I open the dictionary at random and find: Problem.
“Houston, we have a problem.” That famous line was about a space capsule, not about the Houston Texans football team a few years ago (quarterback problem). Which just goes to show that problems can and do arise in an infinite variety of contexts. People seem wired to want to avoid problems, without realizing, in fact, that problems are what make life worth living.
Teddy Roosevelt said, “I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
Problems teach us to overcome, to get stronger. A life without problems would be boring. Don’t you remember that famous Twilight Zone episode? (At this point, nearly every episode of The Twilight Zone is famous in some way, because that was one of the great TV shows of all time, with writing so vastly superior to most of what’s tapped out today that it seems mythic.) The Zone I’m talking about is the one where a small-time hood gets shot and wakes up next to an angelic figure dressed in white, who shows him his new residence—an opulent mansion—and anything he desires he merely has to ask for. That includes booze and women. When he goes out to gamble, he always wins. This begins to bore him, and indeed starts to drive him mad.
So he tells his angel there’s been a mistake, he doesn’t belong in Heaven, and please send him to “the other place.” The angel starts to laugh. “This IS the other place!”
That episode, by the way, is titled “A Nice Place to Visit” and was written by one of the three best TZ writers, Charles Beaumont (the other two being Richard Matheson and Rod Serling himself).
Beaumont was a talented and tragic figure. He wrote short stories and TV scripts and was hailed as a genius in his sphere, but the pressure of prolificity began wear on him. By his mid-thirties he was drinking too much and could barely write to fulfill his obligations and contracts. Friends came in to ghost for him, hoping he would recover, but he never did. He may have had Pick’s Disease, also called frontotemporal degeneration, where the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain degenerate. Horrible. He literally wasted away, looking cadaverous when he died at the age of 38. It was almost like one of his own stories.
But the writing he left behind lives on and still pleases people, which is a legacy any writer would like to have. This is what the writers (really, copyists) of the Dead Sea Scrolls hoped for. Two hundred years before Christ they copied the Hebrew scriptures onto leather and papyrus scrolls and hid them in jars in caves, to preserve them from the Romans. They remained hidden for over two thousand years. Then one day in 1947 a Bedouin shepherd boy tossed a rock into a cave and heard something shatter. He and his pals went in and discovered a bunch of these jars.
Archaeologists came rushing in and eventually uncovered 800 scrolls and fragments in jars from nearby caves. Pieced together, it was nearly the whole of the Hebrew scriptures, lacking only the Book of Esther. What happened to that one? Maybe one of the Essene ascetics liked that story and kept it at home for nighttime reading.
I like to think that after I have shuffled off this mortal coil, somewhere down the line somebody may discover one of my books and take it home to read. They are not hidden in jars, but may still be available on Amazon.
So thank you, Charles Beaumont, for your stories. And you, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and John D. MacDonald and Charles Dickens and a whole host of others.
Dickens, of course, wrote before typewriters, and his books were not short, yet his stories moved. Not all writers can do that. Indeed, one of the most devastating book reviews was only one line, written by Ambrose Bierce: “The covers of this book are too far apart.”
Bierce himself was a prolific writer, known mainly for The Devil’s Dictionary and his short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” A TV version of this story was shown on the old Alfred Hitchcock show, and I remember watching it as a kid…and it blew me away! You can find that episode on a streaming service. If you don’t know the story, watch it without reading anything about the plot!
Bierce’s is another legacy left behind by a writer, whose death is shrouded in mystery. At age 71 Bierce went down to Mexico to cover Pancho Villa. In a letter he wrote to a friend he said, “Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.” His last known letter ended this way: “I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.” He was never heard from again.
From The Devil’s Dictionary:
Lawful, adj. Compatible with the will of a judge having jurisdiction.
Lawyer, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.
Quote of the Week: “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
I so look forward to your wanderings...
“I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.” Love this.