, an epoch in English letters. Bearing the crown of a besieged but almost imperturbable authority, their humors, while the source of abundant instruction and delight to others, appeared to supply little joy to the humorists themselves—both were too seeming stoic to find much consolation, at least overtly, in even the plainest pleasures of sadism.
How fortunate, then, that both have had, and have still, such fluent admirers. “The earnestness and tenderness” contained in Boswell’s richly documented esteem for Johnson finds parallel in the mild excess of formality by which Tina Fey elects to address, in her eulogy for her, one of the matriarchs of her craft: “Ms. Arthur.” Sweet. Right.
Dulce et Decorum.
Notes:
1. “I really came to appreciate Ms. Arthur and her timing in The Golden Girls in its syndicated-Lifetime-marathon incarnation. I thought, “Man, there’s a lot of good jokes in this, and these ladies are really skilled” (Entertainment Weekly, May 8, 2009).
2. “earnestness and tenderness”—from a letter Johnson wrote to Boswell, dated June 3, 1782, and included by the biographer in his Life of Johnson (1791).
1488. The Finer Reaches of Monotony
It is not that the noble nature loves monotony, any more than it
loves darkness or pain. But it can bear with it and receive a high
pleasure in the endurance or patience, a pleasure necessary to
the well-being of this world: while those who will not submit to
the temporary sameness, but rush from one change to another,
gradually dull the edge of change itself, and bring a shadow and
weariness over the whole world from which there is no escape.
Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” The Stones of Venice
The same smell of the same flowers; your father’s old stories; the timing of the traffic light outside your window; a friend’s usual self-deceptions; his habitual seeing through yours; the one-trick pony, making the lonely round of a distant memory; the poem you’ve read a thousand times, at least. Practice loving them long enough, and then one day when you least expect it, the perfect apocalypse, as quiet as a blooming: wait, this is different or, maybe, better still—wait, I’m different!
Note: See G. Simmel on the debilitating addiction to the alacrity of change that dulls and defines modernity in The Philosophy of Money.