Mike Macartney's Blog - Posts Tagged "2013"
Nothing Is What It Seems
and everything is something it isn’t.
This is a favorite E. B. White quote from his essay The Door. It is old and not well known, certainly not like Charlotte’s Web. The essay, the one about the door, is about life.
The musing is collected in an interesting gray cloth book residing on the shelf of my library labeled: Time Machine. Present Tense, Vol. III, Portrait of a World, edited by Sharon Brown of Brown University was published for college students by Harcourt, Brice & Company in 1941.
The book has wonderful chapters like, The American Heritage, Men at Work, Whither Science, Strains and Stresses, Headliners, Patterns In Politics, and War and the Future. The Door is filed under Strains and Stresses. Even in 1941 there were strains and stresses about the present world and what comes next it seems.
The little gray book also has American Landscape by Thomas Wolfe, Two For A Penny by John Steinbeck, and The Modernization of China and Japan by Hu Shih. It contains 63 essays, columns, poems, and plays from when they taught college students those things, back in the middle of the American Century.
I do wonder who Sharon Brown was and what became of her books. What did all those essays and stories and poems mean to her and the people who published them - and all those students who read them in that time of infamy? What were they thinking? And why were all those particular things filed under, “Portrait of a World?”
How do we find Sharon Brown today? You can find the book on Amazon in the UK. Seems Sharon Brown gets mixed up with Sharon Osborne. But, pick the one who was born in 1891. Then the Amazon search engine breaks down and reverts to Sharon Osborne. Well this is now, and that was then. Celebrities were different then.
What about now? These times are the real times, the ones that matter. There are wars raging. Economies are crashing. America is unsure of what its now and its future will be while the money leaks away and new, dark powers rise. The jobs and cities that were thriving 10 years ago are shaky, unsettled, and wide-eyed. Old national faiths built on old successes and triumphs tremble. They glow dully and seem thinner and staler, too naive. “For it is inevitable that they will keep changing the doors on you, he said, because that is what they are for; and the thing is to get used to it and not to let it unsettle the mind,” says Mr. White in his essay, the one in the gray textbook from 1941. The one about life.
Youth unemployment in America is about as high as it has ever been. It is tough to get a decent job coming out of college right now, and the loans are deep and endless. College students network, blog, text, meet, and have the great ideas that young people with new minds always have. There are many young people in Silicon Valley and New York and Los Angeles who are trying to make the next Facebook, or writing code for the iPhone, or trying to get a conference up with TechCrunch to make the rent for another month. They are smart and connected and working hard. A career? Sure, but have to land the next gig and maybe I will have to go work steady at Google or Yahoo or Oracle or Hp one of these days if my startup does not work out. Now, if I could get on at Apple.
Having a startup and even getting a couple of bucks from an angel investor so you can pitch it to a VC, once you get it running, is not Facebook. But, Facebook isn't quite Facebook anymore. The IPO never took off as it should have. Something changed.
The past is temporary. Wait awhile and It will be something it isn’t. All of it will be invented over again come the next generation and the one after that.
You can also use a door and a bit of string to pull out a loose tooth, so I am told.
This is a favorite E. B. White quote from his essay The Door. It is old and not well known, certainly not like Charlotte’s Web. The essay, the one about the door, is about life.
The musing is collected in an interesting gray cloth book residing on the shelf of my library labeled: Time Machine. Present Tense, Vol. III, Portrait of a World, edited by Sharon Brown of Brown University was published for college students by Harcourt, Brice & Company in 1941.
The book has wonderful chapters like, The American Heritage, Men at Work, Whither Science, Strains and Stresses, Headliners, Patterns In Politics, and War and the Future. The Door is filed under Strains and Stresses. Even in 1941 there were strains and stresses about the present world and what comes next it seems.
The little gray book also has American Landscape by Thomas Wolfe, Two For A Penny by John Steinbeck, and The Modernization of China and Japan by Hu Shih. It contains 63 essays, columns, poems, and plays from when they taught college students those things, back in the middle of the American Century.
I do wonder who Sharon Brown was and what became of her books. What did all those essays and stories and poems mean to her and the people who published them - and all those students who read them in that time of infamy? What were they thinking? And why were all those particular things filed under, “Portrait of a World?”
How do we find Sharon Brown today? You can find the book on Amazon in the UK. Seems Sharon Brown gets mixed up with Sharon Osborne. But, pick the one who was born in 1891. Then the Amazon search engine breaks down and reverts to Sharon Osborne. Well this is now, and that was then. Celebrities were different then.
What about now? These times are the real times, the ones that matter. There are wars raging. Economies are crashing. America is unsure of what its now and its future will be while the money leaks away and new, dark powers rise. The jobs and cities that were thriving 10 years ago are shaky, unsettled, and wide-eyed. Old national faiths built on old successes and triumphs tremble. They glow dully and seem thinner and staler, too naive. “For it is inevitable that they will keep changing the doors on you, he said, because that is what they are for; and the thing is to get used to it and not to let it unsettle the mind,” says Mr. White in his essay, the one in the gray textbook from 1941. The one about life.
Youth unemployment in America is about as high as it has ever been. It is tough to get a decent job coming out of college right now, and the loans are deep and endless. College students network, blog, text, meet, and have the great ideas that young people with new minds always have. There are many young people in Silicon Valley and New York and Los Angeles who are trying to make the next Facebook, or writing code for the iPhone, or trying to get a conference up with TechCrunch to make the rent for another month. They are smart and connected and working hard. A career? Sure, but have to land the next gig and maybe I will have to go work steady at Google or Yahoo or Oracle or Hp one of these days if my startup does not work out. Now, if I could get on at Apple.
Having a startup and even getting a couple of bucks from an angel investor so you can pitch it to a VC, once you get it running, is not Facebook. But, Facebook isn't quite Facebook anymore. The IPO never took off as it should have. Something changed.
The past is temporary. Wait awhile and It will be something it isn’t. All of it will be invented over again come the next generation and the one after that.
You can also use a door and a bit of string to pull out a loose tooth, so I am told.
