Light a Fire

SUMMARY: Plato (400 BCE) Greek philosopher
Plato Quotes
Plato Books

Plato was an immensely influential Greek philosopher who is as avidly discussed and debated today as he was in 347 B.C., the year he died. Plato is most famous for his dialogues, wherein he presents his famous teacher, Socrates, leading groups of worshipful friends and jealous foes in conversations about topics such as love, learning, politics, mathematics, the nature of the soul, and so on—seemingly rarely asserting his views on these important matters himself, but rather asking his audience ingenious questions designed to either bring out what they know (and didn’t know they knew) or don’t know (but thought they knew).

This style of teaching, or of exploring a subject, is known as the dialectic—a subject is brought up, a speaker or speakers give a definition or an explanation of the subject as they understand it, and then a long process of exploration begins, wherein contradictions are laid bare and every nuance of nook and cranny—be they ever so hidden, ever so shadow-swathed—is brought to light, until no one can say that he didn’t for once try to think a thing through from beginning to end. Plato’s dialogues are clever, inventive, witty, funny, profound, and at times deeply moving. Some of the dialogues, especially those having to do with mathematics, are difficult for the beginner to navigate, but then again there are many others that can be (with a little patience) almost immediately comprehended and enjoyed, whether the reader has read a little philosophy or a lot of philosophy or no philosophy at all.

One of Plato’s most famous doctrines is that of the forms. Plato posits (for example) that every physical tree has its perfect spiritual archetype; that men and women, dogs and cats, apples and oranges but copies of something magnificent; that what we see with our eyes, hear with our hears, smell with our noses, touch with our hands, and so on, is an imperfect replica of a perfect original. He expounds this doctrine in a beautiful and moving dialogues that depicts human beings as living deep inside a cave, where images flickering on the walls are taken for reality, when in fact they’re only reflections of the gorgeous blaze of the teeming world outside. It is the philosopher’s duty to help people leave the cave and discover for themselves the true nature of those flickering movements of light on the wall.

In 387 B.C. Plato founded a famous school in Athens, called the Academy. He counted Aristotle among his students, and in essence laid the groundwork for the university as we know it today. Plato, however, would have frowned upon high tuition fees and paying three hundred dollars for a biology textbook with more pictures than text. His teacher and mentor, Socrates, had been put to death partly for teaching that no teacher should charge money for his services. An important and influential group at the time, known as the Sophists, were getting rich and living luxuriously thanks to the skills (such as rhetoric, or the art of public speaking and persuasion) they had mastered and offered to others at a high price. Socrates (and Plato—who, remember, is really the one speaking in the dialogues) believed that such practices cheapened education and would ultimately be the ruin of any society foolish enough to adopt them.

The Sophists weren’t so much interested in teaching (or exploring), say, the nature of love; rather, they would train you how to speak like a Don Juan, how to say the right things, how, in short, to look like someone who understands love. The appearance was the thing; whether or not the student actually comprehended the subject was of secondary importance. Socrates’ objections so enraged the Sophists and their powerful friends that Socrates was eventually put on trial for his life and sentenced to die by poisoning. His last words, after he drinks the hemlock and feels its direful effects creeping up his legs, are among the most memorable in history; I dare you to read them with dry eyes. You’ll find them in a Platonic dialogue known as the Apology. Happy reading!

SUMMARY: Pablo Picasso (October 25, 1881 – April 8, 1973) Spanish artist
Pablo Picasso Quotes
Pablo Picasso Books

Everyone has heard of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), but perhaps what you think of next is: Oh yes, he’s the painter who paints about as well I could, if I tried, and maybe even my son in kindergarten could give him a run for his money. And what money! He’s the painter that could scribble a circle on a napkin and sell it for thousands!

Well, that last part is true—he could, by the end of his long career, scribble something on a napkin and receive a fortune for it; have people fighting over it. The first part, however, is not true (although we admit we’ve thought it too)—not just anybody can paint or draw or even scribble like Picasso. Picasso was one of the most gifted artists of his time, and of any time. He could paint as realistically as anyone—could paint the human figure, a landscape, a cow. He was a master, young Picasso, who in his youth was the despair of so many hearts—if by the end of his career they fought over his pictures, in the beginning they fought over him.

Not only was he gifted; not only did he show signs of genius from very early on—his earliest sketches of the local whores in his small Spanish town are astoundingly original, and even his technique is astounding in the earliest examples—not only that, but he was a personality like a dark flame of fire, he drew all people to him, men and women, artists and philosophers, fruit sellers and vagabonds; he took what he wanted; he was short, dark-haired, dark-eyed, intense, with sun-dark skin; he utterly captured whatever he wanted. Capturing images on canvas; capturing lives, real lives, real hearts, in his disorderly studio, his low, sun-bleached villa, his bohemian Spain.

You might say that people, in general, feel cold, and that Picasso’s dark flame of genius warmed them. And it is true that Picasso wasn’t careful with hearts; he dropped them and broke them. He burned them though they came for warmth! But he was a genius from the start, and history always forgives genius an infinity of broken hearts. Picasso was a true artist in that he was never content to stay still, he must move, invent, experiment. Yes, he could fabulously paint a woman cooling herself with fresh water in the fresh, cool blueness of her bedroom, he could paint an old man’s memories in an old man’s sad old eyes, he could paint a circus performer in colors cheerily blooming then eerily haunting—red mists that won’t leave you even when you look away. But he must be about something new, he must push the boundaries, always, like Beethoven, like James Joyce, like all the truly great.

And so he slowly moved from realistic images to surreal ones, strange shapes that jarred with each other, colors that were uneasy, as it were, to be together. His humans and animals became monstrous, his horses like something from a nightmare, chomping, stomping, screaming beasts with rolling white moons of eyes. He thought, what if I could represent all the angles of an image at once; what if I could somehow show you a woman’s face and the back of her head, her bosom and her bottom, all of her, all of him, all of a rose, all of a chair, the bow of a brittle violin and behind the bow, beside the bow, both the bow’s sides, simultaneously? Thus cubism was born, a radical new style of painting that attempted to capture the entirety of an image at once, like a mug shot wherein you see the criminal looking left, straight, and right on the same small square of canvas.

Not three separate paintings, three separate heads; one head, but from all directions—a new way of tricking the flat canvas into distances and depths, seeming skies, the detail that comes too close, and you didn’t expect it. Cubism is strange and bizarre, and you must look at Picasso’s cubist paintings very closely and with intelligence and concentration, and, if you do, the image, totally single and totally separate, will emerge like what’s hidden in a 3-D poster, only better.

Picasso tired of cubism as well, and moved again, and kept moving, and never stopped moving, like a shark that dies if it stops moving. Black slashes and look: it’s Don Quixote leaning wearily over his lance; red spatters and look: it’s a field of roses blurring in and out of a rainstorm. We hope we’ve awakened your interest in this fabulous painter, this terrible man, Picasso, who broke the rules because he could, because, like all the truly great, he mastered them until they were his reinvention, and then he broke them into a million pieces. Maybe in the end you won’t like Picasso! Not all people, not all art-lovers, love Picasso. But give Picasso a try, both the coal-haired youth with the huge dreamy eyes and the snow-haired old man, whose eyes will dream one last dream; give Picasso and his evolutions and revolutions a try; perhaps read his biography. The novelist Norman Mailer wrote a pretty good one, and it’s in paperback and sensibly priced and with big vivid photographs.

SUMMARY: Oprah Winfrey ( January 29, 1954) American talk show host, producer
Oprah Winfrey Quotes
Oprah Winfrey Books

Oprah Winfrey was born as obscurely as they come in 1954. Her mother was an unwed teenager, her state of birth, Mississippi—a state, everyone now agrees, not entirely friendly to unwed pregnant African American teenagers back in the 50’s, nor to their little helpless offspring. Winfrey was “raised,” if that’s the right word for it, in a slum in Milwaukee, where, at the age of nine, she was raped, and where, at the age of fourteen, she gave birth to a baby boy, who died in delivery. Life was a little bit difficult for Winfrey at the beginning. You could say that Winfrey wasn’t among the blessed when it came to things such as home stability, family support, a safe, beautiful, unpolluted community, and so forth. But Winfrey was a fighter. If she wasn’t among the blessed in outward circumstances, she was certainly unusual inwardly—with a drive and ambition, a magnetism, unusual in anyone born under any circumstances.

Winfrey was eventually passed along to the state Tennessee, where she lived with a man she refers to as “father” to this day. A local barber, he provided Winfrey with the balanced environment she’d been so dramatically lacking up until that point. Now it was Winfrey’s turn to see what she would do with her inner gifts. She was very active in her local high school, and immediately took an interest in the burgeoning art of radio broadcasting, especially talk radio. Winfrey had a smooth, pleasant, comforting voice, which at the same time expressed urgency and moral seriousness. This combination proved so attractive that Winfrey landed a radio job while still in high school, and at the tender age of 19 she found herself as the co-anchor of a local television station. Winfrey was on her way. From here on out there would be no stopping her. Her horrible beginnings, which might have (and which indeed have) crushed so many others, seemed to give Winfrey a sense of a higher calling and purpose. She desired to speak out to others who were either in or had survived similar beginnings, and to inspire them to make something of their lives and also the lives around them.

Winfrey wasn’t a co-anchor for long. She had a gift for speaking without a script, for improvising in the moment on whatever the subject was, and of humanizing the subject by bringing a certain intensity of emotion to it that people had not experienced before. She soon found herself in the world of daytime television. She was given her first opportunity on a daytime television program based in Chicago, which, when Winfrey arrived, was rated third in the state. It didn’t take long for Winfrey’s active presence to rocket it to first, at which point Winfrey made her move. She formed her own production company, and with astonishing swiftness (for one so new and seemingly inexperienced) achieved national syndication. Oprah Winfrey was now a national, and soon an international, name.

Winfrey is thought by and large to have a generous heart and a quick, curious mind. Her book club has brought hundreds of classic titles to hundreds of thousands of readers, and her billions of dollars have been used in countless charitable causes the world over. Some have accused her of being too emotional and of sensationalizing sensitive topics such as poverty, unwed mothers, racism, emotional and sexual abuse, and so forth, while others point out that these topics by their very nature are highly emotionally charged and that Winfrey is doing their unfortunate victims a service by forcing people to pay attention. Whatever your position, you have to agree that Winfrey is a force of nature and that whatever her flaws she’s championed mightily some unquestionably worthy causes.

SUMMARY: Ogden Nash (August 19, 1902 – May 19, 1971) American poet, author
Ogden Nash Quotes
Ogden Nash Books

Frederic Ogden Nash (1902-1971) was a famous New York poet; a writer a funny poems; clever, inventive poetry—and a football fan. The next question undoubtedly will be: “Did he have a favorite football team?” The answer is: “Naturally, yes.” “Which football team was it?” “The Baltimore Colts.”

Now we have an adjustment to make. Nash was a New York poet; that is, he was born and educated in New York, and got his first important jobs there, and started writing poetry there, but eventually (and not late in his life; not in his twilight years) he moved to Baltimore, and thought of himself essentially as a Baltimore man. He did return to New York, but only for a little while; and the stay only convinced him that Baltimore was his place to be. Of course, he expressed this in a somewhat ironical tone. He gave you the feeling of, “Well, if you’ve got to live in a dump, why not choose the best dump.” But there was, as there is in every true comedic artist, always a great deal of exaggeration and hyperbole in his expressions.

Nash was very gifted when it came to meter and rhyme, to traditional ways of writing poetry, but he arrived on the scene exactly when traditional ways of poetry were losing favor with poets and intellectuals and poet/intellectuals. In some ways, comedy and the fantastic are a traditionally-oriented poet’s last and best resort, because (a) they lend themselves so well to meter and rhyme, (b) the average reader is more traditionally-oriented than not, and (c) comedic-fantastic poetry is still championed by a significant number of intellectuals. Poems such as “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “Humpty Dumpty” stick to a pretty strict rhyme scheme, and to great effect (as we all know because we all know them practically by heart, even though we learned them as children!). Also, believe it or not, there are people writing dissertations on “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “Humpty Dumpty” right at this moment. Nash’s poetry stays with you, lingers; you don’t have to memorize it consciously (if you wanted to memorize it); just reading it is enough; the patterns, like those of the children’s poems mentioned above, fix themselves in the reader’s mind unconsciously.

As a young man, Nash was restless and unsure of what he wanted to do exactly. He tried Harvard; he gave the best university in the land his best shot; and dropped out after a year. He returned to New York and became a teacher. He gave teaching his best shot; but it wasn’t for him. He did know that he had the writing itch, which is pretty usual in the histories of writers. They don’t know anything, but they sure know one thing! It’s a common paradox for artists of all sorts, and Nash was no exception, and for a while he found himself scratching the itch in an unsatisfactory way, as a writer of streetcar advertisements. This is also pretty usual in the histories of writers—they can’t generally start out writing what they want, so they write what someone else wants for a while. For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, had worked for the exact same ad agency as Nash.

Eventually, by the artistic strategy of moving from place to place, by taking a seemingly wandering, random route which nevertheless had a definite logic to it, Nash ended up working for a very respected and important publishing house. He was an editor there, and a good one, and finally he could begin really to toy around with poetry seriously. He worked and worked at it, but he was lucky in that he loved this work specifically and therefore it was a kind of play as well. His first book of poetry, Hard Lines, was published in 1931, and suddenly people knew Ogden Nash was. Nash found this experience quite strange, to one day be just Ogden Nash and practically the next the Ogden Nash. He took it in stride, and, as you’d expect with a personality like Nash, was humorous about it.

Nash’s poetry, though not “serious” poetry in the sense that the modern aesthetic view only accepts existential tragedy as serious, has nevertheless endured, and you often find him in anthologies of immortal poems right alongside Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.

SUMMARY: Og Mandino (December 12, 1923 – September 3, 1996) Italian inspirational author
Og Mandino Quotes
Og Mandino Books

Og Mandino (1923-1996) is a strange name to be sure, but there are few people who are unfamiliar with it. Mandino wrote a series of self-help books that really did help millions of people worldwide. Mandino, you could say, was one of the first writers to really popularize the idea of finding help from a book other than a sacred text such as the Bible. He did this in part by taking ideas found in the Bible and retelling them in such a way that the average, modern person could identify with them on a more practical level. But he had to overcome plenty of difficulty himself to do so; and this is another explanation, without a doubt, for Mandino’s incredible success. He had suffered, and the sufferers who read his books were drawn to him for that reason; and, what’s more, he had suffered as your average Joe suffers, and most of his readers were average Joes. That is, they weren’t Dostoyevsky—they weren’t poets and philosophers—they were salesman and housewives. Og Mandino had been a salesman himself, and somehow his success didn’t make him swell up and strut around and start affecting “great man” poses.

Mandino started out with certain ambitions, to be sure, but they weren’t lofty by any standard. He worked on his high school newspaper, and thought that a career in journalism might be interesting, and planned to study journalism at the university level. From the very first, then, his instinct was for those mediums that reach the maximum amount of people—journalism over philosophy, say. But then disaster intervened. Mandino’s mother, whom he loved very much, died unexpectedly one day while preparing lunch in the kitchen. This had the effect of sending Mandino off on a rather random, wandering course. He worked in a paper factory; drudge work; a difficult, sweaty job. Then he decided to join the Army. The Army’s structured lifestyle fit Mandino very well, and subsequently he became an officer. During World War Two he flew many successful missions; but when the war was over, and he became a civilian again, he found, as did so many other ex-soldiers of that generation, that while his country was ostensibly very grateful for his sacrifice, most businesses were unwilling to hire him as an employee.

Mandino had no other option but to sell insurance door to door; a job that took him on the road; and that led him, for comfort and companionship, into bars; which led, in turn, to a terrible alcoholism that eventually cost Mandino his job, his family, and everything that was important to him. He thought about suicide; he didn’t see any point to his life. One night, however, while searching a local library for books that might inspire him, he found a classic of the early self-help genre, W. Clement Stone’s Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude. From this reading Mandino slowly built an outlook that he would eventually publish in his first (of many) bestsellers, The Greatest Salesman in the World.

Mandino, by practicing what he preached, was able to reclaim all of those things in his life that he had lost through misfortune and the abuse of alcohol. He remarried, quit drinking, and went on to write a total of nineteen more books. His message, basically, was do it now. It seems simple enough, but the majority of the human race seems to have trouble implementing this bit of wisdom nevertheless. Mandino felt that most of us have the right impulse most of the time: get up early; eat healthily; apply for that job; follow through on that idea; make that phone call; raise your hand, ask that question; and so forth. But something, some fear or laziness, blocks us from following through on our healthy impulses, and it is by continual obedience to that “something” that we find ourselves unhappily on the road to nowhere. Mandino’s books encouraged people to just act once on one impulse, and act on it now, and then utilize the feeling of positivism and energy that results to walk another step ahead.

Mandino, by all accounts, was an ordinary man with ordinary problems who discovered an approach to life that millions have been blessed by. His success didn’t change him, except that he abandoned those bad habits that had cost him so dearly to begin with.

SUMMARY: Niels Bohr (October 7, 1885 – November 18, 1962) Danish physicist
Niels Bohr Quotes
Niels Bohr Books

Niels Bohr (1885-1962) was one of the most talented and fascinating physicists to ever walk the planet. On this, many eminent scientists, philosophers of science, and historians of science agree. He was a complicated man whose career took him from his homeland of Denmark to the United States and Great Britain and beyond. He had the ear of presidents such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Ministers such as Winston Churchill. Bohr came from a rather prominent family to begin with. His father and mother were accomplished, sensitive, refined, highly intelligent people. His father, for example, was a professor of physiology at the university, and to this scientific outlook he added a deep Christian religiousness. Christian writers such as Soren Kierkegaard would come to influence Bohr Jr. in later life, though he was less orthodox in his views than his father.

Bohr received his PhD in Denmark, and then moved to England to further his studies and to begin a series of experiments that would make him famous the world over, and eventually win him the Nobel Prize. His first crucial publication came in the year 1913, when Bohr presented to the world what has come to be known as his model of atomic structure. Bohr theorized that electrons traveled in orbits around a given atom’s nucleus, and that the atom’s chemical makeup depended mainly on the amount of electrons clustered in the atom’s outermost orbits. These outermost orbits were the most highly charged, they were an atom’s main source of energy; but, said Bohr, it was possible for an electron in one of these sizzling outer orbits to drop down into a lower, less energized, less active orbit, leaving, however, a subtle and volatile trail of activity in its wake, a sort of tear which might serve as a conduit. Bohr’s early work became the foundation for quantum theory, one of the most exciting and promising fields in physics today.

When World War II came along, Bohr found himself back in Denmark; he also found himself pursued by the German Secret Service. Germany was looking for top physicists to work on weapons of mass destruction in order to further the diabolical cause of the Third Reich. Fortunately, Bohr was able to escape to Sweden and from there to the United States, where he became a member of the highly selective team of physicists which worked on the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project (Albert Einstein was another prominent member) was a top secret project devoted to the study and development of the atomic bomb. Bohr initially (and throughout the rest of his life, some contend) believed that the mysteries of atomic energy shouldn’t be allowed to escape a small circle of experts, physicists all. He was aghast at the idea that political leaders, especially in a time of war, should gain access to such potentially destructive information.

Einstein suggested that Bohr go to President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States with his concerns. Bohr told President Roosevelt that perhaps, if they were going to continue to do research into the atomic bomb, they ought to share the information with Russia, as well, as Russia was then an ally of the United States and Great Britain. Russia, Bohr contended, had many highly gifted physicists of her own, who would certainly aid the allies in obtaining their goal all the faster.

Roosevelt in turn suggested that Bohr talk to Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain. Churchill was very opposed to the idea. He thought of the Russians, especially as constituted under their present leader, Joseph Stalin, as a necessary evil; he thought that Stalin was a psychopath, and that it would be madness to share the secrets of atomic energy with him. Churchill even suggested to Roosevelt that they place Bohr behind bars for a while, but this suggestion was never acted on.

All in all, Bohr was an idealistic, somewhat mysterious, unaffected genius, and one whose life and thought yield rich reward to any reader who cares to take a closer look.

SUMMARY: Jack Lemmon (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001) American actor, comedian
Jack Lemmon Quotes
Jack Lemmon Books

Jack Lemmon was a famous actor to whom we most place him in comedic movies. He was a two time Academy Award winner and starred in some classic movies like “Some like it Hot”, “The Odd Couple”, and “The Out-of-Towners.” Jack Lemmon came into the movie business in the 1950’s and remained there until his death in 2001. He was dearly loved and remembered by the acting business and those who enjoyed watching him as an actor.

Jack Uhler Lemmon III was born in Newton Wellesley Hospital in Newton Massachusetts in August of 1925. Not quick enough to make it to the hospital room, Jack Lemmon was born in an elevator. He was the son of John Uhler Lemmon Jr. and Mildred Burgess LaRue. Lemmon went to school at the Phillips Andover Academy and here he taught himself how to play the piano. By the time he entered Harvard, he was elected President of the Hasty Pudding Club. After college he was enrolled in World War II as a stint in the Navy and then returned to graduate from Harvard at the age of 22 with a college degree. After being discharged from the Navy he moved to New York City and there decided to take up acting professionally. He supported himself by playing the piano in a bar and for silent movies until he landed some jobs in radio, television, and Broadway. By the early 1950’s Jack Lemmon had made appearances in hundreds of different TV roles.

Lemmon married twice in his life and has one son, Christ Lemmon who was born in 1954 with his first wife. His second child is a daughter named Courtney who was born with his second wife in 1966.

Achievements and Roles
Lemmon’s first big hit was in a movie with Judy Holliday in the 1954 comedy, “It should happen to you.” As a result he worked with many other leading actresses onscreen. Marilyn Monroe, Shirley MacLaine, Doris Day, and Rita Hayworth are among a few of the women he built his acting career with. Billy Wilder really took to Lemmon and made him the star in many of his films like “Some like it Hot”, and “The Fortune Cookie.”

In 1956 Jack Lemmon received the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for “Mister Roberts” and “Save The Tiger.” This proved to be a very big deal as he was the first actor to get the Oscar for both movies. He has also been nominated for other the Best Actor Oscar for the movies “Missing” and “American Film Institute.”

As Jack Lemmon learned how to play the piano as a teenager he also proved to have somewhat of a singing career. In 1958 he recorded his own album with Marilyn Monroe. He also played the piano on his “Frank Sinatra-type” album. The album called “A twist of Lemmon” was released in 1959.

Lemmon is often remembered for appearing alongside act Walter Matthau. They appeared in many movies together and won the hearts of many Americans. Some movies they played as the duo act we remember were “The Odd Couple”, “Grumpy Old Men”, and “Grumpier Old Men.” The film “Grumpy Old Men” was a surprisingly big hit thus the filming of the sequel “Grumpier Old Men.” The only role that Jack Lemmon played a more serious part in which he died was in “The China Syndrome” in 1979. For this role he won the Best Actor Award and then won it again in 1982 for the film “Missing.” He is the only actor to ever receive it twice.

In 1998 at the Golden Globe Awards Jack Lemmon was nominated for the Best Actor in a made for TV movie for Twelve Angry Men. He ultimately lost to Ving Rhames, but was asked by Rhames to join him onstage. Thames gave the award to Lemmon, a move that stunned the audience and himself.

Jack Lemmon is remembered as one of the best liked actors in Hollywood. He always took time for people; to talk with them and to teach them. He died of Carcinoma and Metastic cancer on June 17 2001