The Four Kinds of Regrets

Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes has been made into at least three Hollywood films. The first, in 1972, was so mediocre that a second effort was filmed in 1983 starring Jason Robards. This was a better effort but it failed to make half its money back. In 2018 Hollywood made another go of it and this one got worse ratings than either of the previous efforts. Perhaps the theme is too dark. I myself found the 1962 novel to be both vivid and disturbing. Perhaps Hollywood just can't compete with the images a good creates when mingled with our imaginations.

The story is about Mr. Dark's traveling Pandemonium Circus that upends Green Town, Illinois like a furious funnel cloud. The tag line for the film sums up the main point of the story: "After he fulfills your deepest, lifelong dream... he'll tell you the price you have to pay."

For me, I have no memories of the film at all except one. Jason Robards, the father, gets lost in a Hall of Mirrors where he is weeping because it is a hall of regrets.

AND SO when I stumbled across the title of an article on The 4 Major Kinds of Regrets, it grabbed my attention because like many people I have carried with me regrets from my past.  It never occurred to me that there could be different kinds of regret, so I was curious. Here are the categories, according to this article in Psychology Today.

Foundation Regrets
These regrets pertain to a failure to be responsible, conscientious or prudent. Things like getting old without having saved for retirement. Or regrets about having neglected your health. Or your teeth. 

Boldness Regrets
I'm guessing that this one pairs up with the proverb about good intentions. For example, an opportunity that came our way passed us by because of our inaction. Why didn't we say something, or do something? Why were we so passive?

Moral Regrets
This is when we choose the low road rather than the high road. There are a hundred ways we can fail ourselves and our ideals.

Connection Regrets
This, researchers say, is the largest category of regret. It happens when we neglect people who are important to us, when we allow fractured relationships to remain fractured.

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Some of my biggest regrets revolve around things I've said. I'm ashamed to admit that there were a few times when I deliberately said something hurtful. And there were other times I unintentionally hurt people by stupid things I'd said carelessly. What's painful is that there is often no second chance.

The article goes on to examine how people respond to their regrets. Some say, "I have no regrets." Others, and I count myself among these, say, "I  have regrets but I have learned from them."

Life is for learning, through all our experiences, good, bad and ugly. 

Book Burning 101 -- Quotes from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

It was a pleasure to burn. --Opening line. 

"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?"
He laughed. "That's against the law!"
"Oh. Of course."

"It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his 

thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, 

and then I came along in two minutes and boom! 

it's all over." 

• School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?

You can't build a house without nails and wood. If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood.' If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. 

"Remember the firemen are rarely necessary. 

The public stopped reading of its own accord." 

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Last night we had a fire in the fire pit. In addition to sticks and logs we also burned some books. Before we're accused of book burning in the pejorative sense, these were books that a friend gave us for the purpose of burning. They were from a bookstore which gets credit for unsold books. Instead of sending books back to the distributor--which would be a shipping expense--they send the front covers so the remains can't be sold.  The ashes from this book burning adventure might me called "the remains of the day."

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Related Links

Quotes About Books

Eight Books By Ed Newman

An Antidote to Being One-Dimensional

Yesterday while working on a project my mind kept returning to a scene from Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. If you are unfamiliar with the story, it's a worthy read about youth and old age, good and evil. It is somewhat fantastical but has some good life lessons without being moralistic.

A carnival comes to town run by a Mr. Dark, and it is a dark carnival. The story centers on two teens, Will and Jim, and Will's father Jim. The seen I vividly recall, perhaps because when played in the film by Jason Robards it struck me so vividly, takes place in a hall of mirrors. I can't recall whether regret is the trap that captured all the other people lost in that labyrinth. What I recall is that Will's father, on his knees weeping, is wracked by regret because he has looked too deeply into the mirrors.

Here's the thought I had: when one looks into the mirror of one's acts--over a long lifetime of one's acts--it can be difficult, even loathsome, to look too deeply because of those moments where we have behaved badly or hurt people or acted stupidly so that we regret what we said or did. And that this regret is something akin to Chinese handcuffs. Did you ever stick your fingers into Chinese handcuffs when you were a kid? The first time children encounter these finger traps they think that you can escape by pulling, but the more you pull the more you are bound. It's deceptive, and counterintuitive. The path to freedom is to push in, hold it then wriggle your finger out.

This was my thought yesterday afternoon. The regret which Charles Halloway (Jason Robards) encountered in the Hall of Mirrors was a trap, a trap like Chinese handcuffs. It's deceptive because there is nothing you can do to change the past.

This image was brought to mind by one of the ten items in Parnell Thill's column One-Dimentional, which appeared earlier this year in the Pine Journal, the one instructing us to look in the mirror, which you will read below.

* * * *
Parnell Thill is currently Sr. Marketing Manager at AMSOIL INC., but has been an Adjunct Professor of Marketing at one of our local colleges and columnist since the mid-90s for the Cloquet Pine Journal, where this post originally appeared. This spring Parnell was honored as “Columnist of the Year” by the “Minnesota Newspapers Association” for his column, Notes from the Small Pond. His first book, Killing the Devil and Other Excellent Tricks, is available on Amazon.com.

One-Dimensional
Guest Post by Parnell Thill

We are easily seduced. We believe we "get it" and understand the multitudinous and nuanced "Understanding of Things." We shake our heads at those that disagree on Facebook and change the channel to our own when we accidentally hear an opposing opinion. I've said this a thousand times because I'm old.

But seriously.

Here's 10 things to do that everyone should and no one will:

10. Shake the hand of a person who doesn't have a hand, but a hook or another prosthesis, and ask how the original equipment was lost. And listen. Write it down.

9. Interview the oldest person in your family. Ask them about their earliest memory and their most brutal/joyous. Write it down.

8. Go to Pine Valley after midnight and lay on your back in the snow or mud or grass with the wind or the mosquitoes or the ticks and look at the sky and wonder about what the same sky looked like in that exact spot 50 years ago. Five thousand years ago. Fifty thousand. Mind bend. Write it down.

7. Volunteer at a hospice. Be loving to the beloved. Write it down.

6. Find one of those old-school gumball machines and slide your nickel in and crank the dial to extract one of those purple, bumpy, grape gumballs that make your mouth pucker and sucker and douse your mouth with saliva to dilute the sugar your teeth hate. Thanks, evolution. Write it down.

5. Walk on crutches. Humbling. Not humiliating, but humbling. Write it down.

4. Start a fire with no matches or no lighter. It can be done and has been for 40,000 years but hasn't been for a hundred by anyone that anyone knows. Write it the hell down.

3. Eat raw protein, something that used to be swimming or climbing or running or hoping it wouldn't die, but did. Give in to your apex predator. Write it down.

2. Tell yourself the truth. Take a deep breath and stand in front of a mirror and tell yourself what you think of yourself. Chickens--t. Write it, loser.

1. Lie.

Cloquet resident Parnell Thill, former Pine Knot editor, has been penning his "Notes From the Small Pond" column for decades, or at least that's what it feels like. Contact him c/o news@pinejournal.com

Read more of Parnell's columns at the Pine Journal website. 

Throwback Thursday: Quotes About Books

Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends. ~ Dawn Adams

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors. ~ Joseph Addison

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. ~ Mortimer J. Adler

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. ~ Ray Bradbury

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. ~ Joseph Brodsky

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. ~ Katherine Mansfield

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. ~ Jessamyn West

Books had instant replay long before televised sports. ~ Bert Williams

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. ~ Gaston Bachelard

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes. ~ Barrow

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable. ~ Augustine Birrell

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing. ~ G.K. Chesterton

A room without books is like a body without a soul. ~ Marcus T. Cicero

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Do you have a favorite quote about books? I'd like to hear it.

Ray Bradbury Hates Big Government

What does it mean to call for a revolution? This week Ray Bradbury, sci-fi author of The Illustrated Man and Fahrenheit 451 said, “I think our country is in need of a revolution. There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people.”

In an L.A.Times article titled Ray Bradbury Hates Big Government we can read a litany of other things Mr. Bradbury dislikes, including cell phones (too many), machines (too many), our failure to build a base on the moon so we can explore Mars, and President Obama. Mr. Bradbury is 90 now, that venerable age when you can pretty much say whatever you want.

I think there are a lot of people who have a dislike for Big Government to various degrees, from visceral hatred to perpetual annoyance, but at what point does one actually call for a revolution? There are idealists who believe any change will be a change for good but a revolution sounds like a dicey proposition to me. The French Revolution brought a reign of terror. The Russian Revolution resulted in rivers of blood during the Stalin purges. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag paints a pretty grim picture of that catastrophe.

I agree with Bradbury that we have too much government. But who will do anything about it? Or who even agrees which areas of Big Government should be trimmed? The GOP strives to tap into this discontent for votes, but the record shows how neither party delivers on that score. The State grows and grows, has grown for a hundred years and will most likely grow a hundred more.

The problem is that the people presenting alternatives (Libertarians, among others) are probably unelectable because many people do not like too complete of a paring back of government's role. Here is a selection of quotes from Michael Badnarik, Libertarian Party candidate in the 2004 presidential election.

"Drug prohibition has caused gang warfare and other violent crimes by raising the prices of drugs so much that vicious criminals enter the market to make astronomical profits, and addicts rob and steal to get money to pay the inflated prices for their drugs."
Michael Badnarik

"Government is necessary for our survival. We need government in order to survive. The Founding Fathers created a special place for government. It is called the Constitution."
Michael Badnarik

"Gun bans disarm victims, putting them at the mercy of murderers or terrorists who think nothing of breaking the gun laws."
Michael Badnarik

"Gun control means being able to hit your target. If I have a 'hot button' issue, this is definitely it. Don't even think about taking my guns. My rights are not negotiable, and I am totally unwilling to compromise when it comes to the Second Amendment."
Michael Badnarik

"I am opposed to any individual taxes until we eliminate all of the unconstitutional agencies, and I suspect we wouldn't need a tax after that."
Michael Badnarik

"I find it very offensive when the government tells me what I can and cannot watch. Censor yourself."
Michael Badnarik

"I just want everyone to know that 20,000 gun laws in the United States are unconstitutional. They infringe on your right to protect your life, the lives of your loved ones, and your property."
Michael Badnarik

"If we really want liberty - if we really want liberty - then we need to go out and get it, we need to take it, because nobody is going to give it to us. And we need to do it now."
Michael Badnarik

"On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War."
Michael Badnarik

"The first lines of defence against criminals are the victims themselves."
Michael Badnarik

"The government never does anything successfully."
Michael Badnarik

"The question is: how bad do things have to get before you will do something about it? Where is your line in the sand? If you don't enforce the constitutional limitations on your government very soon, you are likely to find out what World War III will be like."
Michael Badnarik

"When the state or federal government control the education of all of our children, they have the dangerous and illegitimate monopoly to control and influence the thought process of our citizens."
Michael Badnarik

I wonder if Ray voted for Michael in the last election? My guess is that Mr. Badnarik wouldn't want tax dollars spent on that trip to the moon, and Mr. Bradbury wouldn't like that either.