Today, I am reposting a column by author and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan in which she shares some poignant thoughts about life as we enter the new year. This particular column appeared in her Signposts on the Wisdom Trail column. As for me, I will return to posting my own thoughts on ForeignCorrespondent soon. As I usually do around this time of year, I go AWOL as I reboot my cranial hard drive in preparation for another year of rants, observations, and miscellany. I thank you for your patience and understanding.
Things I’ve learned from Lincoln, C.S. Lewis, David Foster Wallace, and my friend’s grandmother.
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I start the year with some things I know because life and a few geniuses taught me. They’re things often at the back of my mind.
An Italian grandmother was stirring the sauce on the stove as I was about 10, and my friend, her granddaughter, fantasized about how a local family must be rich, millionaires; they just bought a big car.
“Don’t count other people’s money,” the grandmother said. You don’t know all the facts, and it’s none of your business. “Don’t catalog other people’s sins.” That came from somebody then, and the spirit was, “You want a catalog, go to Sears.”
It never left me when I read Samuel Johnson’s dictum: “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.” Don’t imagine you’re telling them big things they don’t already know or sense.
I once read that Abraham Lincoln said if you asked most people to put all their troubles in an open sack and place it down next to their neighbors’ sacks and then everyone was told to pick one up and keep it, most people would hesitate barely a moment before they picked up their own sack and took it home. Everyone thinks they have it worse than everyone else, but they don’t, and anyway, their own troubles are at least familiar and tolerable, and theirs.
Public figures often want to be understood. This is a mistake. People don’t want to understand you; they’re ornery. Do your job, that will explain you.
The only truth to tell a young couple about to get married: God is real and babies are everything. The only advice for a college graduate: Honest work makes the world go round; bring your talents to market. The important thing to tell a student entering college or high school: Read.
Reading deepens. Social media keeps you where you are. Reading makes your mind do work. You have to follow the plot, imagine what the ballroom looks like, and figure out the characters’ motivations—I understand what Gatsby wants! All this makes your brain and soul develop the habit of generous and imaginative thinking. Social media is passive. The pictures, reels, and comments demand nothing and develop nothing. They give you sensations, but the sensations never get deeper. Social media gets you stuck in you. Reading is a rocket ship, new worlds.
A century ago in a short story, F. Scott Fitzgerald said the rich are different from you and me. Ernest Hemingway is said to have mocked him: Sure, they have more money. But Fitzgerald’s point wasn’t a romantic one. He said that something in the experience of the rich “makes them soft where we are hard” and hard where we are soft. That’s true; it can be unpacked forever and applies even to our politics. On crime and illegal immigration, the private-school-educated bail-reform scholar or the wealthy donor to nonprofits is soft where we are hard. Crime and chaos can’t hurt the rich the way they hurt others. Money changes people because it changes experience.
A paraphrase of C.S. Lewis: Empires rise and fall, great nations come and go, but the man who poured your coffee this morning is immortal because his soul is immortal. That is a world-altering thought and one that, if you keep it in the center of your mind, will modify how you treat others.
Clichéd phrases endure for a reason. Don’t be embarrassed by them. The other night, a big-brained writer texted to tell me about a packed theater as the movie neared its end. “You could’ve heard a pin drop.” Some genius made that up centuries ago, and people still use it because it says it all.
A professionally successful artist told me how he handles invitations and requests for his time. He put a Post-it on his phone: “Do I have to? Do I want to?” Is it a matter of personal or professional obligation? Would the event be a source of joy or pleasure? If either is yes, then yes. If neither, no. Oscar Hammerstein said you can’t let the nice people of the world engage in a conspiracy that keeps you from doing what you should be doing and do well.
We all assume “the professionals” are taking care of things and deep down fear they aren’t. My eyes tell me we’re suffering a decline of professionalism pretty much across the board—in our ability to execute, to keep systems up and going, and even to look and act the part. We should respect our fear more here.
The key to surviving the 21st century will be religious faith—you won’t get through it without it—and situational awareness. Always know where the exit is.
From a journalist friend this week: “You are never sorry you took a walk.” Another writer told me a few weeks ago of his New England Yankee mother, who believed there are no problems that aren’t made at least slightly better by a long walk and none that are made worse.
People listen impatiently these days. Maybe it’s the cumulative effect of the media-interview culture of the past 50 years, which convinced people you look bright and in command if you interrupt; maybe the scrolling of the present has left us less able to hear something more sustained. Whatever the cause, don’t take it personally. We’re all being taught not to take in calmly and absorb.
Often, people trying to tell you something use too many words, jam in extraneous information, or forget their point as they take side trips. A genius, in conversation, will make many edifying digressions. Most people aren’t geniuses. A story is about the Mississippi River. Don’t wander off and get caught in the tributaries. Stay on the river.
“Nothing is written.” This is from Robert Bolt’s screenplay of “Lawrence of Arabia,” in which he urges Ali not to be fatalistic—nothing is predetermined, human effort can change things. You have agency; you were given a brain for a reason. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it, / Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. That’s a loose translation of Goethe.
We pay too much attention to our emotions now. They are an important part of our human makeup, but at some point in the 20th century, we got the balance wrong. We inspected our feelings endlessly and considered their meaning, their origin. Now I would say pay greater attention to your own and others’ thinking. When someone tells you what he really thinks—his undefended, not normally offered thoughts—that is true intimacy. What people really think and why, that’s the true heart of things.
A man in his early 80s told my friend, who was his psychotherapist, that what he really wanted to do was learn Italian, but that’s absurd; he’ll likely be dead in 10 years; what would he do with it? The therapist said, “Well, you can die knowing Italian or die not knowing Italian. Which is better?” So the old man studied Italian happily. It’s never too late. On a piece of paper above my computer is a quote from David Foster Wallace: “Good writing isn’t a science; it’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.”
Go forward this year, whatever your field, like an artist.
Appeared in the January 4, 2025, print edition as ‘Signposts on the Wisdom Trail’.
Peggy Noonan is an opinion columnist at the Wall Street Journal, and her column, “Declarations,” has been running since 2000.
She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2017. A political analyst for NBC News, she is the author of nine books on American politics, history, and culture, from her most recent, “The Time of Our Lives,” to her first, “What I Saw at the Revolution.” She is one of ten historians and writers who contributed essays on the American presidency for the book, “Character Above All.” Noonan was a special assistant and speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. In 2010, she was given the Award for Media Excellence by the living recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor; the following year, she was chosen as Columnist of the Year by The Week. She has been a fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics and has taught in the history department at Yale University.
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