The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, April 29, 2024

Notably: There was a time when this space was almost entirely given to notable dates in history–“the history of blood,” mostly, as Edward Gibbon put it, borrowing from Bayle’s idea that “history, properly speaking, is nothing but a list of the crimes and misfortunes of the human race”–and the occasional birthday. Today’s would be Duke Ellington’s, but that’ll be left to the item below. A few days ago I missed an important birthday. We all did. Cynthia Ozick turned 96 on April 17. Like Clint Eastwood, who just finished yet another movie at 92, or is it 93, Ozick has kept writing. I have always known her as old, of her own pen, having once read, and (amazingly, ironically, considering the topic) never forgotten the opening paragraph of her piece on Alfred Chester, the critic, in a New Yorker of 1992, when she was barely of Social Security age. It’s the image of Ozick looking at her reflection in a shop window that’s stayed with me all these years, and that I invariably think of when I see the daily debris of my decrepitude accumulate on my own reflection in the bathroom mirror: “The other day,” Ozick wrote, “I received in the mail a card announcing the retirement of an old friend–not an intimate but an editor with whom, over the years, I have occasionally been entangled, sometimes in rapport, sometimes in antagonism. The news that a man almost exactly my contemporary could be considered ready to retire struck me as one more disconcerting symptom of a progressive un-reality. I say “one more” because there have been so many others. Passing my reflection in a shopwindow, for instance, I am taken by surprise at the sight of a striding woman with white hair: she is still wearing the bangs of her late youth, but there are shocking pockets and trenches in her face; she has a preposterous dewlap; she is no one I can recognize. Or I am struck by a generational pang: the discovery that the most able and arresting intellects currently engaging my attention were little children when I was first possessed by the passions of mind they have brilliantly mastered.” Which evokes a line by Allan Gurganus in one of hos stories: “You really notice your looks only once you’ve lost them.” One’s looks, such as they ever were.

—P.T.

 

View this profile on Instagram

 

FlaglerLive News Service, Palm Coast (@flaglerlive) • Instagram photos and videos

But all events are mixed in a fusion indistinguishable. What we call Fate is even, heartless, and impartial; not a fiend to kindle bigot flames, nor a philanthropist to espouse the cause of Greece. We may fret, fume, and fight; but the thing called Fate everlastingly sustains an armed neutrality. Yet though all this be so, nevertheless, in our own hearts, we mould the whole world’s hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods. Each mortal casts his vote for whom he will to rule the worlds; I have a voice that helps to shape eternity; and my volitions stir the orbits of the furthest suns. In two senses, we are precisely what we worship. Ourselves are Fate.

–From Melville’s White-Jacket (1850).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.