The Wit’s Guide to Acceptance

Or, clam anagram

One must imagine Sisyphus 😁.

It’s all the same to the clam — or is it? 

Shel Silverstein’s greatest poem posits that the humblest of molluscs is an avatar of acceptance. No matter whether you call him Jim or Frank or Nell, or make an ashtray of his shell, you’ll never hear the clam complain. But maybe we just aren’t listening? 

Dan “The Clam Man” Killam, an environmental scientist, writes that “while clams are not exactly intellectual powerhouses, their behavior is much more complicated than simply sucking up water and opening or closing their shells.” And it’s fair to assume they don’t like being eviscerated.

“Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”
—David Foster Wallace

Still, let’s hold up the clam as a creature with the serenity to accept the things it cannot change, which is pretty much everything. What kind of a clam god would allow Clamato to be a popular Canadian mixer?

Should we all be more like clams? If you accept everything, you’re basically a Stoic. Everything, though? Pretty much. Seneca, one of the all-time greats, had a bad case of asthma in a time long before inhalers. When he was wheezing to near-death, he convinced himself to not only accept what was happening but to welcome it. He was actually willing it! It’s all the same to the clammed. 

“Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.”
— Malcolm Muggeridge

Listen to any newscast and you’ll hear important people deeming various horrible events “unacceptable.” And yet they happened, and continue to happen. The question then becomes: what are you going to do about it? And the easiest answer may be the best: Next time, choose better terms of condemnation. 

 “I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages:

1. This is worthless nonsense,
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view,
3. This is true, but quite unimportant,
4. I always said so.”
—  J.B.S. Haldane

When you are given an award or are nominated for a high post, you deliver an acceptance speech. When you leave a position, you deliver a resignation speech. These are opposite events, and yet we often confuse acceptance with resignation. To use the English language is to accept more exceptions than rules, and ideally to celebrate it.

“Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.”
— Oscar Wilde

The Serenity Prayer, maybe written by Reinhold Niebuhr and certainly made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous, comes down to serenity to accept, courage to change, and wisdom to discern. The trick of it is twiddling the knobs to find the highest amount serenity you can tolerate before you flip your wig. We accept the least as adolescents and then gradually become wiser, or, if you want to be a jerk about it, less courageous. 

But if the clam is 100% serene and 0% courageous, does that make it wise? Put it this way: If its name were misspelled as calm, that would be all the same to the clam.   

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This week’s Recommendation: Twitter’s only good byproduct

How painful is it watching journalists refer to “X, formerly Twitter?” Or referring to the content units on that troubled platform as “posts” and not, y’know, tweets? All of which reminds me of an excellent, funny, big-hearted memoir improbably based on a cult Twitter account from the good old days. For my dear subscribers who plunk down Substack’s bare minimum of C$30/yr, here’s what’s good:

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This month’s Riposte: The Whole Nine Cards

In addition to weekly recommendations like the above, for C$80/year my Founding Subscribers permit me to commission monthly postcards of illustrated quips. Subscribe today and you’ll get the whole nine-card archive as pictured above, plus a Certified Wit sticker to counter anyone who dares question your brilliance.

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Quote Vote

“Of course there is no formula for success except perhaps, an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.”
— Artur Rubinstein

Do we have any choice but to accept what life throws our way? Do you have any choice in next week’s subject? Of course you do! Pick whichever option appeals!

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Thank you for accepting issue 229 of Get Wit Quick, your weekly bivalve salve. An obligatory Russell’s Conjugation: I accepted the facts; you admitted you were wrong; they gave up their ridiculous pretenses. Serenity now! We can’t fight the fact that my book was called Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting; the❤️  below accepts anything you want to throw at it.