Wise Words Take the Place of New Year’s Resolutions

As usual, I am making no resolutions for the new year. They are too easily broken, and that is bad for morale.

One usually resolves to do something one doesn’t like doing, or to stop doing something one enjoys doing. I might resolve to run two miles a day, or I might resolve to stop drinking wine. I’m not likely to do either, so what’s the use of teasing myself?

Instead, it has been my practice in recent years to read the quotations in the RAND calendar for the new year, and to extract lessons from them for a better life.

RAND does not insist that one do anything or not do anything, but merely suggests we get our values straight, for a more useful and worthy life.

For example, it quotes Grace Hopper’s advice to young people in a commencement address: “A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. . . . And I want every one of you to be good ships and sail out and do the new things and move us toward the future. . . . “

At my age I will probably be content to stay in port, but I will try to keep my eyes on the horizons the young people are sailing for.

For October, it quotes Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a 19th-Century abolitionist, on what America lacks: “Justice, simple justice, is the right, not simply of the strong and powerful, but of the weakest and feeblest. . . .”

More than a century after Harper stated that fact, justice is still not available to all.

Albert Schweitzer is quoted on man’s relationship with the natural world: “A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. . . . “

As an innumerate being I can only guess at the significance of Bertrand Russell’s homage to mathematics: “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty--a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture. . . . “

That reminds me of John Keats’ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

I’m afraid both those sentiments are beyond my ken. I once had to explain in a high school English class what Keats meant by “beauty is truth, truth beauty” and I flubbed it. One thing Keats’ lines don’t help me do is divide 364 by 72.

However, with the help of my pocket computer, I hope to stumble through another year, though perhaps oblivious to true beauty.

For July, the Greek satirist Lucian has some good advice for historians: “The historian should be fearless and incorruptible; a man of independence, loving frankness and truth: one who, as the poet says, calls a fig a fig and a spade a spade. He should yield to neither hatred nor affection; he should bow to no authority and acknowledge no king. He should never consider what this or that man will think but should state the facts as they really occurred.”

Those precepts apply not only to historians but also to newspaper reporters, the impermanence of whose writings makes them no less subject to such constraints.

For November, my own favorite politician, Adlai Stevenson, explains why older men know more about life than college youths, for all the latter’s familiarity with “verbal packages.” What a man knows at 50 that he did not know at 20 boils down to this: “The knowledge . . . of people, places, actions--a knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love. . . . “

I’m reassured to know that my sleeplessness has not been in vain.

Good old Eleanor Roosevelt begins the new year with words that reveal her humanity: “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home--so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. They are the world of the individual person, the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. . . . “

Let’s hear it for Eleanor!

Finally, for December, we have a word from William Shakespeare:

“A good leg will fall, a straight back will stoop, a black beard will turn white, a curled pate will grow bald, a fair face will wither, a full eye will wax hollow; but a good heart . . . is the sun and the moon; or rather, the sun, and not the moon, for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps course truly.”

Let’s be of good heart.