Category Archives: generally

Original Thinking

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(In the cartoons, it’s a light bulb that comes on over the head of the character—the bright idea, suddenly arriving.  Did Thomas Edison have a light bulb come on over his head when he finally perfected the light bulb?  All of us have had those sudden thoughts.  But we don’t think about them. From where did they come?  What inspired them?  Dr. Crane returns after a week off to offer some thoughts about thinking)

IDEAS OF A PLAIN MAN—I

“The thought that comes to you,” says a French writer, “has arrived in your mind after a long voyage through space and time, longer than the last of stars is distant from your eyes.”

Everyone has been startled to find, upon opening some book of old ideas that Augustine or Plutarch or Zeno, that some idea he had fancied to be his own, private, and as yet unuttered,  leap out and laugh at him. It gives one a queer turn.  Am I them but a Thought-Inn, a lodging for the night, wherein perceptions, old and indestructible…come and abide? To think is to plagiarize!

About the only original thinking in any of us is that hazy, not understandable, yet most vitally real thing that we call Personality. When Shakespeare or Browning write, they are but restating world-old things, but the things acquire a Shakespeare taste, a Browning flavor.

Even the words of Jesus, many of them, may be traced to this or that source: His sentiments and commandments may be picked up here and there in eastern literature; the intensely original element in him was his rare and wonderful Personality. His enduring miracle was Himself.

Thoughts are Ancient Vagrants. The New things on this worn out old stone are you and I, souls little flames of God, sparks from the central Sun of Life.

Back to the grind

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(Another Monday.  Back to the old job. Again.  For some, today is the first of five days at the old grind.  For others, it’s the beginning of five days of excitement, of opportunity.  For some today just starts a work week. For others it’s another day to fulfill a calling—and the approach is completely different. Dr. Crane might have written this for those who go forth on Mondays, as he considers—-)

THE JOY OF WORK

If you examine carefully all of the supposed joys of life you will find the most enduring, satisfactory and real joy is work.

But to be joyful, work must be the kind you like.

And work, to be liked, must have two elements.

First, it must call into play one’s full, normal activities.

And second, it must be the creating of something.

The truest happiness is found in the most complete exercise of our powers.

Children are happy because they are doing with all their might everything they can do. Arms, legs, lungs, are busy every waking moment.

Laziness, drunkenness, sensuality are diseases that come on later in life. Those that indulge in are happy only by fevered spells. Between these they are consumed by restlessness, doubt, ennui, and despair.

The great mass of men are happy most of the time because they have their necessary work. And where a man finds his right work it is the same to him that play is to a child.

Look at this busy humanity, doctors and lawyers, farmers, merchants and clerks, letter carriers, engineers, masons, carpenters, writers and house mothers!  Out of them, as a mighty chorus, arises the hymn of “The joy lf living.”

Life is pleasant because it is functioning normally.

Life is a burden only when it ceases to function.

Every faculty cries for something to do. The brain must think, plan, organize, project, imagine, reason, compare, decide.

When it has no real business upon which to use these motions, we load it with artificial concerns, such as novels, plays, and travel sites, to sill its clamor and craving. But the people who are amusing their brains are not so happy as those who are using their brains.

It is better to play at work than to work at play.

The muscles demand something to do. When we refuse them, they breed poison in us. They curse us with gout and rheumatism, and biliousness.

The stomach, liver, heart, and lungs all demand steady employment. Give us work, they shout, or we will go on strike. They are more cantankerous than a labor union when they are refused employment.

The eye wants work. We must have someone to love, someone to revere, something to suffer and to overcome.

Tannhauser grew weary in the lap of Venus; he longed for human strife and sorrow.

And a perfect hell would be a place where every sense is lulled, every appetite is gorged, where there is eternal rest and nothing forever and ever to do.

Joy is a function of activity.

Soul and body pray for dangers, crises, tasks.

Perfect joy circles as a halo the brow of the worker and the fighter.

“To him that overcometh will I give the morning star.”

 

Don’t say Don’t

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(As someone who hates to be told, “We can’t do that,” when he wants to hear, “How can we do this?,” this comment from more than a century ago by Dr. Frank Crane has special meaning. Rather than a phrase, he  finds—-)

ONE WORD THAT SHOULD NEVER BE USED

One word I should like to rub out of the vocabulary used by human beings, one toward another. It is the word “don’t.”

Looking back over a somewhat full and varied experience, I can say that in my judgement didactic prohibition issued from soul to soul, for every ounce of good it has done, has made a pound of harm.

“Don’t” is the stupidest, most brainless and laziest of all parental terms. To tell a child what to do requires thought, investigation, interest. To tell anyone what not to do requires no cerebration.

“Don’t” is the language of annoyance. “Do” is the language of love.

“I like very well to be told to do, by those who are fond of me,” said Alcibiades*; “but never be told what not to do; and the more fond they are of me, the less I like it. Because when they tell me what not to do, it is a sign that I have displeased or am likely to displease them. Besides—I believe there are some other reasons, but they have quite escaped me.”

To be sure, the Ten Commandments are “don’ts.”  But they are God’s, which is different.

*Alcibiades (404-450 BCE) was a general, orator, and statesman in ancient Athens, a student of Socrates.

We, the Incompetent

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(All of us are incompetent.  When a faucet leaks or a light switch quits working at my house, it is Nancy who fixes it, not me. I can help her with words when she’s trying to convey a particular thought to someone on Facebook or in a note, however.  Dr. Frank Crane says it is easy to pronounce others incompetent while ignoring our own lack of skill. But, he says, there is one overpowering competence that he believes will survive all of the abuses that we, the individual incompetents, might do to it.)

ONLY HUMANITY IS COMPETENT

One day as I passed down the street, I came to a spot where a teamster had unhitched his horses from his wagon and was giving them their mid-day oats, beneath the shade of a benevolent and comfortable oak. From one of the animals, I noticed the collar had been taken and that his neck was sore.

“Pretty hard, isn’t it?” I inquired of the man, “to make a horse pull with a sore shoulder against the collar?”

“Yep,” he answered, “plum tough.” And then he handed me a bit of philosophy which I have put among most prized possessions. “There wouldn’t be much work done in this word, mister, if only horses and folks that are plum fit had to do it.”

There you are!  That is a large and brilliant truth.  The business of this earth is carried on by the incompetent and the unfit. It is the mothers that don’t know how to bring up children that are bringing up most of them; it’s the people not at all qualified to marry marrying; it’s the teachers that can’t teach that are teaching; and the preachers who can’t preach that are preaching. Most mayors, governors, and presidents do not know how to manage states, cities, and nations; doctors who don’t know are giving us pills and cooks who are incompetent are preparing our food; and altogether the world is in the hands of the unfit.

Yet, somehow, nature manages to get things done. She gains her ends. Perfectly balancing all of imperfections, she arrives at perfection. Let us take heart. Incompetence is no excuse for despair. No individual is competent; only humanity is competent.

 

Old Friends—and the Greatest Friend

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(Paul Simon wrote the lyrics and he and Art Garfunkel recorded it long ago. It’s kind of a melancholy song at first hearing but later reflection reveals it to be a song about the unspoken quiet comfort of longtime relationships that are greater than acquaintance with one another.

Perhaps you have heard the song. It’s been done by several artists. Here are some of the lyrics:

“Old friends, Old friends, Sat on their park bench, Like bookends…Old Friends, Winter companions, The old men, Lost in their overcoats, Waiting for the sunset….Can you imagine us, Years from today, Sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange, To be seventy. Old friends, Memory brushes the same years, Silently sharing the same fear…Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph, Preserve your memories, They’re all that’s left you.”

Memories and photographs are what remains. Why, then, do we become friends if in the end that’s all we have left?   The answer is simple: It is friendships that make life worth living each day that we have life.

Think about the first sentence of Dr. Crane’s meditation on—–)

FRIENDSHIP

When a man says friendship I think he utters the deepest word in human speech. It ranks even a little higher than love, being a sort of unselfed love, love with the hunger and itch extracted.

We do not love our friends; we like them. We love our children, wife, parents, and kinfolks. We like apples and custard pie and a cozy fire and a good bed and slippers—and a friend.

Like goes farther than love. Like is a voice from the subconscious self, a cry from the inward and unknown me. It lies behind the will, beneath the judgment, in the far darkness of our secret soul…

Whence, then, come friends? And who are they? And how can one make them?  All answers to these pathetic questions seem to me to be unsatisfactory, partial, and by the way. The rules of the wise will not work. We do not make friends by being noble and good. Friendships do not arise from similarity in tastes…

The fact is the secret springs of friendship are totally mysterious…As I look over my friends I find I like them as a dog likes his master. So I conclude that his emotion must originate in some Newfoundland or St. Bernard region of my nature, and is one of those instincts not yet eliminated by evolution, something I share with dogs.

For all that, I honor it as the best thing I am conscious of. I am prouder of liking my friends than of any other of my small bunch of virtues. When I think if Bill and Lige and Al and Ralph and Newt, I get a kind of warmth about the cockles of my heart no other contemplation can produce.

And the biggest hurts I have ever felt are those made by the disloyalty of others whom I had thought friends and trusted. Nothing is so salt and nauseous as the taste of Judas in the mouth of memory.

And it seems to me—for this is, after all, a sermon—that religion, rightly taken, is a friendship for God rather than a love for God, and that we would translate all the Bible’s admonitions to love God by the paraphrase to be friends with God.

To love God has a conventional sound, but to be a friend of God—that is a searching and swordlike word. It means to like him, not to avoid him, to seek his presence, to be at home with him, to the cheered, consoled, to be quieted by the thought of him.

Speaking for myself, I can say that I never came into this comfortable relationship until I had swept away all I had ever been taught, dared to presume upon the debt God had incurred toward me, and I took my rightful place as his son at his table.

It does not require any assumption of holiness or sinlessness to do this. It only needs to presume upon the vast nobleness, kindness, and forebearing wisdom of such a heart as Jesus reveals to us. It requires a tremendous burst of moral courage to believe God likes the kind of man I am. But I do believe it and the result is the greatest ethical dynamic of my life—the friendship of God.

When we become infinite

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(There are times when all of us ponder issues of mortality and what comes after. Those of us who believe there is something after occasionally think about what that will be like.  I hope it’s a time with all of the friends and relatives I’ve known—-although I prefer not to meet them anytime soon—and all of the cats and dogs I’ve loved who (I hope) loved me back. It’s a place where I can play softball again and where I’ll never have to trim my toenails. And, yes, with the infinity of time, I not only want to read, I want to meet many of the people I read about.  Maybe I’ll run into Dr. Frank Crane and find out if he’s accomplished the things he planned when he explained—–)

WHAT I SHALL DO WHEN I GET TO HEAVEN

The first thing I shall do is to read up for a thousand years or so.

Nothing impresses me so with the brevity of life as to enter a library—oppresses, I would rather say.

How can one find time to get even so much as acquainted with literature when a Niagara of books, not to mention magazines and papers, roars from the laws of the press in an unending stream?

In Heave, time being no matter, I shall learn all the languages earth ever had (Heaven has but one—multae terricolis linguae, coelestibus una*) clear back to the guttural clicks of the stone-age man and glug-glug of the lake dwellers, and get all local colors and hence know all life.

Celestial beings move with the rapidity of thought. Distance makes no difference. With you were on Antares; and behold you are there.

Now the science story-tellers tell us we see the light of stars that may have been extinguished centuries ago. Rapidly as light travels it takes ages for it to cross the universe, if it ever gets across at all. Hence traveling with thought-rapidity, I can overtake light anywhere along its road. Consequently, all I need to do, in order to witness with my own eyes anything that ever happened on earth is to wish myself at such a distance as shall bring me to where the light of that event is fresh.

Placing myself at so many million miles, I am present at the death of Caesar; at so many more million miles, I walk with Pericles the ways of Athens; so many more I see Moses coming down from Sinai.  So in Heaven, I shall be able to be “among those present” at anything that ever took place. Interesting. What?

In heaven also I shall have time to develop all my latent capacities. The only reason I have not written like Shakespeare is that I haven’t had time. That would take me several hundred years.

So if you meet me a million years from now on some satellite of Sigma Bootes***, you will find me to be a combined Beethoven, Socrates, Raphael, Newton, Agassiz, Newton, Paderewski, and J. Caesar. You can see that I can do anything anybody ever did better than he did it; can lay brick better than any terrestrial masons, also out-Caruso Caruso in singing, and teach your Miltons the art of poetry.

As mere duration, Heaven is rather a dull prospect; but as infinite development, it is an amazing idea. For as John Fiske** says, “The essential feature of man is his unlimited possibilities of development.”

And not only shall I increase in skill and all kinds of efficiency, but my other powers, what may they not become when they are stamped with immortality?

My memory—it will be stored fuller than the British Museum or the Vatican.

My will—it will be strong enough to move a train of cars. I speak soberly. Who knows what the human will may not be harnessed someday, as well as electricity.

My taste—through infinite crudities it will live and become divine.

And my character—what power, gentleness, goodness, nobleness, and majesty it might acquire in aeons of experience!

This is what is meant by those striking words—“the power of an endless life.”

And that high word of Paul that we shall be “changed from glory to glory.”

And from John—“It does not appear what we shall be; but we shall be—like Him.”

*Latin for, “The inhabitants of earth have many tongues, those of Heaven have one,”

**John Fiske (1842-1901), an American philosopher and lecturer was for many years a lecturer on history at Washington University in St. Louis.

***Sigma Bootes is one of the stars in a Bootes constellation known as “The Herdsman.” Astronomer Jim Kaler describes it as a “relatively modest star” about three times more luminous than our Sun, fifty light years from earth.

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Correcting a Short, Pithy Statement

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(We hear them all the time. We say them all the time—verbal shorthand that eliminates the need to explore the nuances of what we say or even the truth of what we say.  They’re called “maxims,” and sometimes we need to question their truth.  Dr. Frank Crane suggests the real truth about one of our often-used maxims is just the opposite of what is said.)

REAL SORROW SEEKS SOLITUDE

One of the maxims that is not true is, “Misery loves company.” The fact is, it is happiness that loves company, while sorrow seeks solitude. We close the door to weep, and draw the blinds. We go to the theatre and crowded restaurants to laugh.

Misfortune isolates. Pensiveness is unsociable.

These lines are written on shipboard; we have been six days at sea and all the passengers have become acquainted; for an ocean liner a few days out resembles a country village; everybody knows everybody and everybody’s business.  Convention rules the decks and gossip guards the cozy corners as thoroughly as in a New England town.

Only one man keeps apart.  His wife is in a coffin in the hold. A month ago they went to Italy for a long lark; she died in Naples. This man speaks to no one. He keeps to his room. He may be seen of nights looking over the rail into the boiling dark of the sea, alone.

When an animal is wounded, he flees the pack and in some cave or under some bush, solitary, he licks the bleeding paw or torn shoulder. So when the human heart breaks, its cry is for solitude; it shuns light; fellowship is pain; lonesomeness becomes a luxury.

Joy is the centripetal; sorrow the centrifugal force of the world. Joy makes cities; disappointment makes emigration.

We will make our own futures

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(Carl Sandburg, Lincoln biographer and Prairie Poet, wrote his epic prose poem The People, Yes 85 years ago. It’s one of America’s great statements about who we are. Read it sometime. Early in the work, Sandburg reflects:

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
“I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time.”

A quarter-century before Sandburg’s poem was published, Dr. Frank Crane suggested that wishing for more time to “do more for myself and maybe for others” was futile. Get on with the doing, he seems to say.  If you want to lift the language of 1912 to the language of 2021, you might want to substitute “humankind” for “man,” as Dr. Crane asserts—)

MAN CARVES HIS OWN DESTINY

Doing clears the mind. Physical activity has a peculiar luminous effect on the judgment. The soundest views of life come not from the pulpit or the professional chair but from the workshop.

To saw a plank or to nail down a shingle, to lay a stone square or to paint a house evenly, to run a locomotive, or to raise a good crop of corn, somehow reacts upon the intelligence, reaching the very inward essential cell of wisdom; provided always the worker is brave, not afraid of his own conclusions, and does not hand his thinking over to some guesser with a large bluff.

Doing makes religion. All religions that is of any account is what we thrash out with our own hands, suffer out with our own hearts, and find out with our own visions.

Doing creates faith. Doubt comes from Sundays and other idle hours. The only people who believe the Ten Commandments are those who do them. Those who believe the world is better are they that are trying to make it grow better.

Doing brings joy. The sweetest of joys is the joy of accomplishment. Make love and you will feel love. Quit making love and you will doubt love. Be kind, steadily and persistently, and you will believe in kindness. Be unclean and you will soon sneer at anybody’s claim to virtue.

So a man has his own destiny, his own creed, his own internal peace, his own nobility in his hands—literally in his hands. For all the worthwhile wisdom and goodness you have in your head and heart was cooked up from your hands.

DOING GOOD

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(We rarely edit Dr. Crane’s thoughts from more than a century ago.  But today we are taking the liberty of updating his thoughts.  This entry is from early May, 1912, almost a decade before women gained the right to vote, at time when it remained a man’s world, if you will. But Dr. Crane’s insights are valid for all and in this instance we have changed his men-only references to reflect timeless truths for those of us who live in much different times from the day this column first appeared.  Call it political correctness if you wish but as you read it, appreciate its value for all.  Dr. Crane originally called it, “The Men Who Make Good.’  That was then, this is now, which is why we call it—-_

THE ONES WHO MAKE GOOD

We are full of hidden forces.

In a crisis, we discover powers within ourselves, powers that have lain dormant, secret reserves of ability, only waiting occasion to leap forth.

You can tell just what weight a bar of iron will bear, just what weight a locomotive can pull, and just how much liquid a glass vessel will hold; but you cannot tell how much responsibility a man can carry without stumbling; nor how much grief a woman’s heart can suffer without breaking.

The human being is the X in the problem of nature. It is the unknown quantity of the universe.

The frightened boy can jump a fence he would not have attempted in his sober senses. A frail woman in the desire to save her child becomes as strong as Sandow.* A soldier battle-mad acquires the strength of ten. Get a meek, timid little man at bay and he may fight like a tiger.

The one thing nobody knows is what can be done in a pinch.

The forceful natures are those that depend on this hidden nerve force. These are the pioneers, to whom the dangers from unknown beasts and savages is a welcome fillip. They taste “that stern joy that warriors feel In foeman worthy of their steel.” **

These are the overcomers…

They do not know what they can do. They only know that when the thing is to be done, possible or impossible, safe or deadly, there is some strength that surges up within them that meets and measures with the task.

Panic only claims them, clears their brain, and steadies their hand while others go mad.

Defeat only rouses in them a dogged strength.

Slanders, sneers, and curses cannot drive them from their work; success or praise does not make them dizzy.

They are not prudent. They are not wise. They are not skilled or trained. They simply make good wherever they are put.

There is no recipe for producing such souls. The choicest heredity cannot breed them, schools cannot prepare them, religion cannot form them.

They are the ones who rise to the occasion. They are unafraid. They are the ones that lose themselves in the thing to be done, and do it, and care not for heaven or hell, or their own life.

The supply of such has never equaled the demand. Every business enterprise wants them. Every profession cries for them.

They are not heroes. They are better…

When you meet them, they seem commonplace, often shy and awkward.

But don’t be deceived. They are the only really great ones. They are the ones who make good.

*Eugen Sandow, Prussian bodybuilder and showman (1867-1925) won numerous strongman competitions and is credited with organizing the world’s first major body-building competition, held in London in 1901.

**Walter Scott, the English poet, in his classic 1810 poem, The Lady of the Lake spoke of:                                                                 “Respect was mingled with surprise                                                                                        And the stern joy that warriors feel                                                                                           In foemen worthy of their steel.”

An Antidote to Uncertainty

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(We might forgive ourselves for feeling uncertain about so many things these days—our political system, our health in a time of pandemic, our personal relationships, our employment future, the uncertainty of our climate, the instability of governments throughout the world—

But Dr. Frank Crane encourage us not to be consumed by uncertainty. He warns against —-)

THE POSTPONEMENT OF LIFE

Many of us are like the boy taking a “run and jump” who ran so far that he couldn’t jump. We spend so much time and strength getting ready to enjoy ourselves that we never enjoy ourselves at all.

We are like businessmen who break down brain, nerves, and body accumulating a fortune to wherewith to take their ease, and when they are at last ready to play they have lost the knack of it.

With too many of us, Today is a fevered compromise, a make-shift something we’ve got to get through with we known not how, something to be forgotten as soon as possible. It is “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” We have no joy but for a sort of reaching for joy, no satisfaction but expectance, no comfort but hope.

Would it not be better to give each day some kind of finish as a good workman perfects each ornament of a temple? Every day has possibilities for the perfect exercise of life’s functions. Emerson said, “Every day is a day of doom.” Here are a few hints.

First, remember that the one thing that has most to do with making life worth living is love. Let no day pass without some expression of affection.

Don’t postpone play. No day ought to go by without some moments of diversion. Play a game. Have a bit of a chat with your neighbor. Do something useless each day lest you become an enemy of the human race.

Don’t postpone physical exercise.

It is not the occasional sport that counts in buttressing health and avoiding flabbiness.

Don’t postpone mental gymnastics. No mind should go a whole day without sweating over some knotty problem, some book hard to read, some genuine, solid thinking.

Don’t postpone beauty. The best-known soul food is admiration. Find today some cloud or flower or picture that warms you. Drop in at the picture gallery, or at least pause a moment at the art dealer’s window. Never go to sleep without having seen some beautiful thing since the last sleep.

Don’t postpone work. Produce something useful, something of distinct value to the world, and if possible, something the world is willing to pay for. The sanest thing a person can do is work, and for wages.

Don’t postpone laughter. A day without one good laugh is a bad day. No drug you can take, and no belief you can embrace will do as much good for the health of your soul and body as a real hearty laugh, from the boots up.

Now, isn’t one day with a dash of all those ingredients a pretty good affair in itself? Think of it! A little love, a little play, a little bodily and mental exertion, a little work, a little laughter, a ltitle wonder; what is that but a whole life in a nutshell?

Love, as the carpenter might say, by the day and not by the job. For after all, life is too much for any one of us, but a day, well, we might manage that perhaps, if we would.