An online commonplace book
“You are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little,” he had told Caroline, in response to her quandary over the riddles of life. “The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know….Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough….So questions and so answers your affectionate grandfather.”
John Adams became more philosophical as he aged. Do we all?
McCullough, David. John Adams. Simon & Schuster, 2001.
“Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.”
– John Adams
The final John Adam’s quote in McCullough’s brilliant biography. A quote written in a letter to his friend Francis van der Kemp.
McCullough, David. John Adams. Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 651
A stream of visitors continued through the seasons and among them was young Ralph Waldo Emerson, who a few years earlier had graduated from Harvard as class poet. He found Adams upstairs in his library seated in a large overstuffed armchair, dressed in a blue coat, a cotton cap covering his bald head. Recounting the interview, Emerson wrote, “He talks very distinctly for so old a man–enters bravely into long sentences which are interrupted by want of breath but carries them invariably to a conclusion without ever correcting a word.”
You know, you can just go visit your heroes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson for John. John for Sir William Herschel.
Posted while watching Iron Man. The first one.
McCullough, David. John Adams. Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 640
Is getting out of your own head added time?
It’s true painting every day wouldn’t suit everybody, but it suits me. If you do that, you live in the now. Painters can live a long time. They either die young or make it to ripe old ages like Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, or my old friend Gillian Ayres. Do you know why? Because when you are painting, you’re so involved you can get out of yourself. Well, if you can do that, that’s added time. I am eighty-two and I feel fine. Maybe I walk slower.
– David Hockney
Hockney explains how when you age you notice more. I wonder if this applies to painters only. The narrative seems to be as you age, you notice less. You’re less alert. You care less. Maybe Hockney debunks those notions.
You notice more with each successive year; I am doing that now. I can go in and look at things more closely, such as a blossom. I took a branch and brought it in here to draw as a still life. It didn’t last long. I had to draw it in about four or five hours. It just rots when you bring it inside and lay it on a sheet of paper. It’s temporary, but most things are.
David Hockney
Gayford, Martin, and Hockney, David. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. United Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, 2021. pp205,207
Balding head. Stubble
silver. Don’t fear. Lather up.
Blade to skin. Live. Live.
Bones spur. Cartilage
tears, splits. Pain takes her sweet time.
Diagnosis: old.
Two grey heads hold hands.
Thirty years between their palms.
Wrinkled lives walk pass.
Floodlights and Goalposts 