The Wit’s Guide to The Future
Or, when horses talk
The future is already here but it’s just not evenly distributed, said William Gibson. Leonard Cohen said that he’d seen the future and it’s murder. So to summarize the teachings of these great Canadians: Cheer up! Some of us may be spared!
“Surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.”
— Zadie Smith
We’re long overdue for a little bit of optimism about the future, as there aren’t many apocalyptic plotlines left to follow in movies, TV, books, and video games. In this one, the zombies breakdance! Looking back on past eras, a glut of cultural gloom is usually the sign that it’s time for a change, if only because our muscles tire of holding these frowns.
“The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.”
— Paul Valéry
And hey: We don’t actually know what’s going to happen next! “Trying to know the unknowable leads inexorably to error and self-deception,” writes David Deutsch in his mindbending book The Beginning of Infinity. “Among other things, it creates a bias towards pessimism.”
“The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.”
— W. Somerset Maugham
Overplanning for the future is a good way to pre-stress. Deutsch recounts this fable: “Our hero is a prisoner who has been sentenced to death by a tyrannical king, but gains a reprieve by promising to teach the king’s favourite horse to talk within a year. That night, a fellow prisoner asks what possessed him to make such a bargain. He replies, ‘A lot can happen in a year. The horse might die. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might talk.’”
“This very remarkable man
Commends a most practical plan:
You can do what you want
If you don’t think you can’t
So don’t think you can’t think you can.”
— Charles Inge
Or consider my all-time favourite Saturday Night Live skit, a deep cut from season 22 in 1996. Dana Carvey plays Tom Brokaw, anchor of NBC Nightly News and a man in need of a holiday. But before he can loosen his tie, he needs to pre-tape news of the death of former president Gerald Ford, just in case. And every potential means of expiration needs to be recorded, including former president Gerald Ford being chopped to bits by a plane propeller and former president Gerald Ford being eaten by wolves. Really?, Carvey-as-Brokaw complains in his South Dakota drawl.
“You’re the one who wants to spend the whole winter in Barbados, OK?” the producer says off camera. “We gotta be ready with something just in case.”
“Any man of forty who is endowed with moderate intelligence has seen — in the light of the uniformity of nature — the entire past and future.”
— Marcus Aurelius
Gerald Ford died in 2006 at the ripe old age of 93 and wolves had nothing to do with it. Or so they would have us believe.
Smoke if you got ‘em
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Outside baseball
Ah, sportsball! A subject I wrote about in my Toronto Star News Quiz last week with a little help from obsessive birdwatchers Charlotte, Guy, Craig, Kelly, and Marc. As we say on the gridfield, teamwork makes the sea bream twerk!
Quote Vote
“I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.”
— Albert Camus
We’ve hovered around mindfulness for a bit in these polls, but the next-level version of it is interoception. I’ll tell you all about it if the voters give me a mandate to do so.
GWQ No. 273 thanks Josh Landy and his talking horse for the David Deutsch recommendation. As Dr. Landy’s horse summed it up: “New information often forces old information into obsolescence. Since you can only make plans with old information, most of them end up obsolete by the time they are useful.” Less wise: The In the Year 2000 skit from the old Conan O’Brien show. I found all the jokes and, big surprise, they don’t date well. Further proof that the future ain’t what it used to be! My book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting is still what it was. Tapping the ❤️ below lets future generations know you were here, you read your email, and you liked it.
Your favorite SNL sketch is also *my* favorite SNL sketch. Spooky!
If the past can be rewritten will I be here in the future?