When approximate is more accurate...

I typed into Google the line ‘Wisdom and old age’.

As I wrote it, I was thinking that perhaps there would be links to the works of wise people that were old. What you get if you do this is actually a page full of links to pages that contain quotes! I clicked on the first one, and about fifth or sixth down was one by someone with an interesting name – (namely) Anais Nin. She is attributed with this:

‘We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.’

I typed her name into Google and followed one of the links. Turns out she was a writer. There’s a row of pictures… some of her as a young person and some of her as an older one. I clicked on an older one. There’s a comment underneath it. It reads ‘man, she was pretty right up to the end of her life’. I wondered how I’d feel about that… if I were her. It’s funny isn’t it that one can spend years acquiring old age and some of it acquiring wisdom, only to be summed up like that… for how you look.

Is it, I wonder, an interesting thing that the Google search had found a page full of quotes, not the page full of links to wise tomes of knowledge that I’d fancied. Is this a sign of the shallow ‘sound bite’ nature of Western society or is it a reflection of wisdom? Some of these people after all, had such a lot more to say and be remembered for. What of that? Why not that stuff on the page?

As I’ve got older myself, and perhaps I may have mentioned this before (I’m getting older… so that’s OK to forget what I’ve written), I’ve begun to congratulate myself on my abject failure to be what our society considers to be ‘success – full’. We begin with such ambition and surety about the way our lives are sure to play out and for some, they get close enough to actually believe they’ve achieved it! I feel successful because I’ve missed the boat with all that material stuff, but have a wonderful family and fine kids. (If that sounds trite to you… it's just possible that you’re not old enough yet! ha ha). Being OK with this ‘failure’ takes time and a gentle and understanding approach to ones own delicate ego. In the process, I guess for a while you replace one form of life justification with another. I’ve probably been guilty of imagining myself as bit of ‘creative’ person or a bit of an ‘intellectual’ or any of quite a lot of other qualities I have attempted to incorporate into my persona to justify a healthy self image. Fortunately for me, I’ve not really minded that my self image cannot be reasonably attached to my body’s appearance and so I’ve not felt the need to have my man boobs reduced or my hair re-coloured or replaced with false stuff in some way. Nor am I interested in clothes or cars that supposedly improve other people’s perception of me.

However, I HAVE always aspired to wisdom, and like so many before me I imagined it as tangible almost, encapsulated in large books of weight and substance. Over time I’ve noticed that it’s also in other places, like the time the bus driver on a bus from central Boston out to Watertown made my day simply by knowing all the people on his bus by their first names, and them knowing him. Or the time I went into a public toilets under the awe inspiring Greenwich Observatory for a slash to find a middle age man on his hands and knees whistling a merry tune whilst he scrubbed the floor adjacent to the urinal I was taking a leak into. (I remember nothing about the observatory itself!)

So in the spirit of this, I took a book off my shelf just now to see what I would find to throw light on why Google has quotes about wisdom where I was expecting a tome. The book I randomly selected was, (funnily enough) a book that I bought in Watertown many years ago by an American Illustrator that my Dad had a couple of books by. His name was Andrew Loomis, and the book is called ‘Creative Illustration’.



I opened it at random. It was a page called ‘The “Big Tone” approach’, in which he talks about the something extra that an artist can bring to an image that a photograph cannot – namely the ability to boil things down to the simple representation.

‘Sometimes the simple postery statement is better then the more finished thing, for it is conceived and executed in truth – truth in the larger sense rather than a minute inspection of the truth. One big truth is more understandable than a lot of little ones (with, perhaps through ignorance of incomprehension, some of the more important ones left out) […] On the opposite page we have taken a simple figure subject'. [See below dear reader...]



'I believe my demonstration will be perfectly understandable to you. I attempt to show the power of simple light, halftone, and shadow, as allied to the Form Principle. You can be a good painter going no farther than this, by getting these tones and simple forms right in drawing, values, in relationship with one another according to the light, and in relationship with the surrounding elements.
It is really so simple that the general lack of understanding of it is amazing. Most of the difficulty, I think, arises from the fact that copy is seldom made, or models posed, in simple light and shadow. Naturally if you break up these original simple tones, which are the best you could possibly have, with a half dozen other lights, you have no form left, nor any opportunity to state it’ Andrew Loomis 1947 (or as it's written in the book MCMXLVII)

And there (perhaps) we have it.

The word ‘perhaps’ was inserted after the fact in the sentence above. It’ll probably be the thing they write on my headstone; Christopher (perhaps) Martin.

After all that, I’ll leave you with another quote on that page:

‘The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.’ H.D. Thoreau. (Who else!)