Platitudes

I HAVE just reached the age of forty, which is neither young nor old. A man of forty is too old not to have made up his mind about many things and too young not to be willing to change it. He has reached a stage in which the pupa of an insect must be just before emerging from the cocoon; he is about to assume that definite shape which will be his last upon this earth and which gives a name to his species.

After forty years of living one must have learned something, even if that something be very small. And it is good at appropriately solemn dates to stop and make an inventory of what one has learned. This is a sort of examination of consciousness, if not of conscience. There is no need of doing this at forty rather than at thirty-nine or twenty-five, but the long and rather dull chrysalid stage inclines one to revery, and, if one must dream, it is more interesting to dream about reality than about illusion.

I have learned many things, I think, which would — and, if the present financial stringency endures, will — make a book, ‘Essays of a Man of Forty.’ No publisher would print it, but I am used to that. Among the more exciting things that I have learned are that people never wall admit that they are acting upon moral principles, that questions are asked,not to be answered, but to furnish grounds for rebuttal, that the main value of the study of ethics is to justify one’s instinctive conduct, that people would rather seem stupid than deaf. I don’t think I have learned anything much outside of the field of human relations.

When I sit dowm to make an inventory of the things I have learned, I find that the first in importance and the hardest to confess is the Truth of Platitudes. Platitudes are dull, boring, and ugly, but they are true. When I was fifteen, I thought that beauty was truth, truth beauty, and unpleasant adjectives were sufficient evidence of falsity. For years I have resisted the suspicion that Keats might be wrong, as one resists the suspicion that an ugly woman might make a good mother, though a bad wife. But now, while at tea parties I shall continue to avoid the usual verbal formulas for platitudes, — as I avoid discussing mathematics with mathematicians, — I shall initially grant their rightness.

I have always been impressed with the brilliance of primitive man’s discovery that the sun which rises in the morning is the same sun that set the night before. That was a hard discovery to make, for after all the sun sets at a point opposite to the point at which it rises, and one had to face the problem of how in the world it got back there without sneaking across the sky in the dark. To discover at that time what is now obvious required a stretch of the imagination which few of us are capable of making, like the discovery — speaking of platitudes — of the wheel.

We have all of us been brought up on platitudes, and for that very reason we have never believed in them. To believe in them requires as great an effort from a man of my generation as to believe in miracles or alchemy or the generation of eels from marinated horsehairs. When the light breaks upon you that after all a rolling stone does not gather any moss, in spite of the fact that you’ve heard it all your life, you may still sneer at it as a proverb, but when it comes to paying for your wife’s appendectomy you won’t sneer at its meaning.

One of the platitudes which have always annoyed me is that people talk best about what interests them — namely, shop. I was brought up never to talk shop and to look upon shop talk as somewhat ill-bred. As a consequence — though I did n’t see it was a consequence — I found a surprising number of dull talkers. I remember one such case — a professor, needless to say — who seemed not merely dull but idiotic. He held an excellent position, had undoubtedly written more footnotes than any other man of his age, and had simply a staggering knowledge about — well, never mind about what, for he reads the Atlantic. Other people found him stimulating; I found him depressing. Others found him judicious; I found him credulous and superstitious. Others praised his taste; I could only deprecate his vulgarity and boorishness. During an unavoidable conversation with him I suddenly and desperately mentioned his specialty. Like an opal in the sunlight this gray mind began to scintillate. His eyes gleamed; his voice (which had always seemed to percolate through a mouthful of cream soup) became crystalline; his sentences (which like wounded snakes had always dragged their slow lengths along) became crisp and vivacious; his ideas made sense; and he at once became capable of using a word in two successive contexts in the same meaning. Surely if this rapid shift from imbecility to rationality was the effect of talking shop, nothing but praise could be given to shop-talking. It became not merely a social amenity but a social necessity. It changed worms into humming birds, weeds into flowers, dullards into wits.

It was a blow to find so much wisdom in what everybody already knew, like finding the United States Senate right about some matter of foreign policy. But there was wisdom in the platitude. Why not admit it? Admitting it led to further admissions. I soon discovered that there is no place like home, that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and that old friends are the best. To be sure, these fundamental truths were not phrased precisely like that. But whether one says that there’s no place like home or that man is not necessarily gregarious makes very little difference. The proverb simply gives one the approval of tradition for what one has discovered to be a truth. But what a relief to wake up to the fact that one can admit without shame that he prefers his own piano to his neighbor’s radio.

It is our curious love of novelty which makes us think that something which is old is therefore bad. But even in science one can only discover what has always been true. There is novelty only in the realm of knowledge, not in the realm of existence. That kind of novelty has, of course, a certain value. In the smaller realm of practical knowledge, to discover old truths for one’s self is of the greatest importance. One cannot live by clichés. Hence, when one has learned that the old friends are the best, one has simply given what Newman called real assent to it. But that is tremendous. Platitude though it be, it takes on a new significance. Hence I am not proposing that one simply accept the old platitudes without criticism at the age of twenty. That would be stultifying. Just as throwing off traditional morality without ever having taken it on is stultifying. I am merely saying that to have discovered them for one’s self at the age of forty is like a sudden conversion.

One must, of course, admit that platitudes do not form a self-consistent system. It has already been pointed out by others that each has its contradictory as neatly expressed as itself. That is undeniable. But is n’t that further proof of their truth? Has not the racial conscience seen that generalizations in the field of human affairs are impossible and that ‘ there are two sides to every question’? I have not spent forty years of my life to learn that a collection of proverbs can take the place of reason. The delimitations of their validity must be left to the individual. They are like Delphic oracles which need an interpreter. Their interpretation is the work of a lifetime. But when their validation is complete, one has the comfortable feeling of agreeing with the race as a whole. One has seen a truth, not merely accepted it.

GEORGE BOAS