February 19, 2008
Quirk
I’d been playing around with the apparent kinship shared by humor, human, humility, and humus. So I bounced the idea off Canon Quirk. He didn’t think much of it, said for me to be extra careful about confusing humor with humility, that it wold be typical of me to get into that kind of foolishness. They aren’t the same, he said, they just sound alike and besides, it would be too easy and an insult to true humility, as well.
The same goes for human and humus, he said. And the only thing out of that whole garden of cognates that could possibly apply to me was human, and even so, he wasn’t all that sure.
These are all the things he said. I share them with you only because they weren’t exactly private, because I don’t agree with him, and also because such revealing might possibly give me a leg up on the humility in which I am altogether lacking. And then there’s the possibility that you might understand how sardonic all this is, whatever that means.
Maybe you’ll notice that in my lead paragraph, I did not refer to the Canon as either my mentor or my friend as I have done frequently. Frankly, he has also recently written me to cool it on the mentor stuff, that even though he is not “taking clients” (his term, not mine) anymore, he still has a reputation to protect, and that he’s never listed me on his “resumé” and doesn’t intend to.
He also said that the whole notion of mentoring is passé. At one time in the past when it was altogether appropriate for use with youth, it may have had some value, but that nobody thinks they’ve anything to learn anymore, especially the insufferably incurious X-generation and their Republican models. He did add that even so, the X-ers are aptly named, as “X” has always been an appropriate symbol not only for the unknown, but, in his opinion, for nothing, as well.
Whether we are yet friends, I suppose remains to be seen. Friendship is one of those palpable intangibles, oxymoronic to the core, one of life’s pleasantries that one never quite gets a grip on without some risk. It gets overlooked too often that Jesus called his associates his friends, a way, I suspect, of his setting them free to be and become themselves, to find their way of the Way and without too much dependence on him. I don’t know if it worked, not much evidence that it did, but it’s always worth a try. Maybe that’s where the Quakers get their lovely name as the Society of Friends, a neat model for all the rest of us who are so often at each other’s ideological throats and decidedly less of a drain on the national budget.
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