"Patience comes to those who wait / he who's lost will hesitate"
See now, that was from a song I wrote a decade-plus ago. Yet now, I see the first part of that couplet ("Patience comes to those who wait") attributed as a quote to some guy Terry Ballard.
It doesn't usually bother me when that happens, because most of the pithy snippets I come up with are pretty butt-obvious after the fact. It's not like something anybody couldn't have said by mistake!
But it does go to show you. Something. It goes to show you something.
Who is this "Terry Ballard."
6 comments:
Pseudo-famous librarian, blogger and curmudgeon will do in the matter of who I am. I've been using that line since the early 1990s in emails, and had the impression that I thought it up, but we may never know since that time was pre-Google.
I will play Tesla to your Edison, sir. Or depending on which side of that controversy you come down on, Edison to your Tesla. In any case, I'm satisfied that there's no way you could have nicked it from an unpublished song of mine! I haven't been accused of paranoia in years.
I've often thought I'd make a good curmudgeon, but only if I could combine it with ombudsman. Not necessarily via Carrollesque portmanteaux - although that could be mighty cool! - but I'd settle for just being a curmudgeonly ombudsman.
If you follow Jung, ideas can spread into the collective unconscious using no mechanism that we know about. Heaven knows I've tried on other occasions to make up an aphorism that nobody else has cornered. I seem to have done it with "I can't decide whether to procrastinate or not." I may have done it with "My memory has a mind of its own." Now that I've achieved that I'll turn my attention to solving the world economic crisis. So far, just one librarian at a time.
Well, aphorisms succeed to the extent that they jangle that universal nerve, so I'm not surprised when I see multiple competing attempts to express the same idea all arrived at independently.
Jung. Jung Jung Jung. Fun to say, especially if you pronounce it like it's spelled rather than how it's pronounced. I'm probably not what you'd call a Jung follower, but I'm familiar with his collective unconscious bit. As a theory, I like it as much as I like Plato's separate reality of ideas.
I love the way you put it, though! "...using no mechanism that we know about." Quite! I'm pretty gullible on hypothetical mechanisms, but I always like 'em a little better if someone can take a crack at describing what the operating principles might be.
I think the shared Jungian archetype concept works if we limit it to working backwards. The thousands of generations of experience we shared prior to history kicking in may well have stamped itself pretty deeply into the grain, so to speak. But I am not convinced that an idea today can spread into a collective unconscious that all humans can then tap (italics mine). I mean, even if it seeps in through the collective eyes via the collective television set, that's going to leave a whole bunch of us out.
Mind you, that's not to say that there aren't certain deep feelings and sentiments we all semi-more-or-less-share, just based on whatever has come up through our genes or in through our environment.
The part I doubt is the part where an idea that wasn't previous in the collective unconscious can then be added in, and at that point it is accessible to all. That's a bit too quantum memetics for me.
Wow. Shit. Neat.
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