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-Caveat Lector-
http://hawk.fab2.albany.edu/sidebar/sidebar.htm
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Sidebar: Get a(n interesting) Life!
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[In June 1996, I posted a piece called "May you live in Interneting times!"
It described my presentations to several large groups of people in the
Albany, NY, area who wanted to learn what the Web had to offer their
businesses or organizations and whether they should develop a Web "presence."
Remember, this was 1996, so e-commerce and e-business were not buzz words
yet. Most business people were simply thinking brochureware, if they were
thinking about the Web at all. The surprising result of doing searches on my
prospective audiences was that every individual, or at least the businesses
or organizations that they represented, was already present on the Web in
some fashion. Hence the notion of "Interneting times," which I adapted from
the well-known ancient Chinese curse. Of course, when I tried to document its
origin, I found that it may be neither ancient nor Chinese nor a curse. So I
added a Sidebar describing that detective story. In May 1998, when the
Sidebar had become more than twice as long as the original piece, I accepted
that it had taken on a life of its own. Here it is in its current
incarnation.]
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If we really want to be fully human, computer technology offers us
extraordinary power to get work done and share our work with humanity. It
offers unprecedented ability to collaborate with the other people of the
planet rather than fighting with them.
Ralph Lombreglia in
Atlantic Unbound
Despite its high visibility, I have not been able to authenticate "May you
live in interesting times" as an ancient Chinese curse. Digital's search
engine AltaVista has indexed over 1500 Web sites that mention the phrase. The
ones that I looked at stated the phrase's origin as a simple fact, with no
attribution. One of them, an electronic magazine called Biased Journalism,
indicated that the longer form -- with the added phrase "and attract the
attention of important people" -- had been posted on Usenet, a collection of
subject-specific bulletin boards or "Newsgroups" on the Internet.
I contacted Tereze Gl�ck, author of May You Live in Interesting Times, a
collection of short stories published in 1995 by the University of Iowa
Press. She did not recall where she first heard the expression, but thought
it was Chinese and certainly not Jewish, as a friend insisted to her.
I also sent e-mail messages to the authors of a few of the Web sites. All of
them responded but none had a citable source, although one person thought an
old Doonesbury strip in the mid-1970s had used the phrase. That same person
suggested checking the Newsgroup called "alt.quotations," so I posted a query
there.
There are no guarantees on Usenet, because you never know if anyone will look
at your posting. But over the next few days five people responded: two from
the United States and one each from Canada, Germany, and Norway. One U.S.
respondent thought there was a third part to the curse, "and may all your
dreams come true," but he had no source. The other U.S. respondent,
apparently a scholar of Chinese linguistic usage, was adamant that the curse
is not of Chinese origin; he posted a reply to me and then a reply to one of
my other respondents to be sure that everyone got the point.
The person from Germany referred me to the British science fiction writer
Terry Pratchett, author of the novel Interesting Times. Although he gave me
an erroneous e-mail address for Mr. Pratchett, I was able to track down the
correct one (with AltaVista, of course) and learned from Mr. Pratchett that
indeed his novel was set in "a 'mythic' version of China," but that "my gut
feeling is that [the curse] was made up comparatively recently."And the
respondent from Norway cited a speech by Robert F. Kennedy in Cape Town,
South Africa, on June 7, 1966, in which he quoted the "Chinese curse."
The most helpful news came from Eben Watt in Ottawa. He responded to the
Newsgroup that he had a "book of insults" in which two similar entries
appeared, one attributed to Confucius -- "May you be born in an important
time" -- and the other an "old Scottish curse" --"May you live in interesting
times." Scottish? That was new!
I sent Mr. Watt an e-mail asking for a specific citation, and he replied that
it was The Book of Insults by Nancy McPhee (St. Martin's Press, 1978). I
checked the electronic catalog of the University at Albany library, and the
book was there, so at about 10:30 a.m. I sent him this message:
>From the time I first checked alt.quotations this morning through my message
to you, your reply, and finding this citation in *my* library (about 150
yards from where I sit) must have been less than an hour! . . . Isn't
technology wonderful?
To which Mr. Watt replied barely two hours later:
Indeed, who'd have thunk it? That some day a fellow in Ottawa might help out
a stranger in Albany, NY(?) as though it were the most natural and easy thing
to do - which some might argue it is, now.
Natural and easy indeed!
And that is where matters rest in mid-June 1996. Nearly twenty years ago
Nancy McPhee asserted that the curse was really Scottish, not Chinese, and
that it was merely old, not ancient. But she gave no source, and St. Martin's
Press has no record of her whereabouts. If you know a source, please contact
me. Say, by e-mail?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Or, more to the point, that is where matters rested until November 26, 1996,
when I received an e-mail message (what else?) from Sam Hobbs, an engineer
from Atlanta, who not only read this Sidebar but then found five "Nancy
McPhees" in Four11, another people-finder. After striking out at St. Martin's
and in long-ago book reviews, it did not occur to me to continue searching,
all of the foregoing notwithstanding! So as a self-proclaimed The-Web-has-all
-the-information disciple, I could not have felt sillier when his message
arrived!!
But, recovering quickly, I started phoning down the list and reached:
* A man who didn't want to be bothered: "No."
* A Nancy who was mildly amused, but "No," it was not she.
* An answering machine of a Nancy who is a realtor.
* A man who listened with interest and informed me that the McPhees came
from Scotland (hmmmm..."an old Scottish curse") to Canada and then to the
United States. But, "No."
* A Nancy who is not the Nancy, but her husband is John McPhee -- not the
John McPhee, but her husband owns all of his books, so to keep up she owns her
book. And less than 15 seconds later, this Nancy was graciously reading to
me from the dust jacket of her copy of The Book of Insults about the Nancy:
graduate of Trinity College, University of Toronto; mother of three
school-age children; active as a political commentator and in broadcast
television. Obviously she would know an insult when she heard one!
So off I went to the home page of the University of Toronto and the office of
Development and University Relations, to whom I dispatched an e-mail in the
hope someone would help. I did not relish the prospect of starting down the
list of 29 McPhees in Toronto who turned up on Canada411. But once again,
like Eben Watt's e-mail from Ottawa, "help" was the operative word! Kerry
Dean of the U of T responded on November 27 that she was
Happy to help. Nancy McPhee is indeed a Trinity grad, and she even has an
e-mail address. I am about to forward your message to her, so she can look up
your Web page and respond to you.
"Stay tuned. . . .," I typed. But wait a minute. I gave up before without
even realizing it. Although I searched extensively in June with AltaVista and
a couple of other engines, I have another tool available now that I didn't
have then, WebSeeker, a metasearcher that queries more than 20 engines and
sorts the results. OK, one last shot. . . .
Now I know where Nancy McPhee is! It was the youngest of those three
no-longer-school-age children who gave it away, a few levels down in her home
page. But I won't tell for now. (I wonder if Fermat felt this same
faintly-conspiratorial tingle when he wrote the marginal note about his "last
theorem.") Please respond, Nancy. The world -- well, a few of us anyway --
wants to know about the Scottish origin of "May you live in interesting
times."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is now nearly a year later -- November 1997.
Leaving out the details of the hunt (which would only interest another Web
ferret like me), Nancy McPhee indeed replied by e-mail to my importuning:
My "Insults" books were a long time ago, and my source material languishes in
some long-buried file box. . . . I fear the whole thing is going to be
anticlimactic, since I rather doubt I can shed much light on your query about
"interesting" or "important" times. But I'll do what I can.
But she was off to sunnier climes for the winter, and I heard nothing more.
So there it rested again, until late May 1997, when the above-mentioned
Tereze Gl�ck e-mailed me that she had
a kind of dim memory -- maybe it's more of a theory than a memory, which is
this: that I first heard the curse in one of those old Sidney Greenstreet
movies -- if not MALTESE FALCON, then maybe THREE STRANGERS. And Sidney
Greenstreet recalls it and identifies it as a Chinese curse. For some reason,
I keep HEARING it in his voice. . . .
Ah, ha. The Web ferret kicked into action and found synopses of both movies
by Ken Yousten of Blacksburg, VA, at The Internet Movie Database Ltd. His
summary for "Three Strangers" certainly sounded promising:
According to a legend, if three strangers gather before an idol of Kwan Yin
(the Chinese goddess of fortune and destiny) on the night of the Chinese New
Year and make a common wish, Kwan Yin will open her eyes and her heart and
grant the wish. In London 1938 on the Chinese New Year, Crystal Shackleford
has such an idol and decides to put the legend to the test. She picks two
random strangers off the street, and puts the proposition to them. They
decide that an ideal wish would be for a sweepstakes ticket they buy equal
shares in to be a winner. After all, everyone needs money and a pot is very
easy to divide equally, right?
Ken Yousten responded to my e-mail with enthusiasm and helpfulness beyond my
expectations, but alas without the hoped-for "answer":
I have both MALTESE FALCON and THREE STRANGERS on tape and ran through them
(fast-forwarding to Sydney Greenstreet's scenes) and didn't hear the curse. I
don't specifically remember it in any other of his movies, but it certainly
wouldn't surprise me if it was, and I just forgot. He was type-cast as the
kind of guy who would say that. :)
So, once more we're back to Nancy McPhee and her Scottish attribution. Her
daughter's (ooops) Web site mentioned being in graduate school this fall,
even naming the institution. But nothing showed up to help, even though I
occasionally checked Deja News for postings to her previous favorite topics.
Then a couple of weeks ago she turned up in one of them. OK, here are those
Fermat-like sensations again. But will she help me importune Mom?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is now May 1998. Every time I think the search has hit a dead end,
something new materializes. In late December 1997, I received an e-mail from
Mauricio D�az of Colombia, who had found this Web page and offered the
following:
I remember a book from Carl G. Jung (The Secret of the Golden Flower - that
is the translation of the title in Spanish). In the foreword to that book,
which is about Chinese alchemy, Mr. Jung quotes the same curse and makes some
interesting reflections about it. Maybe you can find the book to go deeper in
your search.
Profound, if true, since the publication date turned out to be 1931. That
would predate the previous earliest reference -- Robert Kennedy's speech in
Cape Town -- by 35 years! Of course, things are never as simple as they
appear. When I retrieved the book from the University at Albany Library, I
found that the German original would have contained Richard Wilhelm's
translation from Chinese of The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book
of Life plus his explanatory and historical text, Jung's commentary on that
translation, and a memorial speech delivered by Jung in 1930 after Wilhelm's
death. What I had in hand was the English translation of all this, which I
then went through several times. Three times for Jung's commentary, to be
precise. No curse.
It seemed like a good time for some more importuning. So I sent an e-mail
reply: Did Sr. D�az still have the Spanish version in which he saw this
discussion? Could mention of the curse have been in a translator's note or
some other commentary that was not in the English edition? No response.
Perhaps more importantly, although Jung did write about alchemy, Golden Flower
really does not touch on the subject very much, if at all. So I sent e-mail
to several Jung discussion groups and listservs, including the Newsgroup
alt.psychology.jung, asking if any devotees knew of another work in which he
discussed the curse. Nothing.
Dead end.
Then, on March 31, 1998, Keith Henson, who was cited in Biased Journalism as
the source of the second phrase in the longer forms of the curse -- "and
attract the attention of important people" -- sent me a message:
I happened to find a very early reference to the "curse" in a collection of
stories by Eric Frank Russell, Somewhere a Voice, Penguin Books, 1968, a
reprint from Denis Dobson Ltd, 1965, which in turn is a reprint from U-Turn,
a story in Astounding Science Fiction, April, 1950.�.�.�.
So, the "curse" goes back to at least 1950. This use also explains why it is
so well known in the SF community--Russell was very well thought of as an
author. It is just possible that this is the origin of this saying, though
since Russell is long dead, it might be hard to show.
A day or two later, there I was in Special Collections at the University
Library looking at "U-Turn" by Duncan H. Munro, a pseudonym for Eric Frank
Russell. Mind you, I wasn't simply looking at a microform image or even a
bound volume. I was holding the original, unbound April 1950 issue of
Astounding Science Fiction in my hand. It had been recently donated in that
state. Astounding. (Click on the image to the right to see it in all its
glory.)
As for the curse itself, it is on page 137. The main character of "U-Turn,"
Mason, has opted for assisted suicide to escape a regimented life in which
Venus and Mars are civilized, life on the Moon is spent safely underground,
and wild animals in Earth's jungles are as harmless as if they were
artificial. We learn at the end of the story that Mason has correctly
surmised that the death chamber to which he voluntarily goes is actually a
Star Trek-like transporter which will irreversibly send him where he really
wants to go -- to the current human frontier, Callisto, one of the moons of
Jupiter -- assuming he is among the small fraction of those who survive the
dissociation and reassociation process of the device. But before that, while
one of the bureaucrats processes his "death wish," Mason complains about the
order, regulation, and control under which everyone is forced to live:
For centuries the Chinese used an ancient curse: "May you live in interesting
times!" It isn't a curse any more. It's a blessing. We're scientific and
civilized. We've got so many rights and liberties and freedoms that one can
yearn for chains for the sheer pleasure of busting them and shaking them off.
Reckon life would be more livable if there were any chains left to bust.
So now the question is, did Russell simply invent the curse in telling the
story, or was he perhaps a devotee of Jung, in whose writings he might have
found a still-earlier reference? Stay tuned.
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Original posting: June 12, 1996
Latest revision: May 5, 1998
Copyright � 1996-98 by Stephen E. DeLong.
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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