Whose mind hath the finer blade?
[ by Charles Cameron — robert frost, the poet, or yogi berra, the player? ]
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Also of interest, Frost‘s comment, quoted on the Classic Poetry Pages:
One stanza of ‘The Road Not Taken’ was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle of England: Was found three or four years later, and I couldn’t bear not to finish it. I wasn’t thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other. He was hard on himself that way.
As that page shows, I’m certainly not the first to note the overlap between Robert Frost and Yogi Berra — but it caught my attention today as I was reading a comment on Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse‘s On Some Yogisms:
And “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” was his joking way of giving directions to his NJ home. You could get there by going either way once you reached the fork he was referring to; both roads led to his house eventually.
That gives a literal context to Berra’s flight of fancy — and yeah, some roads are looped, it’s true — but without the wit, there’s be no wisdom.
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Witty Wittgenstein, as apparently quoted by Ray Monk and in the Aikin and Talisse piece:
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:06 am
” … I wasn’t thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other. He was hard on himself that way. …”
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The friend of whom Frost wrote was Edward Thomas 1878-1917 author of Adlesdrop, that most condensed of English poems of rural peace and tranquility.
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Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
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The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name .
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And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
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And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
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A famous reading by Richard Burton.
October 13th, 2015 at 7:30 pm
Paradox is a uniquely human tropism, according to friends who just visited. She is a zoo vet, one of the first women to head up care for animals at a major zoo. He is a polymath who speaks for both of them. Paradox may be one of the very few discontinuities between animals and humans. Yogi was a master of malapropisms, and a philosopher, as well. By chance, we met his nephew once, a marine biologist, who attested to his depth of mind.
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Paradox gives profundity to religion and exposes the superficiality of political discourse, where allegiance to unchanging positions on complicated and evolving events is seemingly required.
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As any decision implies the death of the alternative, some meticulous thinkers seem paralyzed by needing to taking that step beyond the fork in the road. Frost catalogued paradox in his poetry, and reveled in his contrarianism. His poetry came out of a context of lifelong bouts of depression: see “Tree at My Window.” It was therapy for him and lucky for us.