‘So what do you collect?’

The question was an expected one, at one of those parties I used to attend in the past, when socialites compared notes about their residences in London or Paris.

The woman who asked the question collected antique watches; the one who spoke before her probably had the finest collection of pearls in Singapore, and the one who spoke before them, had, over 10 years, collected as many properties each of which she renovated with loving, meticulous attention.

They all turned to look at me and I said, with some embarrassment, ‘Nothing,’ not wanting to explain that I could never hope to join such an exclusive collectors’ club. But I do collect something, only it would have been totally out of place beside the antique watches and pearls and renovated houses.

I collect quotations, statements made by philosophers, writers, poets, etc. that in one way or other deal with the aching questions of the human spirit: who are we? Where did we come from? What is our place in the universe? Where did it come from? And knowing all this, how should we behave towards each other?

Over the decades, I have made use of the large diaries that I receive every year, to write down each memorable quotation, building up my own treasure-house of wisdom, a virtual Ali Baba’s cave of glittering gems, where like the ecstatic treasure-hunter, I can get thoroughly lost in awe and wonder.

It would be impossible to share a fragment of this collection, so here are some favourites. Being a passionate pursuer of knowledge, especially in the sciences and in philosophy (to make up for an education that was narrowly limited to the arts, indeed mainly to language and literature) I copy down any quotation from the great thinkers about that subject itself—the epistemic hunger and search.

My two favourite are from Socrates: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’, and its elaborated version: ‘It seemed to me a superlative thing—the explanation for everything, why it comes to be, why it perishes, why it is.’

The ‘why’ is the operative word—it is an innate human need to want to know the cause, or the reason behind things, an urge which is manifested by children almost as soon as they begin to talk. Eric Fromm, the well-known psychologist talks of the special danger in our times when the great advancement of technology with its dazzling processes and products, seems all we care about: ‘We may have the know-how, but we do not have the know-why, or the know-what-for.’

The philosopher Nietzsche goes further, by saying that it is precisely this understanding of the reason and purpose behind things that makes life endurable at all: ‘He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.’

But the quotations that stand out in my collection have to do with my favourite theme of self-fulfilment and its various concomitants of identity, independence, dignity, self-reliance, self-pride, etc. They are mainly poems which I’ve committed to memory for the sheer beauty of their language. Here is one, written by someone who lived in the nineteenth century, a William Ernest Henley who wrote it when he was terminally ill:

‘It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.’

My all-time favourite is still this one, written by a Sir Richard Francis Burton who also lived in the nineteenth century:

‘Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
From none but self expect applause,
He noblest lives and noblest dies,
Who makes and keeps his self-made laws.’

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About Vignettes...

A continuing flow of little, readable pieces that will constitute what I feel is an important 'legacy of values' to leave behind. Read more about Vignettes...