"For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more." ~Luke 12:48
He has been labeled as one of the Robber Barons. His defenders would advocate that he has been libeled to be tagged thus. History is filled with many shadows that complicate its accurate portrayal. Though some of his practices as he built his fortune in the steel industry are outlawed today, at the time they were not restricted. Like the other “robber barons” he was an opportunist.
On the positive side of the ledger, he is to be commended for a very strong belief in the concept of noblesse oblige, a French term which is understood to mean that nobility and wealth have moral obligations and responsibilities. Carnegie believed, and publicly stated, that it is morally wrong to die rich. In this matter Carnegie led by example. By the end of his life Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant who made good in America, had generously given back all of his fortune to help the less fortunate.
Before Carnegie died (ninety years ago this summer), he had already given away over 350 million dollars, the equivalent of 4.3 billion in today’s dollars. Upon his death, the last thirty million were given to foundations, charities and pensioners.
I myself am a lover of libraries, as anyone who knows me knows. Carnegie, too, was a believer in the power of books and education to help people improve their lot in life. For this reason, in addition to contributing heavily to many academic institutions he also built public libraries across the country.
When I first came to Duluth, I was struck by the beautiful architecture of the Carnegie Library here, and surprised that Carnegie’s wealth flowed even to this little corner of the universe. (The library moved to a larger facility shortly after.)
Whatever people think of the man himself, a businessman who became the richest man in America, for his example of noblesse oblige Andrew Carnegie should be remembered.
"...leaning over the mirror of our acts, our souls will recognize what we are."- Andre Gide
For nearly all of us mirrors play a role in our morning rituals. Whether for shaving or make-up, fixing one's hair or straightening one's tie, the mirror is a useful tool, presenting to our eyes a true reflection of what is there.
On other occasions, a reassuring glance in the mirror before a job interview or an important date gives us confidence that at least the external things are taken care of - our hair isn't mussed, collar turned right, no food crumbs on our chin or the corners of our mouth.
At the end of the day there is another mirror which is equally valuable to us, and perhaps even more so once we practice using it. We can call it the mirror of our acts. As we quiet ourselves and reflect on the day, we discover that our actions reveal our souls as surely as the bathroom mirror reveals our faces.
The mirror of our acts reveals us as we truly are, giving a more precise picture of ourselves than we may wish to see. For it will reveal not only our strengths, but also our limitations; it will show not only our inward beauty, but also the defects that mar that beauty. When I look back on my day, with honesty, standing before this mirror of my soul, what do I truly see reflected there? Thoughtfulness and sensitivity? Selfishness? Duplicity and deceit? Laziness? Industriousness? Courage? Courtesy? Insensitivity? Foolish pride? Pettiness? The character defects we see need not leave us discourage. Recognizing one's shortcomings is the essential first step to the cure. Or, as they say, no pain no gain.
Taking time for reflection at day's end can be a most wonderful tool to help us grow to our full stature as human beings. Keeping a journal where we record and analyze these insights is even more helpful. As they say, "The weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memory."
It's an oft neglected truth that if we wish to make the world a better place, there's no better place to begin than in ourselves.
I remember a guy on the Johnny Carson show who was a bus boy who cleaned Richard Nixon's spot while he had dinner with Nikita Kruschev during Kruschev's visit in the late 50's. Nixon had only taken one or two bites out of his sandwich (Nixon had been doing all the talking) and the bus boy felt it was so important he simply could not throw it away. He wrapped it and froze it, and it became the cornerstone of his uneaten sandwiches collection. The guy said he had 3,000 sandwiches from all kinds of famous people, I believe, and was hoping Johnny would let him have an unfinished Carson sandwich.
That story reminds me of how my cousin Gary got started with his baseball card business. It began with a lucky find as we were exiting the 1963 All Star Game. I kicked something with my foot, he bent down and retrieved a baseball that had been signed by all of the National League All Stars. Years later, while a fireman in Ponca City, Oklahoma, Gary Reed made this ball the centerpiece of his baseball cards and collectibles business.
In the same vein, Horace Waterman has the world's largest collection of discarded scraps of paper from the wastebaskets of famous writers. His family has been in the business of sifting through mountains of useless notes and discarded scraps for more than six generations. (His great great grandfather made a fortune in the blackmail business before having to flee England in the late 1800's.)
Here are some famous lines that were discarded before the memorable one's came into being. I pulled them from Waterman's eccentric Facebook pages. He even posted photos of some of them, though many were nearly illegible.
"I weep, therefore I am... in need of a tissue." ~ Rene Descartes
"Something's happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear.
There's a man with a pun over there
A-tellin' me that I'm a-kinda square." ~ Stephen Stills
"Dearest Pookie,
I'm pretty sure e = c x c x m.
What do you think?
Love, Albert" ~ Einstein
"I reek, therefore I am." ~ Rene Descartes
"In this world, nothing is sure but death and Texas." ~ W.
"When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. The one is a liberal and the other a conservative." ~ JFK
"Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life, I find. But when you try to stretch it to a triple, unless you are really fast, or lucky, they can usually peg you. It's best to let the next hitter try to knock you in." ~ JFK
"When I look at our beer bellies, I understand why women don't mistake us for gods." ~ Nietzsche
"What doesn't kill me makes me.... something, something something. FIND a Catchy something here." ~ Nietzsche
For the record, the first two stories are true. But if you believed any of these quotes were real, than P.T. Barnum's famous observation applies to you.
"When a white army battles Indians and wins, it is called a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre." Chiksika, Shawnee
The relationship between our U.S. government and the native peoples who occupied these lands before the coming of the Europeans has had many tragic moments. One of the most appalling was the removal of the Cherokee, Choctaw and others from their native homelands in the Southern Appalachians to a desolate space called Oklahoma.
In 1830 Andrew Jackson championed the Indian Removal Act which was essentially a forced deportation. There were objections raised in some quarters. Chief Justice John Marshall of the Supreme Court stated that the act was unconstitutional. President Jackson said, essentially, "Try and stop me." In other words, the president had the army, the Court had pieces of paper.
Alexis de Tocqeville, French philosopher who was studying the American experience at the time, wrote of this forced removal, "In the whole scene there was an air of ruin and destruction... one couldn't watch without feeling one's heart wrung."
Yet, amazingly, the country allowed this thing to happen. All through the 1830's the various tribal peoples were forced out and relocated to other lands. Thousands died along the way. As they made their way west from the Carolinas, however, many escaped and disappeared into the forest hills of Tennessee and fled north into Kentucky. This is when certain of my Kentucky kin appeared on the scene in Eastern Kentucky, though they probably disowned their roots at that time for fear of reprisals. Every family has its secrets.
Today, most people give little thought to this forgotten incident. Yet we honor President Jackson with his portrait on our twenty dollar bill. No wonder history is so messy and confusing.
EDNOTE: Most of the paintings and illustrations on my blog are available for sale. If you see something here that makes you say, "I gotta have it," be sure to let me know and we can negotiate a price. I am also interested in painting portraits. I am always seeking new and interesting subject matter. You can see my style here, and the prices will be very reasonable. Feel free to contact me.
“The sole difference between me and a madman is the fact that I am not mad!” ~Salvador Dali
Without doubt he was talented. And an individualist with enormous ego. Said Dali, “At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”
Was Dali’s bizarre style a put-on to increase his marketability or was he simply a madman whose talents brought him critical acclaim, despite his ludicrous behavior?
According to the Masterpiece Paintings Gallery website, "Dali's ego and need for attention were never satisfied. His thirst for scandal was unquenchable. And 'the thought of not being recognized was unbearable', he said. He used to walk through the streets of New York ringing a bell whenever he felt people were not paying him enough attention. 'Every morning when I wake up I experience an exquisite joy -- the joy of being Salvador Dali -- and I ask myself in rapture what wonderful things this Salvador Dali is going to accomplish today.'”
As an art student I found Salvador Dali’s sensational work remarkably invigorating and inspirational. Inspirational on two levels… first, his extreme attention to detail and the skill of his painterliness, and second, for the evocative quality of his imagery.
Steve Martin, in his autobiography Born Standing Up, in passing mentions an incident during a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York whereupon he comes across Dali's Persistence of Memory. Martin was quite surprised at how small it was. Like Martin, the first piece I saw in person was this famous painting of melting clocks. At the time, Picasso’s stunning Guernica was on the wall just before I reached Dali’s piece. Guernica is enormous, and impressive. Just around the corner Dali’s Persistence of Memory was, in contrast, a tiny little thing, yet astonishing in its detail. When you look at plates of paintings in art books, both paintings might take a page of the book, and your mind just doesn’t quite grasp the reality.
My second Dali was the shocking/fascinatingSoft Construction with Boiled Beans - Premonition of Civil War which hangs in a private collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This is a wonderful museum, with the Dali piece accompanied by some of Marcel Duchamp’s most significant works, a great place to hang out if you are a masterpiece.
But if you seriously want to take in more than a piece or two, I strongly recommend you visitthe Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida which is wholly dedicated to this icon of Twentieth Century Surrealism.
While visiting the Dali Museum two springs ago, a tour guide told us a story about small sculpture composed of a lobster sitting on an old fashioned telephone rack. Dali, while dining, threw the lobster over his shoulder and it landed on the phone after knocking the handheld part off the receiver. He loved the look and made it “art.” Crazy or creative?
But the story that sealed my impression that he was a bit mad was when the tour guide said he went through a brief period in which he refused to say any two sentences in a row in the same language. So he would say something in Spanish, then French, then English, then Spanish, etc. This went on for days, maybe weeks. You can imagine the conversations that followed… or didn't.
If you've never been and you're anywhere near Tampa/St. Petersburg, you owe it to yourself to visit the Dali Museum. In contrast to Persistence, you will see fifteen foot high paintings like the Hallucinogenic Torredor, along with many rooms of other major works. The Torreador alone is worth the visit.
Although among the Surrealist Movement's brightest lights in the 1930's he was eschewed by these famous artists who composed the Dada Movement because Dali was a capitalist and they were socialists. As it turns out Dali mastered the art of making money, which contributed to his legacy. On the flip side, his mass production of prints of his work resulted in scandals that in some circles has damaged his name. It may be because his definitions of truth and ethics are as ambiguous as his motivations.
Here is a YouTube film that reveals the character of Dali's mind: self absorbed and over stimulated.
One of the most powerful autobiographies I read two decades ago was Buzz Aldrin's Return To Earth (1973). Aldrin, the second human to put foot on the moon, candidly talks about the dream, the fulfillment of that dream, the pressures he was under at the time, and his regrets, because here he was, standing on the moon, but with eight hours of tests to conduct in four hours he couldn't just take a deep breath and take it in. A man is not a machine or a robot, but has a soul and heart, and fifteen seconds to stand in awe was not enough.
The pressures didn't let up after the return. These guys, Armstrong and Aldrin, and several others that followed in their footsteps, were paraded around the globe as international heroes, an "in your face" statement that we had achieved the impossible and we had done it first. This was Cold War posturing, and like good little foot soldiers Aldrin & company were expected to play the game. The strain of maintaining a happy face while feeling alienated and inwardly confused proved too much for Aldrin, and a nervous breakdown swept him out of the limelight.
The book is candid, and illuminating because of its candor. One of Aldrin's regrets was that he kept his mouth shut while NASA was making certain bad decisions. As result Aldrin, at age 80, has determined to be more vocal about the direction NASA is going as it pursues a second lunar space race.
I know many people who question the space program's viability altogether. Other than prestige, warm fuzzies and a few moon rocks, what do we get? Supporters will point to all the technology advances that emerged from the initial space race.
But Aldrin, who even invented a concept called the Mars Cycler that will get us to Mars more efficiently, is adamant that NASA must reconsider its trajectory over the next 25 years. In a CNN piece he states, "What we truly need is not more Cold War-style competition but a destination in space that offers great rewards for the risks to achieve it. I believe that destination must be homesteading Mars, the first human colony on another world.
"By refocusing our space program on Mars for America's future, we can restore the sense of wonder and adventure in space exploration that we knew in the summer of 1969. We won the moon race; now it's time for us to live and work on Mars, first on its moons and then on its surface."
It's obvious that for many, this is their life passion. This makes them very persuasive. But is this where our tax dollars should go? Actually, Aldrin even has an answer for that. If lunar exploration fails to pay for itself with what it discovers there, then it should be scrapped.
This was my entry in an Imitation Hemingway short story competition. The rules were simple: a set length, entertaining parody, and a reference to Harry's.
The Old Man and the Pea
He was an old man who shopped alone in downtown Los Angeles and he had gone eighty-four days without remembering what he had gone out to buy. The old man was definitely salao, which is the very worst form of unlucky, and very close to senility as well.
When he found the pea he bargained hard to obtain it. He could not believe its size and even with ten Hail Marys could barely lift it. After that he walked around L.A. three days before he found his apartment building again. This is good, he thought, my mind is not harmed in any way except for the memory. That can easily be replaced. He was on the second floor landing when the first cockroach hit.
The cockroach was not an accident. He had come from deep inside the wall, so fast and without caution. He broke through a crack in the baseboard and ran alongside following the scent. He was a very big cockroach, built to run as fast as the fastest.
When the old man saw him coming, he knew that this was a cockroach that had no fear and would do exactly as he wished. He prepared his pocket knife and shifted the weight of the pea while he watched the cockroach come along.
The old man's head was clear and good now and he was full of resolution but had little hope. It was too good to last, he thought. He took one look at the great pea that straddled his shoulder as he watched the cockroach come in close. I cannot keep him from hitting, but maybe I can get him.
The cockroach climbed fast and leaped and when he hit the pea the old man saw his mouth open and his strange eyes and the clicking chop of the pincers as he drove forward into the pea just below the stem. The old man could hear the skin tearing when he whirled and lost his footing on the stairway. Then, on his back with his legs thrashing, the old man cried out, bad luck to your mother, and he bashed the cucaracha into the terrazzo.
He began to climb again. He did not like to look at the pea any more since it had been mutilated. It was too good to last, he thought. I wish I had gone to Harry's now and that I had never found this monstrous pea. I have seven flights to go to reach my flat, and now they have the scent. The cockroaches are many and they come.
All night he climbed and battled and when dawn began to come he had nothing left except a piece of the stem. The key broke off in the lock and he went to sleep in the hallway.
In the morning a boy came to him and the old man was still sleeping on his face. And he was dreaming about Harry's.
"For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more." ~Luke 12:48 
