Robertson Davies (1913 – 1995)
Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist and professor.
It is not my intention to denounce modern education. If it is bad, it may be said that all education is bad which is not self-education, and quite a lot of self-education is going on today — some of it in our schools, under the very noses of the teachers!
He sets a thief to guard his purse
Who trusts a dial with his hours
Or bids a sand-glass bleed away his nights,
His days, his loves, his pleasures and his powers.
The burthen of his years
Is Time's soft footfall, Time's soft
Falling
Through his joys and tears.
I think we should see whether we are wise trying to educate everybody to a high standard the way we are trying to do now. There has to be a high level of education so everybody is literate, but whether university education is necessary for everyone is open to question.
The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.
As for an afterlife, there has been a general decline in the general acceptance of it as a certainty, and though a few rationalists may be pleased, to many people this has added a new terror to death. We are reluctant, in the main, to consider the disappearance of ourselves and consequently all we feel and know. Every man's death is, literally, the end of a world if he dies without hope. We have exchanged Gone Elsewhere for Gone Nowhere.
The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books.
It seems to me that most of us get all the adventure we are capable of digesting. Personally, I have never had to fight a dozen pirates single-handed, and I have never jumped from a moving express-train onto the back of a horse, and I have never been discovered in the harem of the Grand Turk. I am glad of all these things. They are too rich for my digestion, and I do not long for them. I have all the close shaves and narrow squeaks in my life that my constitution will stand, and my daily struggles with bureaucrats, taxgatherers and uplifters are more exhausting than any encounters with mere buccaneers on the Spanish Main.
Let people alone. Let them find their way. Let them find their level and you may sometimes be delighted and astonished at the extraordinary high level to which they'll rise if they're let alone.
The really great eccentrics are all inimitable; they are not possessed by a single oddity; they are, in their deepest selves, unlike the generality of mankind.
It is popularly believed that our grandmothers were unathletic, but no girl who operated a parlour organ lacked exercise, pumping with her feet, clawing at the Vox Humana and Celeste stops with her hands and wagging her head to keep time. But the parlour organ went out when short skirts came in. Many a young fellow of the nineties, charmed by his girl's command of her organ, married her, only to discover on his wedding night that she had legs like an eight-day bicycle racer — the result of furious pedalling. When skirts were raised, the jig was up.
There are people nowadays who think that Irving was a ranter and a ham; quite true, he was, but in the sense that Alexander the Great was a martinet and a butcher. Ranting and hamming are very necessary accomplishments for a great actor, and he is able to invest them with a greatness which lesser actors cannot approach.
The life of Man is a struggle with Nature and a struggle with the Machine; when Nature and the Machine link forces against him, Man hasn't a chance.
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best.
Famous author (and former newspaperman) Robertson Davies recently gave a reading from his latest novel to a packed library theatre in Calgary. After the reading, he took questions from the audience. One young man asked, "Professor Davies, how can a practicing journalist find time to write fiction?" "Oh dear," Davies replied, "that question shows a great deal of innocence about journalism."
My brother Fairchild has just bought himself an "electronic janitor", a costly device which, I understand, keeps his house at an even temperature of 70 degrees without any effort on his part whatsoever. I don't know quite how it works, but it has something to do with molecules and the quantum theory.
The inert mind is a greater danger than the inert body, for it overlays and stifles the desire to live.
It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.
Have you never read the manifesto of the Marchbanks Humanist Party? How does it begin?
The more taboos and prohibitions there are in the world
The poorer the people will be.
The more sharp weapons the people have
The more troubled the state will be.
The more cunning and skill man possesses
The more vicious things will appear.
The more laws and orders are made prominent
The more thieves and robbers there will be.
And who wrote that, do you suppose?" "You, I imagine." "No, you don't imagine. That's what's wrong with you, and your kind; you don't, and can't imagine. Those words were written by the Chinese sage Lao Tzu in the sixth century BC.
The most dismaying call of this kind came one night at nine o'clock from a youth of sixteen who said: "I've got to have this essay ready to hand in tomorrow morning, and I'm stuck. Can you give me some help with these-here Jungian archeotypes?" It was impossible to explain to him that no telephone conversation could help him; indeed, in his agony, I do not know what would have helped him except sudden and merciful death.