Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Quotes of late scribe to live by
I’ll be honest: I’m egregiously behind in reading the works of award-winning author, editor, teacher and Princeton University professor emeritus Toni Morrison, whom we lost on Aug. 5.
Years ago I read some of her book, Song of Solomon. If I recall correctly I read some of Beloved, having been given a copy during a press junket to Chicago to see the then-new movie version and interview its stars. Totally meant to crack another Morrison book, The Bluest Eye — although from what I learned of its plot, I don’t know if I could keep from being sad afterward.
After she passed, I saw a number of Morrison quotes posted on social media. That gave me the idea to look up a few of her best verbal and book quotations and see if I was living The World According to Toni, or at least agreeing with it. A few that struck me:
Bit by bit … she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
Ah, truer words were never written. Sometimes, even when we’re delivered from a thing, we act as though we’re still a slave to it. But watch that freedom. Another Morrison quote:
We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
Indeed, with freedom comes responsibility. Responsibility to keep hearts, couch-potato-ing and hormones in subjection to our heads.
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
And the way to surrender to the air: Release the mind from the notion that one must always settle for “gravity.” A similar sentiment, more bluntly expressed:
You wanna fly, you got to give up the s*** that weighs you down.
If we could only push past our mental comfort zones and jettison burdens literal or figurative, we’d be shocked to realize what weighty discomfort we accepted.
Anger … it’s a paralyzing emotion … you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don’t think it’s any of that — it’s helpless … it’s absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers … and anger doesn’t provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever.
Those words should be heeded especially now, when anger and frustration show themselves in so many tragic ways. Anger has
its place, but nonconstructive anger can result in a paralysis that keeps us from moving forward into peace and positivity. When we do “get anything done,” it’s because we’ve let our anger slingshot its way into destructive action.
But then, Morrison also wrote:
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
Which is why I said “nonconstructive” above. Anger can prompt “good” adrenaline, indeed causing us to be aware that we’re too good for the mess we’ve settled for and shouldn’t stand for, not one more darn minute.
I tell my students, “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grabbag candy game.”
As we church folks say, that’ll preach. We all have some kind of following, people who are watching us, people who are looking to us and up to us, people who just might pattern their lives after ours in some way. We should not only put forth our best efforts but actively encourage and help position others to do the same.
She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?”
Substitute the third cookie, the third doughnut, the third bag of popcorn. Hey, it’s there. I might as well consume it — it’s not like the consequences won’t be that much worse than they are already, and if I scarf it down, it won’t present a future temptation. That “third beer” thinking has led many down the path to spiritual, mental, physical and financial ruin or at least been a kick in the pants to our quality of life. Beware the third beer.
All paradises, all utopias, are designed by who is not
there, by the people who are not allowed in.
A ritzy club or neighborhood wouldn’t, by design, be ritzy if poor folk could come in and wallow all over the place. It’s up to each of us to ask by whose standards a paradise/utopia qualifies as one, and whether or not our being in it means ignoring or even instigating suffering outside it.
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
Boo-yah. And there are the books you need to read but haven’t yet. I’ve got some catching up to do.
Your thoughts? Email:
■ Notable Arkansans does not appear this week.