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This Week's Puzzler
On February 21, 1927, this American humorist was born in Bellbrook, Ohio. An early reader, she also had early literary aspirations, writing a column for her junior high school and her high school newspaper. After graduating from the University of Dayton (Ohio) in 1949, she worked as a reporter and columnist for The Dayton Journal Herald until 1953, when she quit her job to start a family. For the next eleven years, she did not work outside the home while raising three children.
In 1964, a local suburban newspaper persuaded her to begin writing a weekly humor column for three dollars a column. When her old bosses at the Journal Herald heard she was back in the business, they lured her back by offering her fifty bucks a week for two columns. Several weeks later, the paper signed a deal that syndicated her "At Wit's End" column in 36 newspapers around the country.
Almost overnight, she became a national celebrity, as millions of American women resonated to her wry and witty reflections about being a wife, mother, and homemaker. Over the next thirty years, she wrote over 7,000 columns that were anthologized into fifteen books, many with extremely clever titles, including If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? (1971) and The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank (1976). In a 1994 column, she wrote:
"When I stand before God at the end of my life,
I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left
and could say, 'I used everything you gave me'."
Who is this woman? (Answer below)
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This Week's Theme:
"Are You Using All the Talent You've Been Given?"
The quotation in this week's Puzzler is a wonderful reminder that talents are to be used, not squandered. One would think that this is so obvious it need not be stated, but the sad reality is that many people spend their whole lives working in jobs or careers that are not even remotely related to their true aptitudes and abilities. Even more sadly, countless others are gifted with a talent that is never developed because of insufficient drive or determination. Thomas Wolfe summed it up nicely when he wrote in The Web and the Rock (1939):
"If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed.
If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed.
If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it,
he has gloriously succeeded,
and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know."
If you are using the whole of your talents, everybody wins: you, the people around you, and the world in which you live. If you are not, or worse, if you are squandering your talents, everybody loses. You lose the most, of course, because you—more than anybody else—know you're selling yourself short. Those around you lose as well, for they will never see someone they know and love soaring to great heights. And, finally, the world loses, for it is cheated out of the contribution you might have made had you fully mined the vein of talent within you.
As you think about how fully you've utilized your talents, take a look at what others have said about this important theme in human life:
"Every person is born with a talent,
and happiness depends on discovering that talent in time."
—Isabel Allende
"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins.
Beyond talent lie all the usual words:
discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance."
—James Baldwin
"The barriers are not erected which can say to
aspiring talents and industry, 'Thus far and no farther'."
—Ludwig von Beethoven
"If you have a talent, use it in every way possible.
Don't hoard it. Don't dole it out like a miser.
Spend it lavishly like a millionaire intent on going broke."
—Brendan Francis (Edward F. Murphy)
"True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents."
—John W. Gardner
"This mysterious thing, artistic talent: the key to
so much freedom, the escape from so much suffering."
—Nancy Hale
"If you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts,
they will turn on you. Or drag you down
with their immense sadness at being abandoned."
—Joy Harjo
"But of course we can't take any credit for our talents.
It's how we use them that counts."
—Madeleine L'Engle
"As tools unused become rusty, so does the mind;
a garden uncared for soon becomes smothered in weeds;
a talent neglected withers and dies."
—Ethel R. Page
"A great deal of talent is lost to the world
for the want of a little courage."
—Sydney Smith
For source information on these quotations, and many others on the subject of Talent, visit: DMDMQ.
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This Week in History
On February 21, 1903, Anaïs (pronounced Ah-nuh-EESE) Nin was born in Neuilly, France to a Cuban pianist/composer and Danish-Cuban classical singer (their marriage ended a few years later). In 1914, at age eleven, she and her two brothers were brought by their mother to the United States to receive an American education. It was on the ocean voyage to New York City that Nin began keeping a diary, a practice she would continue for the rest of her life.
Nin dropped out of school at age 15, but continued a systematic autodidactic program in the public libraries of Manhattan. In 1924, at age 21, she was working as an artist's model when she and her new husband (a Cuban banker and artist) moved to Paris. In the City of Lights, she studied flamenco dancing, wrote a critical study of D. H. Lawrence, and lived a bohemian lifestyle that included an intimate relationship with her analyst (Otto Rank) and an affair with writer Henry Miller. She also continued her diary-writing regimen, saying about it:
"My diary is a mirror telling the story of a dreamer who, a long,
long time ago went through life the way one reads a book."
In 1939, as Paris was preparing for a German invasion, Nin returned to New York City. She spent the next quarter of a century writing novels, short stories, and female erotica. For a time, she also became a "lay analyst" (a psychoanalyst without a medical degree), even seeing patients in an office adjoining Otto Rank's.
Nin languished in literary obscurity until 1966 when, at age 63, she finally won recognition as a writer with the publication of the first volume of her diaries (eventually eight volumes of The Diaries of Anaïs Nin were published). The diaries brought her critical acclaim, and within a short time, attention was finally paid to her previous works. When she died in 1977 at age 73, she was a feminist icon, and routinely hailed as one of history's most famous diarists. She penned pithy and penetrating observations on countless topics. Here's a sampling:
"When one is pretending the entire body revolts."
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
"Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity."
"Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge."
"Art is the method of levitation, in order to
separate one's self from enslavement by the earth."
"In every relationship, sooner or later, there is a court scene.
Accusations, counter-accusations, a trial, a verdict."
"Each friend represents a world in us,
a world possibly not born until they arrive,
and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
"The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life
because the imagination is a demon within us
and it knows where to strike, where it hurts."
"Writers do not live one life, they live two.
There is the living and then there is the writing.
There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction."
"Love never dies a natural death.
It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source,
It dies of illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness,
of witherings, of tarnishings, but never a natural death.
Every lover should be brought to trial
as the murderer of his own love."
Puzzler Answer
Erma Bombeck
My Thought of the Week
"Few things are more beneficial to self-esteem
than the development of a talent—any talent."
Until next week,
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