David Murdock Column: On rummaging around the writing junk drawer

As I’ve said a few times over the years, I have a writing “junk drawer” — a notebook where I jot down ideas for columns. Some of those ideas come to fruition here, but most don’t. So, I have notebooks full of jotted-down quotes and words and “just things I want to remember” that will never fill up a full-length column. Unless you string a bunch of ‘em together!

Like ... the note I made on March 23 of this year. I was sitting on the front porch and saw a black cat. No big deal — I’m not particularly superstitious about black cats. In some cultures, like Scotland and Japan, they’re actually considered good luck. So, the particular reason that I noticed this one is that it was a bob-tail. That ups the interesting quotient, enough so to note it.

I went inside for a refill on coffee — black, no sugar, by the way — and came back outside to see the black cat all the way across the yard. So I thought. Then, I noticed this black cat’s long tail. Hmm. I sat there for a bit until I saw both of these black cats … just to make sure I wasn’t losing it.

Early April finds a great quote by the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel: “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.” Minerva is the Roman goddess of wisdom, and she is represented by the owl, so that’s Hegel’s poetic way of saying that it’s only with the coming of age — “the dusk” — that wisdom takes flight. Well, at least I have something to look forward to!

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Here’s a quote from the great Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot: “Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.” That one is from "1944."

And, since today we are more into “technology” than “industrialism,” it stands to reason that we think that a lot of those “problems of life” can be solved in “computer terms.” That’s why I dislike the phrase “life hack,” although I use it all the time. A hack is a coding solution that works, but it ain’t pretty. We talk about “bugs” in our lives, etc.

I noted the quote from Eliot, but I neglected to write down from where I got it. When I just searched for it, I found several articles I read lately from which it could have come. I also found the original 1944 article by Eliot. That’s why all articles on the internet sound similar, I think.

And — saving this one until the end — there’s a quote from Jay Nordlinger in National Review from back in January: “You know what I hate? Nostalgia. (You may be surprised to hear.) Sometimes, the past is overrated, and the present underrated. In some respects, the ‘good ol’ days’ were not so good — and the days of now are very good.” Amen.

Anytime I see quotes or observations on certain subjects, I’ll jot ‘em down. Nostalgia is one of them. That’s been one of my fascinations since graduate school. I don’t mind nostalgia so much — I’d be a hypocrite if I did, considering how nostalgic I can wax, sometimes — but it’s always in the back of my mind that these days right now are going to be a whole generations’ “good old days” in the future.

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By the way, I’m still on a mystery novel/detective novel kick — and enjoying them more than ever — but those books somewhat prove the point. I just finished a British mystery novel that features a happy ending for a young couple. It was published in 1939.

The characters in the novel have no idea what horror is about to be visited on them. By the end of 1939, Great Britain and her allies would be embroiled in World War II, and all the happy dreams of the young couple in love in that novel will be (at least) put on hold, if not shattered entirely. The young man is exactly the age that would be first called up for military service. Part of the novel had to do with what his father had endured in World War I.

We are nostalgic about many things, but no one is ever nostalgic about bad things. The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns once remarked that nostalgia is the “strategic oversimplification of the past.” One thing about that remark — although I found several places that quote him as saying it, I cannot find exactly where he said it … which makes me suspicious of its veracity. It’s simply too good a quote, though.

But I’ve been bitten too many times passing along quotations that turn out not to be true quotations. That’s why I’ve just spent another 20 minutes trying to track down the source of the quote, just to make sure. I’m not a huge Ken Burns fan, so that one could have slipped right by me without my noticing.

But I do like my nostalgia, though. Burns is right, too — sometimes we have to strategically oversimplify the past to endure it.

David Murdock is an English instructor at Gadsden State Community College. He can be contacted at [email protected]. The opinions expressed are his own.   

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: David Murdock on junk drawers and why nostalgia is overrated