Two of my favorite prolific producers of poignant one-liners are Oscar Wilde and Yogi Berra. While the former made seemingly pessimistic observations about the world and the latter more paradoxical statements that nonetheless closely ressemble many things people think and say, reading and hearing quotations from both men allow us to look on life with a slight air of humor and irony.
The expression "fear of the unknown" very closely imitates a Y.B.-style pronouncement. For what is fear but a particular physiological and psychological response to uncertainty. For me, this fear comes from a lack of understanding of human emotion, which is one of the reasons that I have become such an avid reader of the news and fiction. In much the same way that a child's lack of awareness of the potential for physical harm in many of his or her daily activities allows a certain freedom of movement, so does this same lack of awareness allow him or her freedom of speech.
One of my favorite movies in a French film called La Faute à Fidel or, in English, Blame it on Fidel. In the film, a rather precocious, 9-year old girl named Anna is growing up in Paris and is constantly confronted with the changing social and political ideas of the late 1960s and early 1970s, most notably through the reactions of her parents. While her mother is from a French bourgeois milieu and her father from a formerly powerful Spanish family once friendly with the Franco regime, the parents become stauch advocates of Communism. Anna and her younger brother try to make sense of all these changes and often ask the sort of "naïve" and yet poignant questions that produce in the specatator a reaction similar to that upon hearing or reading O.W. and Y.B. quotes. But one of my favorite lines is when the young Anna, after having been told bluntly to keep her thoughts to herself by one of the nuns at Catholic school, asks her mother how she is supposed to know when to speak her mind and when to keep quiet. Her mothers sets her down, takes her firmly by the arms, looks into her eyes and says "You're a talker. You talk."
I grew up in the school of "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." But the world isn't that manichean. Clear cut lines between "nice" and "not nice" don't exist. For years, I have feared expressing my opinions or feelings unless I was sure of how they would be received. I feared offending others or utterly altering relationships for the worse based on a single misinterpreted statement. However, I'm learning that a small part of this fear is healthy. It makes us aware that our ideas are not the same as everyone else's and that a particular amount of restraint is necessary in society. On the other hand, if you want to be respected, you must make yourself heard. If you never open your mouth, no one hears your ideas but you. Without discussion and debate, it is difficult to learn and grow. Reading is a way to test my ideas against other writers. To learn more about how other think and experience the world. Both writing and speaking allow me to articulate those thoughts. They serve as a sounding board both for myself and for others. Being a writer is a first step towards being a talker. So here in this forum is where I've decided to work out my thoughts. To think about and articulate my thoughts and reactions to the world around me, for it is the only world I know.
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