Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Understanding Others")

April 28—May 4, 2024 | THIS WEEK: “Understanding Others”

Happy Birthday to Me!

As we get older, birthdays come faster every year, and this week—on May 2nd—I will celebrate my eighty-second! In 1995, when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer at age fifty-three, I feared that I would be departing this mortal coil much earlier than I would have preferred. And now, at an age I once considered almost synonymous with senility, I find myself in complete agreement with a remark the writer E. B. White made on his seventieth birthday:

“Old age is a special problem for me because I’ve never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself—a lad of about nineteen.”

Opening Line of the Week

Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, is best known for her political commentary, but she also wrote extensively about gender dynamics—and these are the delightful opening words of her bestselling book on the subject. As she continued, she gave readers an equally delightful synopsis of her views on the subject:

“I had a moment of dazzling clarity when I was twenty-seven, a rush of confidence that I had cracked the code. But it was, alas, an illusion. I think I overcomplicated their simplicity. Or oversimplified their simplicity. Are they as complicated as a pile of wood? Or as simple as a squid?”

For nearly 2,000 memorable opening lines from every genre of world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com.

This Week’s Puzzler

This week’s Mystery Woman at three stages of her adult life.

On April 28, 1926, this woman was born in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest of four children raised by a homemaker mother and an attorney father (her father was a direct descendant of a leading figure of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War).

Growing up, she was a notorious tomboy, a voracious reader, and the best friend of Truman Persons (later Truman Capote), a boy who lived down the street.  When she was in elementary school, her father served as defense attorney for two local black men who were accused of murdering a white merchant (they were both found guilty, and later hanged).

With literary aspirations taking firm hold in high school, she went on to study English literature at Huntingdon College in Montgomery and the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa.  In her junior year at Alabama, she participated in a special program that also allowed students to earn credits toward a law degree.  After a year, she dropped out of school completely, confessing to family and friends that writing—not the law—was her first love.  She never did get her degree.

In 1949, at age 23, she moved to New York, where she worked as an airlines reservations clerk by day and a struggling writer at night (it was at this time that she reconnected with Capote). In 1956, she was beginning to have grave doubts about the viability of a writing career when the Broadway composer Michael Martin Brown and his wife Joy gave her a spectacular Christmas present—a check to support her for one year in order to finish a novel she’d been working on for several years.

In 1960, at age 34, she finally brought the book to publication. To her great surprise, it became an immediate best-seller. It went on to win the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into a 1963 movie starring one of the era’s most famous Leading Men (he won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance). The novel sold more than thirty million copies, and, in 1999, a poll by the Library Journal named it the “Best Novel of the Century.”

A number of passages from the novel went on to be widely quoted, including this one from the protagonist: 

Who is this week’s Mystery Person? Who was her famous ancestor? What was the title of the 1960 novel? What was the name of the novel’s protagonist? And who played the lead role in the 1963 film adaptation? (Answers below) 

Is It Possible to Truly Understand Another Person?

The vivid metaphorical observation in this week’s Puzzler about climbing into another’s person’s skin is only one of a number of popular sayings that are commonly offered when we’re being urged to make an effort to understand other people. A similar admonition from the American lawyer Clarence Darrow was cited in John Farrell’s biography Attorney for the Damned (2011):

“The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.”

Over the centuries, a number of similar expressions have become popular. One of the earliest, according to the The Online Etymology Dictionary is:

“To stand in someone’s shoes, ‘see things from his or her point of view,’ is attested from 1767.”

A variation is “to walk in someone’s shoes,” and, for many, that will bring to mind a saying most of us learned as children about “walking a mile in another man’s moccasins.” Commonly described as “an old Indian maxim,” the saying has nothing to do with Native Americans. Its first appearance in print was in a 1930 issue of The Lincoln [Nebraska] Star, when an unnamed Caucasian journalist wrote, “Never criticize the other boy or girl unless you have walked a mile in their moccasins.”

All of these sayings contain an important nugget of wisdom: to understand other people, it is essential for you to make a sincere effort to see things from their perspective. These are truly “words to live by,” and if there is anything faulty with the various versions of the advice you’ve seen above, it is that they all make it sound fairly easy. It is not.

Indeed, understanding other people is one of the most difficult things we human beings are called upon to do—especially when we’re dealing with people who differ from us in age, ancestry, life experience, gender, nationality, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, philosophical outlook, or political persuasion. Some have even described it as dangerous.

When I came upon this saying for the first time, I did a double-take, for I was expecting to see the word difficult when I realized that dangerous was the word actually used. The words come from Maestro Bertoldo, Michelangelo’s teacher, and he never really clarified the nature of the danger (his words came as he was discussing the challenges of an artist who is “trying to create something that never existed before”).

Bertoldo’s saying stuck with me long after I finished reading Stone’s novel, and several years later, it immediately came back to mind when I read the following notebook entry from the French poet and writer Paul Valéry:

A very dangerous state of mind: thinking one understands.

I’ve spent many hours trying to understand the danger involved in understanding others, and here’s the best I’ve come up with so far: it is dangerous to think we truly understand people when, in fact, we don’t. And that problem, I believe, derives in large part from the tendency to let our unconscious biases and preconceptions about people filter, color, misinterpret, and even distort what they say or do. Over 400 years ago, the legendary English writer Francis Bacon stated the problem well: 

No discussion of the subject under consideration would be complete without at least a brief mention of male-female communication, and the many problems men and women have historically had in understanding each other. One of the central issues, according to many, is the vastly different way in which the minds of men and women work. The image below is a typical—or should I say, stereotypical—representation:

To shift from a railway metaphor to a celestial one, countless people over the years have made the claim that men and women are so unlike each other that they might have come from different planets.  Not surprisingly, a clever author finally capitalized on that longstanding conception when, in 1992, John Gray came out with Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, a book that went on to sell more than 15 million copies.

While the subject of male-female communication is deep and rich and complicated, it has led many to conclude that men will never truly understand women, and vice versa. And, as we quickly learn when we turn our attention to other areas of human life, the problem of not understanding isn’t restricted to men and women. In a 1713 essay, for example, Jonathan Swift wrote:

“Nothing is so hard for those, who abound in riches, as to conceive how others can be in want.”

In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1962 novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the narrator asked:

“How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?” 

In Graham Greene’s 1948 novel The Heart of the Matter, narrator and protagonist Henry Scobie says flatly:

“No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.”

In a 1903 letter to a friend, Franz Kafka wrote:

“When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours?”

Kafka continued, “And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?”

And finally, let me mention a stunning realization writer Joan Didion had several months after the 2003 death [from a heart attack] of her 71-year-old husband John Gregory Dunne. Writing in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), she revealed:

“We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”

In this week’s post, I’ve stacked the deck with people who’ve emphasized how difficult it is to understand other people. And I’ve done this because I want you to see the whole matter not so much as a problem, but as a challenge. If the bad news is that a full and complete understanding of another person is difficult, or even impossible, the good news is that you can be a far, far more understanding person in the future than you are today—if you make it a priority.

My personal role model in this regard is Eleanor Roosevelt. From the day she was born, she lived a life not merely of comfort, but of affluence. She never experienced poverty or hunger, she never wondered where her next dollar was coming from, and she climbed into a warm bed every cold, winter evening.  So, given everything we’ve read so far, one might predict that such a person would never truly understand the many millions of unfortunate people on the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum.  But, amazingly, given her background, Mrs. Roosevelt proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that people can possess the gift of understanding if they possess a social consciousness, the trait of empathy, and a sincere belief in one of the greatest religious insights of all time—that we should love our neighbors as ourselves.

If I could leave you with one thought as I bring my remarks to a close, it would be this—understanding others is one of life’s great challenges, and at times so difficult it is almost impossible to achieve. And while you may never achieve true understanding, know that it is clearly possible for you to often achieve high levels of understanding, and occasionally even deep understanding. Guide your future efforts by the words of Louise Erdrich, who wrote some of the wisest words ever offered on the subject:

This week, think about how all this applies to you. Do you regard yourself as an understanding person? What major misunderstandings have haunted your life? And, in your entire life, how often have you felt that another person truly understood you? Here’s a compilation of quotations to further stimulate your thinking: 

• One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other. — Jane Austen

• To understand another human being you must gain some insight into the conditions which made him what he is. — Margaret Bourke-White

• In the sick room, ten cents’ worth of human understanding equals ten dollars’ worth of medical science. — Martin H. Fischer

• To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to. — Kahlil Gibran

• If you don’t understand yourself, you don’t understand anybody else. — Nikki Giovanni

• If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool. — Carl Jung

• Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity. — Doris Lessing

• No one feels another’s grief, no one understands another’s joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality, they only pass each other by. — Franz Schubert

• You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself. — John Steinbeck

• I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet? — Rebecca West

For source information on these quotations, and many others on the topic of UNDERSTANDING OTHERS, go here.

Cartoon of the Week:

Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:

Harper Lee. Robert E. Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus Finch. Gregory Peck.

Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week:

Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “Losing Our Way.”

Mardy Grothe

Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com

Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note