Fifth column: ‘Sez who?’, E T Ranger

‘Sez who?’

E T Ranger questions the value of quotations

How often do we quote those words of Felicity Upshott: ‘The longer the piece of string, the tighter it binds’? Not often, I suspect, because I have only just made them up. But we do frequently call upon other people’s words when we seek legitimacy or weight for our personal views. Why, and how well does it work? For a start, there are some quotations that don’t do it for me. There is that desk diary sent at Christmas by the school bus company or the catering contractors, which expresses an array of sentiments wildly irrelevant to your mission in life. Or worse than irrelevance, the themed daily pearls of wisdom seem to be hinting that your philosophy is in serious need of redesign. Just because Roger J Rogers wrote the exhortation, am I necessarily bound to obey?

In a way public quoting can be valuable. An international school contains colleagues – and families – who sincerely hold diverse values and outlooks. A slogan on the wall or a statement on the letterhead could be a good way to clarify the institutional priorities to those newcomers who live by a different formula. If individualism is your thing, tell the world; if community matters more, share it with everyone. I wonder how many mission statements were composed to enlighten outsiders, and how many to echo the assumptions of the majority?

Academic publications have their own particular needs. Instead of arguing every case from basic principles, researchers can declare whose work they are building on. This saves writing, and openly commits the writer to a known school of thought; take it or leave it. In fact one of the first things an academic will do in surveying a publication is to look at the references. What kind of ‘-ism’ underpins this concept, what authority is this person building upon? Can we trust the source?

Is the fact that ancient words are still remembered a sign of their validity? There is a well-known prose-poem titled ‘Desiderata’, a catalogue of New Age sentiments, which frequently circulates with the attribution ‘found in Old St Paul’s Church, Baltimore, 1692’. Over the last 50 years this has been widely revered as a relic of the moral purity of the Founding Fathers, on the assumption that they originated it. Actually, it was written in 1927 by an unsuccessful Indiana lawyer-poet named Max Ehrmann, and the date became linked to it when it was distributed by a rector of that church, which itself was founded in 1692. But did we need to know that? Does it make a difference?

Print itself has power. When my grandfather’s ship was caught blockade-running to Japan by the Russian Baltic Fleet in 1905, he had about ten minutes to gather his belongings before the ship was seized and sunk. This tough seaman took only one thing: a flowery print of a maudlin poem about separated lovers that his fiancée, my grandmother, had given him. Is it that we genuinely cannot find such good words, or is it the authority of print, that gives it more value than word of mouth?

The choice of people we quote is very important in our lives. Do you have a sense of someone who knows best, some ‘influencer’, some person whose moral compass you are happy to follow? There is a generation now for whom ‘celebrity’ is a virtue, and the respect once accorded to parents, teachers, or elders of the clan is now up for digital grabs. This matters deeply and professionally, because teaching requires that we are listened to. Is Kim Kardashian your students’ reference point for fashion, or in reality their general all-knowing source for existential wisdom? If your teenage students assert their independent views at home, is it you that they quote?

I’m a great admirer of Michel de Montaigne. In 1580 he wrote an essay ‘Of Pedantry’, exhorting thoughtful people to speak with their own voices and to renounce quotations that borrow authority from greater figures. This essay contains 29 quotations, but ends ‘[D]o I not the same thing almost throughout almost this whole composition? I go here and there, culling out of several books the sentences that best please me, not to keep them (for I have no memory to retain them in), but to transplant them into this; where, to say the truth, they are no more mine than in their first places.’ And if Montaigne thought so, it must be true!

There is a generation now for whom ‘celebrity’ is a virtue, and the respect once accorded to parents, teachers, or elders of the clan is now up for digital grabs.