When Grandmother is Right

I swore, as a younger man, that I would never sing that old tune, made popular by (I think) Mark Twain: “when I was twenty, I though my father was an idiot, at age 25 I was surprised how much he had learned…”

It’s so smug, assuming the young know less than us, assuming that they too will grow up and make the compromises and—too often—forget the dreams and the ideals which on occasion can have real worth. And if they don’t? Well, isn’t it better to have had them? Who wants a 21-year old Republican investment banker? I’ll take a kid writing the great American novel in a garage studio any day….

So why am I reading a book called Willpower, a New York Times Bestseller by Roy Baumeister (the social scientist) and John Tierney (science writer)?

Well, the first reason is that I want more of it. As I sit writing this, my eyes see a group of coupons for Swanson Vitamins (excellent source, by the way, and cheap), two containers of juggling balls (decided to learn to juggle in lieu of getting a job), a little device that I had no idea what use it could provide until I figured it out—it’s the iPod (from aPple!) charger.

Well, Messieurs Baumeister / Tierney would hate that. The first thing they suggest is to clean your desk. Get a to-do list that is concrete, not fuzzy. No “clean the house”—who can possibly do that? Where to start? Instead, “clean guest bathroom sink, dust piano, remove junk from desk…”

You get the idea…..

The book has much to commend it. Which is better—to give kids self-control, or to give them healthy self-esteem?

Confession—that’s the next chapter. Haven’t got to it, yet. But I did sneak and read the two quotes under the title. The first is by someone called Lady Gaga—a popular entertainer (haven’t heard her, don’t know if she can sing): “You’re a superstar no matter who you are or where you come from—and you were born that way.”

Back in a moment—gotta do 100 units of insulin for that surge in blood sugar….

The second quote is just a bit tarter: “Brats are not born. They are made.”

That’s from a lady called Deborah Carroll, a.k.a. Nanny Deb (which does suggest somebody with a bit more hands-on than Lady Gaga…)

Why do I feel that I pretty much know the thesis of this chapter—just by reading the two quotes?

OK—the book also has some great ideas for increasing will power. In the first place, like a muscle, the will can be strengthened. How? By repeated exertion, so that the act or action stops being an act of will, but becomes instead a habit.

And thus steps the explorer Henry Stanley into the book. You’ll remember him—the guy that set off into darkest Africa to find Dr. Livingstone? By the way, it appears that Stanley made up at a later date the famous line, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” A fascinating guy—our Stanley. Born poor, was put into the workhouse, and emerged pretending to be an upper-class American—he even affected the accent. Anyway, he kept voluminous diary accounts—he never missed a day—and guess what one page has been torn out of all his diaries?

Yup, the day he finally stumbles on Stanley….

Well, besides being rigorous on the diarying (oh, all right, computer! Diary keeping!), he also shaved every day of his life. Even in the jungle. Even when he had yellow fever or malaria or whatever-it-was and had gone from 160 pounds to 110 pounds. Even when his beloved Miss Alice—to whom he was romantically attached; who was his North Star; who said screw-this and up and married someone else almost before the ship had left the harbor—wasn’t there to see him. Just the cannibals.

With whom he dealt quite well. In fact, on one of the expeditions, he was the ONLY guy to walk out of the jungle—his entire party had died. And yes, he seems to have understood and empathized with the natives.

Was it because he had shaved, that morning?

Yes and no. It seems that by building habits that promote self-control, you no longer have to exert self-control except when really necessary. His sense of rectitude and command, in other words, came easily. When the cannibals shouting “meat, meat!” set upon the group, Stanley had the strength to—as we would say—dialogue.

In addition, the book tackles the thorny question—why do religious people, in general, live longer and happier than agnostics / atheists? Does AA really work, with its invocation of “a higher power?”

Seems so—which is why I may start to meditate again. In the case of Stanley, he was an agnostic, as am I, officially. But his Miss Alice—that less than faithful fiancée—worked for him as God does for the religious. He spent years of his life struggling to be worthy of the woman he had chosen to be his goddess (you do have to be sorry for her—all that adoration would drive anybody into another’s arms….). So, she served him well, in a sense.

Lastly, we come to Trollope.

The learned and educated Readers of this blog don’t need to be told that Trollope has some claim to be a major Victorian novelist—and the Victorian era industriously produced some great writers. And no one was more prolific than Trollope. A more devoted blogger than I would have counted the works listed on Wikipedia. But I can tell you that the list is two-columned, AND you have to scroll to come to the end of it.

Not all was great, of course. But what is great is like nothing else. Or at least George Eliot thought so—she wrote that she could not have written Middlemarch without the novels of Barsetshire (this is too funny—Barsetshire was the fictional shire created by Trollope, and the computer has red-squiggled it! Self-reference turning back on itself?)

And how did Trollope do it? Did he devote himself to working from dawn to dusk?

Nope, he had a job—working at one point for the Royal Mail. He’s the guy who dreamed up a little red post box—an obvious idea, but novel at the time.

He also wrote every day from 5:30 to 8:30. His routine output was 2500 words per day. (This post is at 1083—and will be ending soon…) He charted his progress, and wrote in his Autobiography, “a week passed with insufficient pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.”

Well, it goes against the romantic myth of the writer, desperately awaiting the muse, struggling and fighting to give birth to a work of genius. Trollope is at his desk, counting his words—250 words a quarter-hour, 1000 words an hour. 

“I have been told that such appliances (i.e. the watch) are beneath the notice of a man of genius,” he writes. But he’s not, he claims, a man of genius. Yet goes on to say, “a small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.”

Well, such ideas—shaving in the jungle, dining formally in the desert, industriousness and duty—all seem from another time, when ladies wore corsets and the legs of the piano were seemly dressed, so as not to provoke wanton desire. The time of our grandmothers.

“You can’t grade papers with a red pen,” a student told me, I thought in jest. But no, it’s true. A paper slashed with red ink wounds the self-esteem of the students, according to popular theory. Red pens are no longer permitted in the schools.

Yeah? There was a lot not to be kept from those times. But there may also be a place for self-control—for the rigor of sane and healthy habits practiced over a lifetime.

Note to readers—1341 words. Just over half of Trollope’s daily production….