The Wit’s Guide to Birth
Or, blessed-up events
“We all knew you had it in you.”
— Dorothy Parker’s telegram to a new mother
If you’re going to gripe about life, you might as well start at the beginning. “Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best,” judged Sophocles. Man’s greatest crime is to have been born, complained Barca. We cry upon birth because “we are come to this great stage of fools,” King Lear grouses. “Not to be born, not to be, to be nothing” was Nietzsche’s ideal. There’s something quite cheering in reading all these glum opinions of birth. It’s not that bad, you guys! And of course they are all guys.
“We are born crying, live complaining and die disappointed.”
— Robert Lowell
And that’s why, when birth seems the opposite of mirth, it’s hard to top Emil Cioran. The French aphorist makes Nietzsche sound peachy, and his 1973 book The Problem With Being Born is so bleak it squeaks. “Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness,” he wrote, but, malheureusement, “it is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
“Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.”
— Andy Warhol
Cioran’s happyish ending is that he linked his pessimism directly to his insomnia (“In the middle of the night, everyone’s asleep, you are the only one who is awake. Right away I’m not a part of humanity, I live in another world”) and he eventually addressed this problem with a regimen of intense bicycling (“When you do a hundred kilometers a day, there’s no way you’re not going to sleep, it’s out of the question”). In other words: Ride or die. Or maybe ride and die?
“Birth is beastly — and death — and digestion, if it comes to that. ”
— Dorothy L. Sayers
Steve Martin was Born Standing Up, which made for a terrific memoir. Certainly preferable than to be born a crime, although Trevor Noah parlayed that fact into a bestseller many times over. To be born in a log cabin was once seen as a qualification for the U.S. presidency, though to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth has historically been a better predictor. And thus history’s dustbin overflows with those born in silver cabins with logs in their mouths.
“It sometimes happens, even in the best of families, that a baby is born. This is not necessarily cause for alarm. The important thing is to keep your wits about you and borrow some money.”
— Elinor Goulding Smith
Birth would seem to be one event in life that wouldn’t require a euphemism, and yet we have “blessed event.” Why? Well — if you’re reading this aloud, cover the ears of any nearby children — the events that generally occur nine months prior are ripe for innuendo. That’s why Walter Winchell, king of the Jazz Age gossip columnists, would slyly report that two heretofore unlinked celebrities were together expecting one of these events. Or as the 1932 comedy Blessed Event explains, it’s a plausibly deniable phrase “for describing the news of births to come, regardless of whether they are with or without benefit of clergy.”
“There’s a time when you have to explain to your children why they’re born, and it’s a marvelous thing if you know the reason by then.”
— Hazel Scott
No one asked to be born, as teenagers often remind us before slamming their doors — but what if this is less an existential problem than a grammatical quirk? In English, to be born is a passive event: I lived, I died, but I was born. Notwithstanding the fact that even the best of us needed a bit of help to be born — thanks, mom! — and that other languages do have active verbs for birth, perhaps we’d have fewer mopey philosophers if we took a bit more ownership over our beginnings. I burst forth! I began my story! I sprang to life! I arrived at the party! Despite everything, I borned!
“When I was born, I was so surprised I couldn’t talk for a year and a half.”
— Gracie Allen
This week’s ReccoMention
For my paying subscribers (C$30/yr!) this week, here’s a piece of mine from the May issue of the Literary Review of Canada on Samuel Marchbanks, the great grumpy doppelganger of Canadian literature.
The crankiest literary doppelganger
There’s never been a writer like Samuel Marchbanks, mainly because there never was a Samuel Marchbanks. The self-proclaimed Philosopher of Skunk’s Misery, head of a one-man splinter party, and mid-century diarist in the Peterborough Examiner was also a pseudonym of Robertson Davies. Not his alter ego — a term that “suggests some dreadful non-cholesterol cooking substance,” Marchbanks insisted — but rather his doppelgänger.
This month’s Riposte Card
Mayday! Mayday! It’s a new month and thus time for the next Riposte Card! By popular demand, the line to be illustrated is once again about eggs:
“Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
— Muriel Spark
I’ll reveal the artist and her artwork next week! In the meantime, here’s the previous ovoid illustration, and a reminder that I’ll send you these physical mementos in the mail if you subscribe today!
Quote Vote
“I was Cesarean born. You can’t really tell. Although whenever I leave a house, I go out through the window.”
— Steven Wright
I was impressed by how much love last week’s issue on trains received, so I thought deeply about ways to capitalize on that interest. In the end, I came up with zero ideas. Onward!
Issue No. 252 of Get Wit Quick borned in a handbag, right next to Jack Worthing. Its mother was the book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting and its father went out for cigarettes and never came back. Oh wait, here he is now. Turns out most places don’t sell cigarettes anymore so he was somewhat delayed. Every tap of the ❤️ below is a Blessed Event.
Another beauty!
One of the best! A great laugh for a snowy (Canadian, what else?) May morning.