Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Maturity")
September 3-9, 2023 | THIS WEEK'S THEME: “Maturity”
Opening Line of the Week
The son of a weaver, Barrie studied at the University of Edinburgh before moving to London in 1885 to pursue a writing career. In 1897, he befriended Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davis, a London couple with three young sons, George, John, and Peter (the parents ultimately added two more sons to the mix). Barrie loved playing with the boys, and regaled them with many fanciful stories, including one in which Peter was a bird before he was born and, after his birth, retained the ability to fly.
Barrie introduced the character of Peter Pan in his 1902 novel The Little White Bird, but it was only a minor role, and Peter never advanced beyond infancy in the tale. Two years later, in his 1904 London stage production, “Peter Pan, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” Barrie developed Peter into the character we all know today. The play was a spectacular success, and catapulted Barrie into worldwide celebrity.
In 1911, Peter Pan was already one of the world’s most famous fictional characters when Barrie extended the stage play into a full-blown novel titled Peter and Wendy. The novel’s opening line is now regarded as a classic in world literature.
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This Week’s Puzzler
On September 5, 1916, this man was born in Augusta, Georgia. The child of an African-American father and a Scotch-Irish mother, he grew up in an intellectually stimulating and upwardly-mobile environment (his mother was a teacher and his father a hotel doorman who dearly wanted his children to have more opportunities than he had). Growing up, he attended the Haines Institute, Augusta’s first school for African-American children (originally founded by Lucy Craft Laney in 1883).
After getting his high school diploma in 1933, he went on to Augusta’s Paine College, where he majored in English and began writing poetry and short stories for the school newspaper. After graduating in 1937, he went on to Fisk University, obtaining an M.A. degree in English a year later. In 1938, he moved to Chicago, where he began post-graduate studies at the University of Chicago, worked at the Federal Writer’s Project, and launched his career as a free-lance writer.
He got his first big break in 1944, when he was awarded the O. Henry Memorial Award for “Health Card,” a powerful short story about racial prejudice in the South. Normally, such an award would nicely position a writer for a book contract, but when he tried to find a publisher for a larger novel on Southern race problems, he was rejected again and again.
To make a living, he turned to writing novels set in the antebellum South, but featuring white male protagonists. His very first effort, The Foxes of Harrow (1946) was a great success, making him the first African-American to write a bestselling novel. A year later, after the premiere of the 1947 film adaptation (starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O'Hara), he became the first black writer to have a novel adapted into a film.
Over the next twenty years, he wrote many popular romance novels (he called them “costume novels”), building a readership of predominantly white fans who had no idea they were reading books by a black author. In the late 1960s, he began to feature non-white protagonists in extensively-researched historical novels, like Judas, My Brother (1968) and Speak Now (1969).
When he died in 1991, he was literary history's most successful African-American novelist, with 33 novels that sold more than 55 million copies. In addition to his gifts as a storyteller, he also had a talent for composing aphoristic observations. In The Girl from Storyville (1972), for example, he had a character say:
Who is this person? (Answer below)
Have You Been Able to Achieve Maturity in Your Life?
Over the years, I've been drawn to observations about maturity, and the quotation in this week's Puzzler is one of my all-time favorites. In sixteen simple words, this week’s Mystery Author captured some essential truths about mature people: they are not fragile, and they do not crumble in the face of ugly or unflattering facts. They don’t fear the truth, they accept it and find a way to deal with it.
Maturity is a critically important stage in maturation, a complex and often mysterious process that occurs all around us (think of a mature wine, for example, or a mature cheese). When a wine or cheese is immature, it doesn’t taste good—and something similar happens with immature people. Instead of having satisfying and enjoyable encounters with friends, family members, and co-workers, immature people find countless ways to annoy, anger, confuse, and frustrate them.
While most people know almost instinctively what immaturity looks like, maturity is complex and multifaceted, and can take a multitude of forms. The Puzzler quotation identifies one important “marker of maturity,” and when I sat down to consider the subject this week, a bunch more came to mind. In my view, mature people…
...admit a mistake when they make one;
...apologize to people they have wronged;
...accept full responsibility for their actions;
…realize they’re not the center of the universe;
…retain their composure during stressful times;
...accept their occasional lapses into immaturity;
...do not seek simple solutions to complex problems;
...are able to listen to criticism without getting defensive;
...take care of themselves without taking away from others;
...retain a youthful spirit without sacrificing their maturity;
…don’t blame other people or outside forces for their problems.
…have sufficient empathy to be compassionate to those in need;
…do not deceive their friends and family about the true nature of things.
In constructing this list, I’m sure I’ve failed to mention many other things that are equally important. If you’d like to add anything, do so in the “Comments” box below.
Maturity and immaturity have played such a pivotal role in human life that they’ve been explored for millennia—including in this legendary piece of scripture:
In the world of quotations, we typically think of world-class observations as being the sole province of famous writers and wordsmiths, but some of the best things ever said have come from regular, everyday people. One of the best I’ve seen on this week’s theme came in a quotation contest I sponsored in 2012. The winner was Dr. Marlene Caroselli, and I think you will appreciate her inspired creation.
This week, give some thought to the role that maturity—or the lack of it—has played in your life. In particular, try to answer the following question: “How successful have I been in achieving maturity in my own life?” If you’d like to carry the exercise a bit further, ask exactly the same question to one or two key people. Before you do anything, though, take a few moments to peruse this week's selection of quotations:
Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. — Maya Angelou
To do the work that you are capable of doing is the mark of maturity. — Betty Friedan
Maturity begins when we’re content to feel we’re right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong. — Sydney J. Harris
Maturity is the ability to live in peace with that which we cannot change. — Ann Landers
There is no “trick” in being young: it happens to you. But the process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained. — Marya Mannes
Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity. — Anaïs Nin
That’s maturity—when you realize that you’ve finally arrived at a state of ignorance as profound as that of your parents. Elizabeth Peters
Age is a high price to pay for maturity. — Tom Stoppard
Maturity…is fatal to so many enchantments. — Mark Twain
Maturity is the ability to do a job whether you’re supervised or not; finish a job once it’s started; carry money without spending it; and the ability to bear an injustice without wanting to get even. — Abigail Van Buren
For source information on these quotations, and many other quotations on the topic of MATURITY, go to Dr. Mardy's Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations.
Cartoon of the Week
Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:
Frank Yerby
In 1951, in large part to protest racial injustice in America, Yerby emigrated to France. After living in Nice for three years, he moved to Madrid, Spain, where he remained until his death from liver cancer in 1991. His gravesite is in the Cementerio de la Almudena, the largest cemetery in Spain. Today, a historical plaque honoring him may be seen in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia (near the corner of 8th and Hall Streets).
Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week
Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “Adversity.”
Mardy
Perhaps another sign of maturity is to accept the weaknesses and mistakes of others without being unduly critical? Another observation about maturity is to recognize it as something many of us aspire to but never completely reach - or am I just writing of myself :)
Your opening observations about Peter Pan reminded me that I wrote a film script for Robert Halmi Productions many decades ago -- PETER PAN'S CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE -- where the hope was
Peter O'Toole would play Captain Hook. Alas, the project never came to fruition, Thank you. I
haven't thought about that for a long time.
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Do your quotations imply (or state outright) that I am not the center of the universe? If true, that's
a disappointment to me, but a sigh of relief to everybody else.