Author Archives: markdowe1

Arts

Guiding proverbs

PROVERBIAL MINES

MICHAEL DRAYTON, a poet who lived in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, once penned a poem about two travellers entertaining each other with proverbs.

The stanza is clear as to what happened. The first presented a proverb and the second replied with one which contradicted it. Nine proverbs were put forth and each one was promptly confronted by its opposite.

Drayton said that the travellers met as fools and parted none the wiser.

His point, many will imagine, is that wise men and women don’t live their lives by the words of others. They use those proverbs as guidelines, mining them for the good they can find in them. Then, in their own time and place, they apply that good as befits their situation.

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Arts

The right time of year

THE INCHWORM TALE

IN the 1952 film ‘Hans Christian Andersen’, Danny Kaye sang the Frank Loesser song, ‘Inchworm’.

After a debate over whether imagination or book learning was most important, he watches a caterpillar ‘measuring’ the diameter of a marigold in its repeated, regular movements while the children are learning their times tables in a repeated, regular chant.

Andersen tells the inchworm that its arithmetical skills will take it far, but suggests stopping awhile to notice the radiance and beauty of the flower.

Both options are good, with neither excluding the other.

If you would sow marigold seeds, this is the right time of year. If you would like to learn a new skill to help you get ahead, or work on increasing your imagination and appreciation, it is also the right time of year for that!

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Arts, France, History, Literature

The ‘billet-doux’ should return!

SHORT-SWEET LETTERS

Have you heard of a billet-doux?

During the Thirty Years’ War, when French soldiers might have slept in a different town each night, they took their chance, whenever they could, to write home.

The letters from their latest “billet” would hopefully be “sweet”. And so the term “billet-doux” was derived.

The practice carried on into peacetime, with many a young lover receiving regular letters, generally of no consequence other than the assurance of undying love.

Of course, the subject doesn’t necessarily have to be love. It might be gratitude, appreciation or wonder!

In an age when people often claim they don’t have time to write letters, might we encourage the return of the short, sweet note – the billet-doux?

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