One half of enduring anything is pink knuckles. Or rather, knuckles that are roughly the same hue as the rest of your epidermis. If you are white-knuckling it, you’re not likely to make it.
“By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.”
— Mark Twain
Inevitably, there is the temptation to white knuckle it. If the rollercoaster is really high, the airplane turbulence is extreme, or the road is particularly windy (note that you can read that to mean buffeted by gales or laden with curves), it’s tempting to hold on so tightly that you can’t feel your fingertips. But that only makes you less agile and more fragile. Also it can’t last for very long, and the whole point of endurance is lasting for very long.
“If we were not all so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
The other half of endurance, the simple and obvious part, is not stopping. One trick to make that happen is using your inherent negativity against itself. When your brain says, “It’ll feel so good to stop,” reply with an arched eyebrow and the question, “Will it really?” Sure, there’ll be a rush of relief and you’ll catch your breath, but shortly thereafter you’ll just be back to your dull normal resting state except with the added humiliation of having given up for very little reward. By this logic, it’s easier just to keep going.
“Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.”
— Joseph Heller
The great stories of endurance are notable for the fact that the heroes often fail to achieve their stated goals. In The Old Man and The Sea, Santiago catches the marlin only to see it devoured by sharks. Terry Fox, the greatest Canadian, set out to run across the country but was stopped by lung cancer before he reached Thunder Bay. And Ernest Shackleton, captain of the HMS Endurance, aimed to make a land crossing of Antarctica; the fact that he got stuck in the ice, lost his ship, spent nine months in the frozen vastness, and kept all 28 crew members alive still made him an international hero. The point is that the point didn’t matter. Every goal is, to quote the title of Tamara Shopsin’s memoir, an Arbitrary Stupid Goal.
“A man must learn to endure patiently that which he cannot avoid conveniently.”
— Michel de Montaigne
And then there’s the advice offered by the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt in the sitcom of the same name. How did she survive 15 years of imprisonment by a cult leader in an underground bunker? “You can stand anything for 10 seconds,” she explains in the show’s second episode. “Then you just start on a new 10 seconds.” With short increments, inverse negativity, and pink knuckles, you can continue forever. Alternately, you can always quit.
“The head cannot take in more than the seat can endure.”
— Winston Churchill“I think it was Shaw who advised young playwrights to gear the length of each act to the endurance of the human bladder.”
— Alfred Hitchcock
Artists and politicians who realize that their public must endure them tend to be the easiest to take. In that spirit, thank you for your continued endurance of this newsletter! And next week?
Get Wit Quick, now clocking Issue No. 332, is like the Energizer Bunny. Actually, can you imagine how annoying it would be to be followed around by an animatronic pink rabbit pounding a drum forever? The true test of endurance is putting up with that, which requires gumption. This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. To those who bravely tap the ❤️ below no matter the weather, I salute you.
Each week I squeeze out a little more juice (and some pith!) for all my beloved GWQ VIPs. It’s called Quip Service, a careful selection of clever thoughts on whatever we’re all thinking about today. And today, that’s obviously…
The nonexistence of funny vegetables
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