Pithy Little Things
No, I haven’t just come back from the dentist and I haven’t done a typo.
The dictionary definition of pith is:
brief, meaningful in expression, full of vigor, substance, or meaning; a pithy observation, of, like, or abounding in pith.
With this in mind, I’ve picked out three examples of pithy observations. One is for readers, one is for writers and one is for, well, it’s for everyone really.
Back of a £10 note with portrait of Jane Austen
‘I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading’.
You probably see this quote all the time without even realising it. It’s on the back of £10 note along with the image of the woman who wrote it – Jane Austen.
All readers know there is no enjoyment to compare with the joys of a good book. The irony is that the above quote is not, as you might expect, from Pride and Prejudice’s heroine, Lizzy Bennet, but is uttered by Miss Bingley.
Miss Bingley doesn’t even like reading but has only picked up a book because she’s trying to impress Mr Darcy! Shortly after her declaration, she ‘yawned again’ and ‘threw aside her book’.
But don’t let the fact that the speaker of these lines doesn’t believe them. It is Jane Austen’s other ‘truth universally acknowledged’ that there is no enjoyment quite like reading that we should remember. That’s why it’s on the back of a tenner!
Scrabble-style tiles saying ‘you choose your words’.
‘It’s just wonderful when you’re just making a sentence and it’s subject - verb - object, get a couple of words that don’t normally go together and get that little . . .poof! . . . look at that, how could you not want that? How can that not be a kick, you know? ‘
This is a quote about writing from David Mitchell* at a talk he gave at the Hay Festival in 2015.
If I ever find myself in a writing ditch where I wonder what I’m doing, why I thought I could ever do this and how am I ever going to get out of here, I think about what David said. It doesn’t always have to be about plot, structure and character arcs. Sometimes, it’s just good to enjoy what you’re doing – one word, one sentence at a time.
* This is Cloud Atlas David Mitchell, not Peep Show David Mitchell which the woman sitting next to me was surprised to discover! I checked with her at the end and she had still enjoyed herself.
Friends are people who know you really well and like you anyway.
Well, as you can see, I saw this on a packet of tissues.*
I’m not usually into smoothies and oat milks that pretend to be human, and a bit of a creepy human at that, with their matey marketing chat. When I saw this, though it got me thinking and not only of the person who tapped these words into the tissue-packet design software, hoping their words would make a difference somewhere out there.
There’s a touch of insecurity in those words, as if you suspect you are so flawed nobody could really like the real you but try switching it around. You still like your friends even when they’re occasionally drunk or forgetful or a little bit flakey.
Don’t you?
* Please don’t judge me for my Google search in the background of this pic. I was astonished though to discover this is a commonly held belief among dog owners!
If you read, watch or listen to just one thing . . .
Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, Richard Ayoade in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
Oppenheimer, Schloppenheimer.
Nowhere near enough mention has been made of this year’s Oscar-winning Best Short Film. If you have Netflix and you haven’t seen The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, please go and correct this at once.
A stylish story of a story within a story within a story, it’s one of the most Wes Anderson things you will ever see! And just like Oppenheimer and Barbie, it’s packed with all those British actors you’ve seen before in that other thing, you know the one I mean . . .