Part 9 (1/2)
Walter works and plays at full speed all day long He watches the whales, plays tennis, flies to Vienna for New Year's He dances until two aracefully He attends boards of directors' s, tells jokes and plays endlessly with his computers He comes back from a trip on the QEII QEII in time for the Super Bowl in ti, Walter Cronkite would weigh five hundred pounds He disproves the theory that you can't have your cake and eat it too
I wish now I hadn't driven in to work this otten into this wholeLies are a part of life In spite of the ad in childhood to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, theus don't live by that standard It's too hard
The Truth About Lying 133 133 ”How does this look?” a wo out the door to a party If he's lucky, he genuinely likes what it looks like If he doesn't he's in trouble because either he has to lie or tell the truth and start the whole evening off on the wrong foot He not only has to lie but has to add to the deceit by lying enthusiastically ”It's okay” is not enough
It's at least partly the wo the question in the first place Saer on the probleht to put another under such a difficulty that hethe truth or hurt hi what is not true”
Truth has a andize ourselves in favor of it every chance we get All the wise men have endorsed it: Plato-”Truth will prevail”
H W Shaw-”Truth is the edict of God”
Emerson-”Every violation of truth is a stab at the health of human society”
Woodrow Wilson-”The truth always matches, piece by piece, with other parts of the truth”
Mark Twain-”When in doubt, tell the truth”
In spite of the lip service we pay truth, we spend a lot of tiood that it doesn't come easily or naturally toto deter told the truth
Advertising puts us to the test and gives us a lot of experience in detecting untruths We know they lie so how good is this product they're telling us about? And what about politicians? Notout of Washi+ngton without wondering whether they're getting the truth or some altered version of it The elected official who lies or tells less than the whole truth may, like the husband, believe that it's best for everyone if he doesn't go overboard being honest He can get hi it's best for the American people if they do not know the whole truth He is not lying for personal gain This is called ”Lying Made Easy”
It is even sadder to consider the possibility that many Americans know it and accept it They don't want the burden of knowing the truth because they are then confronted with solving so to discern whether we've been lied to or not is co that maybe ere told part of the truth but not all the truth Part of the truth is like a lie but worse because it's uest on the Larry King show one night I said sos, in answer to his questions, that I would have been better off lying about or avoiding My superiors at CBS were angry It was not that the people who objected to what I said necessarily thought I rong They siht, disloyal to be critical of CBS while I still took a salary from the company
In ht if all the truth were known by everyone about everything, it would be a better world He scoffed I think ”scoff ” is what he did I know he rejected the idea
I've thought about it and in retrospect decided he was right It was a pompous statement that sounds true but probably isn't Our lives could not survive all the truth about everything Ifto lie and repeat it I like the sound of it Maybe I can get my name in Bartlett's Fa, ”It would be a better world if everyone in it knew all the truth about everything” by saying, ”It would be a better world if everyone in it knew all the truth about everything”
The Sweet Spot in Time I'm lukewarm on both yesterday and toia interests reat things coood raceful, simple and efficient artifacts of yesterday, the antiques, but this moment is the moment I like best
The Sweet Spot in Tihts inevitably coet sentimental about the memories of Christmases past and years past and the people you spent theifts hich to commemorate the season, on the other hand, often ey ”Buy her a computer, the tool of the future!”
So I feel a certain ambivalence toward both the past and the future I dislike retyping a piece to correct raphs My son, Brian, said that if I got with it and bought s He said that if I tried one for just a few days, I'd never go back to my ancient Underwood 5
Well, I did buy a word processor and I've tried it for a year but I still write primarily on my old machine There are times when it's best for all of us to close our eyes to the future There's just so ress we have ti it the old way to take tiress when it co, in part, fro to try to impose efficiency on a writer
My antipathy for too ia can probably be traced to several hundred little antique shops where I have stopped to talk with conniving antiquaries It seeh every ti, they ruin it The good antique shops are outnumbered by the bad ones
The revival of the style of the 1920s and 1930s has helped turn ia They call it Art Deco but to h It's all phony frou-frou Its ashtray art and gilded replicas of the E put me off The emphasis was on how it looked and notold it has no virtue and it isn't even very old Being old isn't reason enough to originate a revival of anything anyway Age is no guarantee of quality in objects or people
Too many of the revivals in art forms are fads based more on commercial enterprise than artistic worth Someone stu or furniture practiced by an appropriately unknown artist and they revive that style because they knohere they can lay their hands on fifty examples of it and make theia works as well for the dealer as fear does for the insurance salesman
It isn't easy to live in the present The te of the future is always there because it's easier than getting up off your tail and doing soets that proic future in which we can do the hardest jobs with the touch of a button It's just that experience has taught me that the promise usually precedes the product by soit until it's actually in the store
I like old movies, old music, old furniture and old books but if I had to choose between spending the day with dreams of the future or memories of the past or this day I have at hand, I think I'd take pot luck with today
Life, Long and Short I changeback at how quickly a son or daughter grew up or at how h school, life seely fast Then I look around s I've done and life see at the coffee cans I've saved ht or ten tablespoons of coffee a day Those cans sure represent a lot of days
Used coffee cans are the kind of statistics on life that we don't keep Maybe if we kept theevity Maybe when each of us has his own computer at home, we'll be able to save the kinds of statistics the announcers use during baseball games
It's always fun, for instance, to try to to remember how many cars you've owned Think back to your first car, and it er If remember how many cars you've owned Think back to your first car, and itand Short 137 137 you're fifty years old, you've probably owned so many cars you can't even remember all of them in order I've also wondered how many miles I've driven That's a statistic uess at If you've put roughly seventy-five thousand miles on twenty cars, you've driven alike twenty-five thousand dollars on gas
It's more difficult to estimate the number of miles you've walked Is there any chance you've walked as far as you've driven in a car? I'o out on a weekend and walk four hundred miles the way you'd drive a car On the other hand, every ti to the steps you've taken All those little walks every day must add up to a lot of miles, even if you aren't a hiker
And how much have you cliht up with all the stairs I've negotiated in my life There are seventeen nine-inch steps in our front hallway and I often climb them twenty times a day, so I've lifted my two hundred pounds two hundred and fifty feet on the stairs in the house in one day alone That doesn't include the day I cliton Monument with the kids or the time my uncle took me up the Statue of Liberty
And howall that distance? I' for the perfect pair of shoes and I've never found them yet, so I buy more shoes than I wear There must be six old pairs of sneaks of mine in closets around the house All in all, I'll bet I've had two hundred fifty pairs of shoes inwould your hair be if you'd never cut it? Everyone has wondered about that at soth would ? And, it's a repulsive thought, but I supposeif I hadn't hacked therowing once it gets a few feet long? I don't ever recall seeing anyone with hair ten feet long My hair row at least an inch a month That's a foot a year I've certainly never seen anyone
This is the kind of thinking that helps er to me When I think of how many times I've been to the barber or even to the dentist, life seems to stretch back practically forever
The one statistic I hate to think about is how eably large number I'd have to estimate it in tons I must have eaten ten tons of ice crea and lovely just thinking about every bite of it
The Glories of Maturity I don't do asExcept that you have more years ahead of you, youth isn't necessarily a better ti, I was always having to do things I hated
School was harder than work has ever been I enjoy working and I never enjoyed studying I liked learning but found the process of education tedious There are still nights I drea The scenario is always the same I haven't read any of the books and I skipped class most of the ti up all night to study for an exae My parents and all the teachers said cra way to learn but craood way to pass an exaer stay up all night for anything If I have soo to bed and try to get it done the next et it done? Sue ularly unpleasant and burdenso work ho Andy outside his home in Albany, New York the office now, it's because the work interestsit, I put it off
There are still things that come up in my life for which I'm unprepared but they don't bother er seem like life-or-death situations If o to et out of your twenties It doesn't hurt all the tier fall in and out of love I have ood forthat soood for me and I had to eat it Now the s that are bad forsnow is my idea of hard fun so I shovel snow in the winter, but I've always hated cutting the grass so in the summer I pay someone to do that
On Saturdays, I always had to stop playing with the other kids and have lunch at twelve o'clock I still play a lot on Saturdays but I quit playing and come in for lunch when I feel like it I don't care what tilories of youth but there are advantages toI don't want to read, I don't go places I don't want to go, I don't spend a lot of ti to
I feel no need to hat the other fellows are wearing, listen to the o to movies I don't want to see
Every other Sunday my father and mother would put everyone in the car and drive to Troy to see so Sunday to go see them I sat on the floor and looked at books while the adults talked I'o to Troy anymore