The Best of Ballast
Highlights from past issues of Ballast Quarterly Review, a periodical commonplace book, published 1985-2006
edited by Roy R. Behrens
Joseph Epstein [A Line Out for a Walk]
One of the things that college taught me was that I cannot be taught in the conventional manner. Autodidactically, I have to go about things in my own poky way, obliquely acquiring on my own such intellectual skills as I have, assembling such learning as I possess from my odd, unsystematic reading. Are there many such people as I? The inefficacy of teaching in his own life, if I may say so, is an
unusual thing to have to admit on the part of a man who spends a good part of his own time teaching others. But there it is—or rather, there I am.
Morris Cohen
[in his philosophy course, when a student asked "How can you prove to me that I exist?" Cohen replied] Who's asking?
Adrienne Gusoff
I have often depended on the blindness of strangers.
•••
Graham Greene [Travels with my Aunt]
The first sign of his approaching end was when my old aunts, while undressing him, removed a toe with one of his socks.
Francine du Plessix Gray
[in George Plimpton, The Writer’s Chapbook]
We must all struggle against all that is curious, already-seen, fatigued, shopworn. I battle against what my admirable colleague William Gass calls "pissless prose," prose that lacks the muscle, the physicality, the gait of a good horse, for pissless prose is bodiless and has no soul. Of course this holds equally true for fiction as for essays, reporting, a letter to a friend, a book review, a decent contribution to art criticism—in sum I search for language in which faith intertwines with desire, faith that we can recapture, with erotic accuracy, that treasured memory or vision which is the object of our desire. I'm keen on the word "voluptuous," a word too seldom heard in this society founded on puritanical principles. I think back to a phrase of Julia Kristeva's, the most interesting feminist thinker of our time, who speaks of "the voluptuousness of family life." I would apply the same phrase to the prose I most admire, prose I can caress and nuture and linger on, diction which is nourished by the deep intimacy of familiar detail, and yet is constantly renewed by the force of the writer's love and fidelity to language.
Richard F. Sterba [Reminiscences of a Viennese Psychoanalyst]
A group of us went with [Hungarian psychiatrist Sandor] Ferenczi to a
nightclub at which the famous American dancer Josephine Baker was performing. We all enjoyed the graceful, supple movement of her beautiful body and were enthusiastic about her performance. After her appearance on stage, Josephine joined the audience. I have no idea what made her pick out Ferenczi for an enchanting little scene. She came to our table and in a most natural fashion sat on Ferenczi's lap. She glided her hand through her own black hair, which was smoothly and tightly glued to her scalp by a heavy pomade. Then she stroked the bald center of Ferenczi's head and, rubbing the pomade on his hairless scalp, said, "So, that will make your hair grow."
•••
Finley Peter Dunne
I wish it cud be fixed up so's that th' men that starts th' wars could do th' fightin'.
Ambroise Bierce
What this country needs—what every country needs occasionally—is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.
Charles Eliot Norton
"There never was a good war," said [Benjamin] Franklin. There have indeed been many wars in which a good man must take part, and take part with grave gladness to defend the cause of justice, to die if need be, a willing sacrifice, thankful to give life for what is dearer than life, and happy that even by death in war he is serving the cause of peace. But if a war be undertaken for the most righteous end, before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense, it is a national crime
•••
Anton Bilek [American GI, in Studs Terkel, The Good War]
One time [during WWII, while interned in a Japanese prison camp, where he worked underground in a coal mine], at the end of the day, while I was waitin’ for the little train to take our shift out, I laid back against the rock wall, put my cap over my eyes, and tried to get some rest. The guy next to me says, “God damn, I wish I was back in Seattle.” I paid no attention. Guys were always talking about being back home. He said, “I had a nice restaurant there and I lost it all.” I turned around and looked and it’s a Japanese [soldier]. He was one of the overseers. I was flabbergasted.
He said, “Now just don’t talk to me. I’ll do all the talkin’.” He’s talkin’ out of the side of his mouth. He says, “I was born and raised in Seattle, had a nice restaurant there. I brought my mother back to Japan. She’s real old and knew she was gonna die and she wanted to come home. The war broke out and I couldn’t get back to the States. They made me come down here and work in the coal mines.” I didn’t know what the hell to say to the guy. Finally the car come down and I says, “Well, see you in Seattle someday.” And I left. I never saw him after that.
Jock Munroe [in The Common Ground Book]
I [a Scottish bagpipes player dressed in a kilt] had another amusing encounter in Rotterdam when I was playing and suddenly felt this hard poke in the back. Quite hard. I stopped and looked round. A little old woman was prodding me with her walking stick saying, "The Lord God said men should wear trousers and women should wear a skirt. And you're a man and you're wearing a skirt and you're sinning."
She was a Dutch Reformed Church fanatic—absolutely off her rocker. I wasn't in any danger since she was pretty ancient.
"I'm terribly sorry," I said, "but I don't seem to recall that Jesus Christ wore trousers."
"Aawhhh, you're just making fun of the Lord. Aawwh..." she went and started poking me again.
The naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts.
•••
I believe that eating pork makes people stupid.
Walter Hamady [Perishable Press Ltd.]
A dented deckle. A fold-over corner. The out-of-square sides. That fortuitous red thread underlining a random word, that lace-wing insect preserved forever in the corner of the title page, that crate, the vatman’s drops, the vatman’s tears, a circle between title and text. The irregularity signifies: here, humanity, here is a sign that a human being did this! The eye and hand were here! The aesthetic Kilroy, if you will.
Joseph Epstein [“About Face”]
Love of one’s work tends to make one’s face interesting. Artists have animated faces, and performing musicians the most animated of all. Suffering, too, confers interest on a face, but only suffering that, if not necessarily understood, has been thought about at length. Uninterested people have uninteresting faces.
•••
Julian Bigelow [quoted by Ed Regis in Who Got Einsten’s Office?]
[Hungarian-born mathematician John] Von Neumann lived in this elegant home in Princeton. As I parked my car and walking in [for a job interview], there was this very large Great Dane dog bouncing around on the front lawn. I knocked on the door and Von Neumann, who was a small, quiet, modest kind of man came to the door and bowed to me and said, “Bigelow, won’t you come in,” and so forth, and this dog brushed between our legs and went into the living room. He proceeded to lie down on the rug in front of everybody, and we had the entire interview—whether I would come, what I knew, what the job was going to be like—and this lasted maybe forty minutes, with the dog wandering all around the house. Towards the end of it, Von Neumann asked me if I always traveled with the dog. But of course it wasn’t my dog, and it wasn’t his either, but Von Neumann, being a diplomatic, middle-European type person—he kindly avoided mentioning it until the end.
If A is success in life, then A equals X plus Y plus Z. Work is X; Y is play; and Z is keeping your mouth shut.
David Aaron [Endless Light]
One man who came to me for advice because he was contemplating divorce told me mournfully why he thought this marriage went wrong. He said, “I don’t know what my problem was. I was looking for a Ferrari and I got a Ford.” I said, “I think the problem was you were looking for a car.”
•••
Michael Ondaatje [in Robin Robertson, Mortification]
A well-known American novelist, after her successes, was invited back to her high school. They had put on the dog for her and she had therefore put on the dog for them. She dressed well and stood up at the lectern to give her formal speech about writing, the arts, culture, education—all the noble things writers never talk or think about when they are not on panels or speaking publicly.
It was a full auditorium. Halfway throug the talk she began to feel sick and, knowing she was soon going to throw up, announced in a calm voice that she had left a few pages of her speech offstage, in her bag. She walked off slowly and as soon as she was out of sight ran to the bathroom and threw up noisily. She had been doing this for about a minute when someone came into the bathroom to tell her that the lapel mike was still on.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress—but I repeat myself.
N.R. Hanson [Patterns of Discovery]
Seeing is an experience. A retinal reaction is only a physical state…People, not their eyes, see. Cameras, and eyeballs, are blind…there is more to seeing than meets the eyeball.
•••
Jack Paar [P.S. Jack Paar: An Entertainment]
She [Tallulah Bankhead] could not find any toilet paper in her stall, and asked the lady in the next booth, “Darling, is there any tissue in there?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Then have any Kleenex?”
“‘Afraid not.”
Then Tallulah said, “My dear, do you have two fives for a ten?”
Joseph Gerard Brennan [in The American Scholar (Autumn 1978)]
[British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead] himself had moments when he was not quite sure where he had put things. One day in the early 1930s he had Professor James Melrose of Illinois to tea at the Whithead cottage…It occurred to Whitehead that his guests might like to see the work in progress on a library addition to the house. So he led them outside, first carefully on Professor Melrose’s hat which he found in the coatroom closet and assumed was his own. After the excursion he returned the hat to the closet, but at tea’s end, when he and Mrs. Whitehead prepared to accompany the guests to their car, he went there once more for his hat. This time Melrose hat beat him to it and retrieved his lawful property. Whitehead reached up to the place where his visitor’s hat had been, made a little exclaimation of surprise, then trotted some distance to a spot where his own hat hung on a hook. It was to clear to his guests that the author of Process and Reality did not realize there were two hats, but believed that his own had in some unaccountable way changed its place.
Joyce Cary [opening lines of The Horse’s Mouth]
I was walking by the Thames. Half-past morning on an autumn day. Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried fish shop. All bright below. Low tide, dusty water and a crooked bar of straw, chicken-boxes, dirt and oil from mud to mud. Like a viper swimming in skim milk. The old serpent, symbol of nature and love.
•••
In your eyes there lives
a green egyptian noise.
Peter H. Gott [in The Fresno Bee, 4 May 2000]
After my father’s bypass surgery, he felt so dreadful that he insisted his doctor stop most of his medication. Thereafter, he felt fine. While such a drastic action is not everyone’s cup of tea, you would have to know my father to appreciate how relentlessly stubborn he was. He claimed to have “accurately misunderstood” his doctors, didn’t want them to put [all] his “aches in one basket,” was fearful of “dying of nothing,” and wished as an adult to be “the blind leading a blond.” Darn, he had a way with words…
Mary Emma Harris [in The Arts at Black Mountain College] Emil Willimetz [a student at Black Mountain College] described [German-born painter Josef] Albers’ method of typesetting and designing as the “tausands technique…You do a tausand and then you can see which one is right.”
•••
Emily Sardonia [in Steven J. Zeitlin, et al.,
A Celebration of American Family Folklore]
Every time we came home from the store with a new jar of peanut butter, my dad, when we would go out of the room, would write the initials of the one he thought had been the best that week. And then the next morning, or whenever we’d go to open the peanut butter to put on our toast or something, he’d say, “Oh look what’s here!” And he would tell us that it was the little fairy that lived in the light downstairs, whose name was Matilda and that she had done it. That used to make you be good so you could your name in the peanut butter.
Leslie Fiedler [Freaks: Myths and Image of the Secret Self]
When they [the American Siamese twins, Violet and Daisy Hilton] died of the Hong Kong flu in 1969, they were working in a supermarket near Charlotte, North Carolina, as a double checkout girl—one bagging, no doubt, as the other rang up the bill on the cash register.
Alister Hardy [The Living Stream]
I think it likely that there are no finer galleries of abstract art than the cabinet drawers of the tropical butterfly collector…It is often, I believe, the fascination of this abstract color and design, as much as an interest in biology or a love of nature, that allures the ardent leipidopterist, although all these may be combined; he has his favorite genera and dotes upon his different species of Vanessa and Parnassius, as the modernist does upon his examples of Matisse or Ben Nicholson.
•••
Milton Glaser [in Joan Evelyn Ames, Mastery]
I remember Rudi [a friend and teacher] saying once that all life is about transcendence. If you’re ugly you have to transcend your ugliness, if you’re beautiful you have to transcend your beauty, if you’re poor you have to transcend your poverty, if you’re rich you have to transcend your wealth… There is nothing worse than being born extraordinarily beautiful, nothing more potentially damaging to the self. You could say the same for being born inordinately rich. You suddenly realize how wise the idea is that you get nothing at birth except things to transcend. That’s all you get.
Ginu Kamani
[in Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, ed., Becoming American]
I grew up surrounded by big, dark, animated eyes capable of conveying the greatest subtlety. Recently I was reminded again of the exquisite power of Indian eyes during a Satyajit Ray retrospective. As I watched his films, I realized what one of my biggest confusions must have been as a young immigrant to the US—my American peers appeared cold even when trying to be friendly. I depended so much on eyes to magnify both silent and verbal transmissions, that communication with my American peers often left me in a dissatisfied limbo. I had to adjust to a different sort of communication, all talk and less than expressive glances.
George A. Wolf, Jr.
[quoted in Robert Bruce Williams, ed., John Dewey, Recollections]
[In 1947 or 1948, George A. Wolf, Jr. was a young physician in New York. One weekend he was asked to take the emergency calls of one of his professors, who was John Dewey’s doctor. The American philosopher, who was in his late eighties] had gone for a walk on Fifth Avenue, slipped and hurt his shoulder. I was called to see him which I did in his apartment. The old gentleman was literally quivering in pain and his new wife was most apprehensive…I am an internalist but I remembered from medical school orthopedics a maneuver, somewhat old fashioned, said to reduce such dislocations occasionally.
The patient was in so much pain that I decided to try the maneuver. It consisted of taking off my shoe, sitting on the foot of Dr. Dewey’s bed, placing my sock covered foot in Dr. Dewey’s armpit, grasping his hand and forearm on the affected side and gently pulling…Suddenly, there was a feeling that the bone had slipped back into place. My memory tells me that it was a loud satisfying crack but my biological training tells me that both Dr. Dewey and I were so relieved, he of his pain and I of my apprehension, that the event was really very quiet. He stopped shaking, looked at me gratefully, and smiled a little smile. He said the appropriate thank you’s, as did his wife.
The amusing part was that as I put my foot in the suffering gentleman’s armpit (axilla), I said, “Pardon me, Dr. Dewey.”
•••
James Thurber [cartoon caption]
You wait here, and I’ll bring the etchings down.
Henry Adams [Victor Schreckengost and 20th-Century Design]
[At the Cleveland Institute of Art in the 1920s, one of Frank Wilcox’s] most unusual assignments was to fry eggs in the classroom and then make drawings of them. When the students were done, he would hold up one of the drawings and ask the class what it meant. “How far did the egg run out? How high did the yoke stand? How brown were the edges?” With a hot skillet the egg would flow out less far and have a smaller perimeter. If it was too hot the edges would burn. A fresh egg will stand up higher than a stale one. With a little practice one could look at the drawing and figure out the heat of the burner and the freshness of the egg. As Viktor [Schreckengost] recalls, “He taught us to see.”
“Tommy,” says I, “spell cat,” I says. “Go to th’ divvie,” says the cheerub. “Very smartly answer-ed,” says Mary Ellen. “Ye shud not ask thim to spell,” she says. “They don’t larn that till they get to colledge,” she says “an’” she says, “sometimes not even thin,” she says.
•••
Man Ray [Self-Portrait]
After dinner, [French artist Marcel] Duchamp would take the bus to Nice to play at a chess circle and return late with Lydie [his young, newly-wed first wife] lying awake waiting for him. Even so, he did not go to bed immediately, but set up the chess pieces to study the position of a game he had been playing. First thing in the morning when he arose, he went to the chessboard to make a move he had thought out during the night. But the piece could not be moved—during the night Lydie had arisen and glued down all the pieces… A few months later Duchamp and Lydie divorced, and he returned to the States.
Edward Marsh [Ambrosia and Small Beer]
A soldier up for medical exam proved to have been wearing a truss for the last six years, and was classified as P.E. or Permanently Exempt. On his way out he gave this news to his pal, who immediately asked for the loan of the truss, which was granted. The examiner asked how long he hand been wearing it, and he said “Six years,” whereupon he was classified as M.E. “What’s that?” he asked. “Middle East.” “How can I go to the Middle East when I’ve been wearing a truss for six years?” “If you can wear a truss for six years upside-down, you can jolly well ride a camel for six months.”
•••
Mark Van Doren [Autobiography]
He [his father, an Illinois farmer] loved to call things by the wrong names—or, it may be, the right ones, fanatastically the right ones. Either extreme is poetry, of which he had the secret without knowing that he did. It was natural for him to name two lively rams on the place Belshazzar and Nebuchadnezzar… Frank [a brother] became Fritz Augustus—just why, I never inquired—and I was either Marcus Aurelius or Marco Bozzaris. Guy was Guy Bob, and Carl was Carlo. And Paul, when it came time for him to share in the illicit luxuriance, was no other than Wallace P. Poggin—again, I have no faint idea why. My father never discussed his inspirations, any more than he analysed his spoonerisms, or even admitted that they had fallen from his mouth. He would cough, and appear to apologize by saying: “I have a little throaking in my tit.”
Rudolf Arnheim [in a letter to Ballast]
The physicist George Gamow was also an entertaining popularizer. He once told the story of how with his wife and their baby daughter he visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa. As they climbed the steps, they noticed an increasingly musty smell, which they first attributed to the ancient walls of the building. Then, however, they began to suspect their little girl, and by the time they reached the top it was clear that she needed immediate attention. “And from the very place,” explained Gamow, raising his arm and his voice dramatically, “where Galileo launched his experimental objects, we also propelled…”
•••
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Liam Hudson [“Texts, Signs, Artefacts”]
The arts in particular are seen [in our society] as peripheral, or—even worse—as “fun”; that is to say, as a simple emotional release that receives little professionally academic attention because it deserves none. Yet the briefest glance shows that poems, novels, paintings, photographs, plays, films of any quality are rarely fun, either for the artist or for the spectator; what is more, that they are at least as carefully poised, as subtly calculated in their effects, as any other genre of intectual activity. Many take months, years, to put together, and at least as long to assimilate in any but a superficial way.
Lady Maud Warrender [My First Sixty Years]
The beauty of Lord Curson’s first wife had impressed the Indians. She was the daughter of Mr. Joseph Leiter of Chicago. Her mother’s twistings of words are worthy of immortality: “What I like best about Rome? Why the Apollo with the beveled ear, the Dying Alligator, and Romeo and Juliet being suckled by the wolf.” She used to say that it was essential to have a ventre-à-terre in Paris; also that she had given her decorators bête noire to do what they liked; and she thus described her first meeting with her future husband at a costume ball—”He was dressed in the garbage of a monk and I said to Momma, ‘Alma Mater, Ecce Homo!”
•••
[Edwin Lutyens] thought as a little boy that the Lord’s Prayer began with “Our Father Charles in heaven, Harold be thy name.”
Samuel Butler [The Way of All Flesh]
He [Ernest] was, however, very late in being able to sound a hard “c” or “k,” and, instead of saying “Come,” he said “Tum, tum, tum.”
“Ernest,” said Theobald, from the arm-chair in front of the fire, where he was sitting with his hands folded before him, “don’t you think it would be very nice if you were to say ‘come’ like other people, instead of ‘tum’?”
“I do say tum,” replied Ernest, meaning that he had said “come.”
Judith and Neil Morgan [Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel]
On one of their walks together, his [Dr. Seuss’s] father told him about his business trip that day to Northampton, where he had retained the young lawyer Calvin Coolidge to collect brewery debts from shopkeepers. He and Coolidge had stopped in a saloon where the special was two martinis for twenty-five cents. After his first drink, the frugal Coolidge rose. “I’ll be back tomorrow for the other one,” he said.
Selection of material is copyright © by Roy R. Behrens