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When I say I can make you understand why this is so, I only mean that I can answer the first “why” that any one is likely to ask about it, and perhaps a “why” or two behind this. Then I must stop. This is all that is ever meant by those who say they can tell us why a thing is so and so. No one professes to be able to reach back to the last “why” that any one can ask, and to answer it. Fortunately for philosophers, people generally become fatigued after they have heard the answer to two or three “whys” and are glad enough to let the matter drop.

- Samuel Butler, capturing in his 19th Century notebooks, a truth my daughter taught me in 2002, when she was a toddler and was never “glad enough to let the matter drop” after hearing “the answer to two or three ‘whys’”

It’s not that she wouldn’t take “Wow. I actually don’t know why that is” for an answer. She would. She seemed to love that just one question asked persistently could basically blow my mind and make my world as fresh, unfathomable, and boundless as hers.

I’d never met anyone like her. “Good times” does not begin to cover it.

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When I am inclined to complain about having worked so many years and taken nothing but debt, though I feel the want of money so continually (much more, doubtless, than I ought to feel it), let me remember that I come in free, gratis, to the work of hundreds and thousands of better men than myself who often were much worse paid than I have been. If a man’s true self is his karma - the life which his work lives but which he knows very little about and by which he takes nothing - let him remember at least that he can enjoy the karma of others, and this about squares the account - or rather far more than squares it.

- Samuel Butler in 1883, from The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

I came to this tonight via Dear Scott/Dear Max and, specifically, one sentence from a 9/18/1919 letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to editor Max Perkins: “Every young author ought to read Samuel Butler’s Note Books.”

Fitzgerald did not elaborate. Maybe he liked this Butlerism:

An immortal like Shakespeare knows nothing of his own immortality about which we are so keenly conscious.  As he knows nothing of it when it is in its highest vitality, centuries, it may be, after his apparent death, so it is best and happiest if during his bodily life he should think little or nothing about it and perhaps hardly suspect that he will live after his death at all.

Or this one: “Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”

Or this: “A sense of humour keen enough to show a man his own absurdities, as well as those of other people, will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing.”

Or this: “All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.”

Or this: “The world will always be governed by self-interest.  We should not try to stop this, we should try to make the self-interest of cads a little more coincident with that of decent people.”

Or this: “There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular.  The first is that every one can, in the end, get what he wants if he only tries.  This is the general rule.  The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the general rule.”

So we beat on, boats against the current, etc.