Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [64]
Well, I did buy a word processor and I’ve tried it for a year but I still write primarily on my old machine. There are times when it’s best for all of us to close our eyes to the future. There’s just so much progress we have time for in our lives. Mostly we are too busy doing it the old way to take time to learn a new way. I do close my eyes to progress when it comes to typewriters. This may spring, in part, from a deep feeling I have that it’s wrong to try to impose efficiency on a writer.
My antipathy for too much nostalgia can probably be traced to several hundred little antique shops where I have stopped to talk with conniving antiquaries. It seems as though every time people find out there’s money in something, they ruin it. The good antique shops are outnumbered by the bad ones.
The revival of the style of the 1920s and 1930s has helped turn me off nostalgia. They call it Art Deco but to me it was the ugliest era that progress ever took us through. It’s all phony frou-frou. Its ashtray art and gilded replicas of the Empire State Building put me off. The emphasis was on how it looked and not much on how it worked. Except for being old it has no virtue and it isn’t even very old. Being old isn’t reason enough to originate a revival of anything anyway. Age is no guarantee of quality in objects or people.
Too many of the revivals in art forms are fads based more on commercial enterprise than artistic worth. Someone stumbles across an obscure style in architecture, painting or furniture practiced by an appropriately unknown artist and they revive that style because they know where they can lay their hands on fifty examples of it and make themselves a quick buck. Art doesn’t enter into it and nostalgia works as well for the dealer as fear does for the insurance salesman.
It isn’t easy to live in the present. The temptation to sit thinking about the past or dreaming of the future is always there because it’s easier than getting up off your tail and doing something today.
I love the electronic gadgets that promise a magic future in which we can do the hardest jobs with the touch of a button. It’s just that experience has taught me that the promise usually precedes the product by so many years that it’s better to put off anticipating it until it’s actually in the store window.
I like old movies, old music, old furniture and old books but if I had to choose between spending the day with dreams of the future or memories of the past or this day I have at hand, I think I’d take pot luck with today.
Life, Long and Short
I change my mind a lot about whether life is long or short. Looking back at how quickly a son or daughter grew up or at how many years I’ve been out of high school, life seems to be passing frighteningly fast. Then I look around me at the evidence of the day-to-day things I’ve done and life seems long. Just looking at the coffee cans I’ve saved makes life look like practically forever. We only use eight or ten tablespoons of coffee a day. Those cans sure represent a lot of days.
Used coffee cans are the kind of statistics on life that we don’t keep. Maybe if we kept them, it would help give a feeling of longevity. Maybe when each of us has his own computer at home, we’ll be able to save the kinds of statistics the announcers use during baseball games.
It’s always fun, for instance, to try to remember how many cars you’ve owned. Think back to your first car, and it makes life seem longer. If
Life, Long and Short 137
you’re fifty years old, you’ve probably owned so many cars you can’t even remember all of them in order. I’ve also wondered how many miles I’ve driven. That’s a statistic most people could probably make a fair guess at. If you’ve put roughly seventy-five thousand miles on twenty cars, you’ve driven a million and a half miles. You’ve probably spent something like twenty-five thousand dollars on gas.
It’s more difficult to estimate the number of miles you’ve walked. Is there any chance