Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("A New Year")
Dec. 31, 2023-Jan. 6, 2024 | THIS WEEK'S THEME: “A New Year”
Opening Line of the Week
I’m not sure if Macaulay was the first person to use the phrase another spin of the wheel to describe the ending of one year and the beginning of another, but it’s now become a common expression. And it’s a lovely metaphor for our planet’s annual revolution around the sun. In her essay, Macaulay continued:
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This Week’s Puzzler
On January 7, 1891, this woman was born in Notasulga, Alabama to a mother and father who were both born into slavery. The fifth of eight children, she was three when she moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida (just north of Orlando), now celebrated as America’s first incorporated all-black town. Her happy—almost idyllic—childhood came to an end at age 13 when her mother died, her father remarried, and, as she later wrote, she was “passed around like a bad penny” to relatives.
By age 16, she was living on her own and working in a traveling theater group. In 1917, at age 26, she presented herself as a teenager in order to qualify for admission to a Baltimore high school. After graduating a year later, she went on to Washington D.C.’s Howard University, where she blossomed as a student, but didn’t complete her studies. In 1925, after moving to New York City, she was working as a research assistant to Fannie Hurst when the popular and socially-conscious writer helped her obtain a full scholarship to Barnard College.
The first black student to attend Barnard, she studied anthropology under the guidance of professor Ruth Benedict and a young graduate student named Margaret Mead. In 1928, at age 37, she graduated with a B.A. degree (she continued her graduate studies at Columbia University for two more years, but never received an advanced degree). Along with Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and others, she became a key figure in that wondrous explosion of creativity known as The Harlem Renaissance.
In the 1930s and 40s, she was America’s most celebrated black female writer, but interest in her work faded dramatically in the 1950s. In one of literary history’s great tragedies, she was living in obscurity in a Florida welfare home in 1960 when she died and, a few days later, was buried in an unmarked grave.
In 1975, seven years before Alice Walker wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, she wrote a powerful Ms. magazine essay titled “In Search Of ____ ____ _____.” That single essay sparked a renewed interest in this week’s Mystery Woman, and literature lovers everywhere owe Ms. Walker a debt of gratitude for helping to bring the all-but-forgotten author back into our lives.
A prolific author, she wrote essays, articles, poetry, plays, and works of fiction, including a fascinating 1939 novel—Moses, Man of the Mountain—that told the Exodus story from an African-American perspective. In 1942, she published her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, to mixed reviews. To modern readers, though, she is best remembered for the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). The book contained many memorable passages, but perhaps the most famous was this one:
Who is this person? (Answer below)
Will 2024 Be Asking Questions, or Providing Answers?
In Metaphors Be With You (2016), I selected the quotation in this week’s Puzzler as one of “The Ten Best Things Ever Said” on the subject of Years. And now, as we bid farewell to a passing year and extend a warm welcome to a new one, it seems appropriate to feature it here.
The notion that a year can ask and answer questions is an intriguing metaphor, and it speaks to a reality that most people understand. If you’ve been a smoker for four decades, for example, then you’ve been saying “no” to a critically important question each one of those forty years has asked: “Are you promoting your well-being by making healthy lifestyle choices?”
If, after forty years of smoking, you are then diagnosed with lung cancer, emphysema, or another smoking-related illness, this means you’ve finally seen the appearance of a year that is no longer asking questions, but is now providing a definitive—and disturbing—answer.
In the long ebb and flow of life, many years stand out because they present us with special challenges, in effect asking, “How are you handling this stage of your life?” For some, these asking years are marked by the deep soul-searching that is often required to figure out what we’re made of and how effectively we’re living our lives. For others, though, there is little or no introspection and self-examination, almost as if people are saying, “Don’t bother me with those annoying questions.”
Compared to the years that ask questions, the ones that offer answers provide us with evidence about how well we’ve functioned in our lives. During these years, what was once uncertain or unknown begins to become clear, often crystal clear. The answers that emerge may be positive or negative, depending on whether we’ve successfully met life’s many challenges, or fallen short in some important ways.
Our experience with asking years begins in childhood, when identity formation is the central psychological task. “Who are you?” and “What kind of person are you becoming” the years seem to ask—and continue to ask in a multitude of different ways for the rest of our lives. As we move into adolescence, all of the “Who are you?” questions of childhood continue to exist, but they take on an almost monumental emotional significance.
As you will likely recall, life’s questions during adolescence revolve around such important issues as: (1) developing an identity that sets us apart from our parents; (2) learning how to think independently and remain true to ourselves while at the same time seeking acceptance and approval; (3) developing clarity about our strengths and weaknesses, and the personal qualities that make us unique or special; (4) forging a complex set of beliefs and values that go well beyond those that were drilled into us earlier in life; (4) developing strategies and skills that will help us deal with failure, frustration, conflict, loss, and other forms of adversity; and (5) somehow finding a coherent and satisfactory way of dealing with massive physiological changes and newly-formed desires for intimacy and connection.
Now that I’ve entered the final phase of my own life, adolescence is a distant memory. But the questions keep coming—and they have a distinctly different flavor from those of earlier years. Many of today’s questions have to do with learning how to live with illness and injury (my own and the afflictions of others). Others have to do with a uniquely painful reality, the deaths of dear friends, family members, and other loved ones. Still other questions revolve around the gradually diminishing capacities of older people, and the critical importance of maintaining a high level of mental and physical fitness. And, of course, the most personally important questions have to do with my own mortality and the nature of the legacy I’ll be leaving after I depart this mortal coil. I can never be sure of what life’s ultimate answer will be for me, but I’m hoping it will be something along these lines:
“You’ve had a great run and, while you made some blunders along the way, you’ve learned from your mistakes and, all things considered, have done a pretty good job for yourself.”
This week, take some time to reflect on the years of your life—either through the asking versus answering prism or some other perspective. Before you do, though, take a moment to peruse this week's selection of quotations on the theme of A New Year:
Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go. — Brooks Atkinson
Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. — Henry Ward Beecher
Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. — Hal Borland
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year, it is that we should have a new soul. — G. K. Chesterton
A new year is a clean slate, a chance to suck in your breath, decide all is not lost and give yourself another chance. — Sarah Overstreet
Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365 page book. Write a good one. Brad Paisley, in a Dec. 31, 2009 Tweet
And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands. — Rainer Maria Rilke
Hope/Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,/Whispering, “It will be happier.” — Alfred, Lord Tennyson
New Year’s Day. Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. — Mark Twain,
For source information on these quotations, and many other quotations on the topic of A NEW YEAR, go to Dr. Mardy's Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations.
Cartoon of the Week
Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week
Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “Bitter Truths.”
Mardy
Thanks again for your thoughts and work, Mardy. They have meant so much over the years. All good wishes for 2024! All the best, John.
2024 starts with a questiom: Will the United States remain a viable Democracy?
2024 in its final two months will provide an answer to that question.