TRUISMS

MY GO-TO BLOG, the one I must read whenever I can, is Dominique Browning’s Slow Love Life.  I have followed Dominique over the years, first in her books (before Slow Love, she wrote Around the House and In the Garden, Paths of Desire, and many compilations of work from her days as editor of House and Garden magazine, where I always treasured her monthly column.)

This past week her blog introduced me to Jenny Holzer, a conceptual artist who had collected a set of maxims she called Truisms from 1979 to 1983. A truism, according to Merriam-Webster, is “an undoubted or self-evident truth; especially: one too obvious or unimportant for mention.” According to Holzer, it's her "Reader's Digest version of Western and Eastern thought."  I decided to take a look at a few of them.

There are several that start with “If” -- perhaps a good place to start:

                    if you aren't political your personal life should be exemplary

Well, I have never considered myself political, nor is my personal life exemplary. Moreover, in 2011 being "political" seems to be about being a bit contentious -- knowing more about "solutions" than I would ever claim to understand. So let's think about exemplary.

May Sarton, in her later books A House by the Sea or  Encore, a Journal of the 80th Year,  wrote warmly of friends who lived “exemplary lives” – a phrase I deeply admired at the time, and a category where I did not belong. I’m just a simple trudger, a laborer in the vineyards, trying to meet the next deadline, get the garden planned and planted, the meals prepared – oh, and if I have a little extra time, help with a local fundraiser. But crusading with a passion? Dropping everything to save humanity? Hard to know where to begin.

Jump to a New York Times piece this past September about the resurrection of Kenyon College in Ohio. The article quoted Horace Mann, Kenyon’s first president (1859-59), in a statement from his 1859 commencement address that became the college motto:

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

That would given anyone pause, but for me it evokes another memory. Early in my career, I worked with a number of  physicists, many of whom had earned graduate degrees with R. Victor Jones, now Robert L.Wallace Emeritus Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard. My colleagues  were advancing the frontiers of applied science, getting published in Phys. Rev. and the leading engineering journals, doing interesting work, making good salaries, raising children...  But every time they would bump into Vic, his greeting was always the same: “Hello (Tom or Ramon or Mike).  What have you done lately for world peace?”

Who of us can measure up?