When I was in school, sure we knew all the lyrics to Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini and Heartbreak Hotel, but we also learned
the Gettysburg Address and Longfellow’s The
Village Blacksmith. Maybe you’re
like me and have trouble remembering a complete joke (both set up and punchline)
let alone a poem. [An aside: here’s one
I heard twice in the last week. What do
you call a pig who knows karate? A pork
chop!]
As our attention span shrinks into sound bites, so, I think,
has our active love of more formal language that connects us to the past. That’s a shame since as our world has gotten
smaller, with a library at our fingertips, there is so much more language to
enjoy. When I was writing my book and
weekly as I muse on a topic, I often seek inspiration by doing a search that
starts with “quotes on …” or “quotes by …”
I’m sharing three quotes that maybe you can work into some discussion
this week:
“Age appears to be best in four things: old wood best to burn, old wine best to drink, old friends to trust, old authors to read.”“We read that we ought to forgive our enemies, but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.”
“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor to console him for what he is.”
Why these quotes? Because the author, Sir Francis Bacon, is an ancestor of mine, a great-uncle times nine, and I’ve enjoyed reading some things he wrote. Next time you run across an interesting phrase, joke, and quote, or if you learn any tricks on ways to remember them, please share.
Marilyn
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ReplyDeleteLet's try this again, this time with no typos. I enjoyed the quotes, but I was even more intrigued by the Bacon connection. Were you aware of it "way back when"? I imagine Mrs. Benfonte would have been interested and impressed by it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for asking! A couple of years ago a friend researched my geneology and that's when the Bacon connection was discovered. That's when I also learned about Susanna North Martin, my female ancestor accused as a witch by Cotton Mather in colonial times. She was hanged. I wrote about her last May for Mother's Day in the blog called Solid Foundation. You're so right that it would have been interesting to know these things to connect to literature or history when first studying them in a broader context in school. Well, it might also be interesting to be able to have high school discussions bringing the wisdom of age!
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