In the bonus, we continue our discussion with Eli Burnstein, author of "Phrased & Confused." We look at why "Life is short, art is long" was originally about medicine and how "Fail again. Fail better" comes from a surprisingly bleak Samuel Beckett novella. Then we look at why a Zen master would tell his students to kill the Buddha.
In the bonus, we continue our discussion with Eli Burnstein, author of "Phrased & Confused." We look at why "Life is short, art is long" was originally about medicine and how "Fail again. Fail better" comes from a surprisingly bleak Samuel Beckett novella. Then we look at why a Zen master would tell his students to kill the Buddha.
Find Eli at eliburnstein.com.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: This ad-free podcast is part of your Grammarpalooza subscription.
Greetings, Grammarpaloozians! We are here with Eli Burnstein about his book "Phrased and Confused." One of the things I loved about it is finding out that familiar quotations don't mean quite what I thought they did, but I also came across phrases I had never heard before, and a lot of those were interesting, too. So we're going to talk about those in this bonus segment. Eli, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Eli Burnstein: Oh, thanks for having me back.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, so there were so many. So here's one I hadn't heard before: "The way that can be told is not the eternal way."
Eli Burnstein: Yeah, so that is the opening line of the "Tao Te Ching," which is kind of the founding text of Taoism, which is in turn kind of considered one of the three main wellsprings of Chinese philosophy and religion and thought, the others being Buddhism and Confucianism. So Taoism, you know, there are a few big texts in it, but the original one is called the "Tao Te Ching." The opening line, "The way that can be expressed is not the eternal way." So this is this beautifully opaque reflection on the possibilities and impossibilities of language, and it's made ironic by the fact that it is the first line in a poem where language is being used to kind of help people evolve their behavior so as to be in greater harmony with the way or the Tao. So Taoism, the word "Tao" means the way. What is the way? It is the fundamental principle of the universe, and the book is trying to get people to kind of live in harmony with the way. So to return to the line, "The way that can be expressed is not the eternal way," it is ultimately a kind of disclaimer. It is saying that language cannot capture perfectly what the way is. The way is beneath language, it is before language. So language, what we do with language is kind of sort things into boxes, we name things, we label them, we classify, and ultimately the text is saying we have to be careful about that, because the more we do that, the more we run the risk of kind of having this conceptual and detached relationship with the world, whereas to be in harmony with the way is to kind of slip into the world and live in the kind of dynamism of the world. And if that sounds kind of anti-linguistic, there is a silver lining to this, which is the poetic and kind of the beautiful in language, because if the poem is kind of saying language cannot show you the way, it is also kind of winking while it does so, because there are now 81 verses that essentially kind of make you feel the way. But importantly, it makes you feel the way in an indirect way, in a poetic way, and I think poetry or beautiful language more broadly, according to the "Tao Te Ching," or at least my interpretation of it, can resubmerge you in the flow of life. It makes you feel something. It actually gets you out of your head. So writing can either kind of feel cold and detached, or it can really fire you up and just like any other kind of moment of beauty, kind of resubmerge you in the flow of life.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, in the book "Phrased and Confused," it is beautifully illustrated, and my favorite illustration was the one that went with this, because it was an arrow that is sort of dissolving as you get closer to the point of it, and I thought that was just an inspired way to convey what is a very abstract idea. How would you convey the idea that words can't convey the way? And then I just thought it was brilliant.
Eli Burnstein: Yeah, I love that one. Well, all credit goes to Liana Finck, the illustrator, and her brilliant mind.
Mignon Fogarty: How did you work together? Did you just give her the phrases and she came up with them on her own, or was there some back and forth?
Eli Burnstein: There was some back and forth, but mostly Liana did her own thing. So I shared kind of an early draft of the manuscript with her, and she kind of in batches would send the illustrations back to me. There were some that were kind of, you know, home runs out the gate; there were a few where I kind of wanted to go in a different direction; there were also some where I wanted to go in a different direction and then ultimately realized she knew what she was doing a lot better than I did, and I came full circle and said, "You know what? Your first idea was brilliant, and I just didn't see it, because I was, I think, like so many writers, had some vision for how things should look to go with the book," but I think the more I let go of that, maybe in the spirit of the line we just discussed, I think the better. But, you know, Liana, yeah, she's got a beautiful mind. I think that she really captured the spirit of philosophy, but also of play, that is in a lot of the entries, and I think that they're a really lovely accent to the text.
Mignon Fogarty: Do you have a favorite one?
Eli Burnstein: Yes. There are a few I love, but I think one of my favorites is from the biblical quote, "In the beginning was the Word." So that's one of these quotes that's not misunderstood so much as not very well understood at all, at least by me. This was in fact one of the animating quotes for the book altogether. It was a quote that I've long heard and just gone, "What does that mean?" And, you know, it was one of the ones at the top of my list. There's God essentially speaking the universe into existence. And to me, I just think it is so beautiful. I think it's fun, but it's also so thought-provoking, and, you know, you see the stars of the cosmos kind of being vocalized into being. And I think that that gets to the heart of kind of what the quotes—"In the beginning was the Word," well, this line from the Gospel of John, it's the first line in the Gospel of John, he's trying to say that language, or more specifically logos, which means language, but also thought, is kind of the principle of creation. This is how God—God doesn't need clay, he doesn't need steel, he doesn't need any materials, he just, what he says or what he thinks is, and I think the image captures that idea perfectly.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Yeah, here's another old one that just surprised me that it doesn't mean what people think it means: "Life is short, art is long."
Eli Burnstein: Yes, I like this one a lot, too. So it may not have quite the stature of "I think, therefore I am," or "The medium is the message," but it's a well-known line, and to those who have heard it, the common interpretation is that life is short, but art lives forever, or beauty never dies, or our creations live on after us. But that is not what the line means. So "Life is short, art is long" actually means that life is short, art takes a long time to master. So be patient, work hard, be humble, be diligent, and, you know, the proof of the original meaning is in who said it. So it comes from Hippocrates, who was an ancient Greek figure widely regarded as the father of medicine. And it comes from his book, "The Aphorisms," which immediately after that beautiful first sentence dives into pretty gruesome specifics around purging patients who have diarrhea, and, you know, using all kinds of archaic medical practices. So he's talking, strictly speaking, about the art of medicine, and so he's using the word "art" in the broader sense of a craft, or, you know, like the art of kung fu, or the art of sailing, or the art of, you know—and I think the point that he's making applies well beyond the field of medicine to any of these so-called arts, right? That life is short, art takes a long time to get good at. So it's not a sprint, it's a marathon, and if you feel dejected by, you know, the slow progress you're making in writing or whatever it is that you're doing, it's a kind of a beautiful reminder to be patient and to keep at it.
Mignon Fogarty: It can be inspirational, and like our next one from Samuel Beckett that's often used on inspirational posters about failure, but also like has a sort of different original meaning at least.
Eli Burnstein: That's right. "Fail again, fail better" comes from the Irish poet and playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, the author of "Waiting for Godot" and a Nobel Prize winner. It's funny, because this line has entered kind of the business and tech world in a huge way, as well as kind of the world of just inspirational quotes, but it's really the world of tech and business has latched onto this quote. In fact, there are, I think, now seven or eight podcasts, most from the business world, with the term "fail better" in it. And you can see why it would enter this world, because it ultimately is about kind of iteration and prototyping and continuing to try, because in trying and in failing, we learn and we get better. These are ideas that are in the original text, but first let me pause and reflect on the, you know, observe the irony of who it came from, because Samuel Beckett is an absurdist and kind of tragicomic writer. He is the last person you would expect inspirational quotes to come from, let alone LinkedIn business and tech wisdom to come from. And so it is a very unlikely origin for this phrase. That being said, I think there is overlap between the kind of popular inspirational meaning and the original. However, if you read the original, you'll see that the overlap is partial, because it comes from a very weird novel or novella that Beckett wrote called "Worstward Ho," as in, we're heading worse, we're heading towards the worst. And it is a very experimental novella in which an author basically is trying to write something, and he keeps hating what he's writing, and basically says, "First this. No, first that. No, hate this. Hate that. Fail better." You know, "or fail again, fail better. No, fail worse. No, till I'm sick." And ultimately, it sounds like by the end of the paragraph, the speaker is puking. So it's not very cheerful, it's pretty dark, it's pretty funny. It's the, again, like I said, the last place you'd think that people would get inspired, but it is a reflection, I think, upon, you know, as as writers will know, it is a reflection upon the experience of writing that's really in the in the in the word-by-word experience of it, that we're not necessarily—it is not this beautiful, flowing experience of just taking what's in our minds and putting it out, it is actually mostly what you could call a via negativa or a negative path of just crossing out the things that you hate. You're kind of trying to clear away all the clichés and all the unoriginal stuff that you're like, "No, that's not it. No, that's not right. That's not," but you don't know what "it" is until it's there. So it's this kind of fail better experience that's kind of motivating, but it's also kind of like it's forever going to be hopeless. You're never going to get perfection. You're going to get to a place where you can live with it. And so it's humorous, it's tragic, it's kind of Sisyphean, that there's this endless kind of struggle to capture what we mean in words. There's this kind of quasi-nauseous thing that's going on. Anyway, it's pretty wild, and certainly doesn't quite just mean, you know, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."
Mignon Fogarty: And then the last one, I found this shocking! So I'm reading your book and suddenly I see, "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha." I'm like, "No! Don't kill the Buddha. Why are we killing the Buddha?"
Eli Burnstein: That's right. I love this quote for, you know, shock value is a literary device, and I think this phrase uses it well. When I read that, it really caught my attention. I said, "I have to put this in the book." It's just, "What does that mean?" So again, it's not quite as well known as "The Road Not Taken" or some of the other quotes in the book. However,, you know, readers who have dabbled in or who practice Zen Buddhism might know it, because it comes from one of the kind of leading figures of the Zen Buddhist tradition, a figure named Linji, and this is one of his famous quotes. It's often considered what's called a koan, or a kind of Buddhist riddle, along the lines of "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" or "If a tree falls in the woods, no one's there to hear it, doesn’t it make a sound?" "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha." Why would you do that? Isn't he our hero? And Linji's point is precisely, "This isn't about hero worship, this is about you." So he was ultimately trying to move us against hero worship, idol worship, kind of the academization of Buddhism, that we kind of sit around and we quibble over the meanings of what certain masters said, when ultimately he's saying, "You know, you're all overthinking this. This is about you. This isn't about intellectualizing. This isn't about, you know, what some long dead master said. This is about you and about being detached and independent." And so, an important, in case it's not clear already, he didn't mean it literally. He wasn't saying, "Go out and be violent." He was saying, "Kill the image of Buddha that you have in your head." You're not doing it because of some guy, you're doing this because of you.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, the book is "Phrased and Confused" by Eli Burnstein. It was fabulous. I enjoyed it so much, Eli, I really did. Thank you for writing it and sharing with us on the show what it's about. And now I'm going to ask you to recommend other people's books. We do our book recommendation section, so after you read "Phrased and Confused," what do you recommend that people enjoy when they're sitting down to read?
Eli Burnstein: Great. I've got my pile of books right here. First, let me say it's also been such a pleasure to be back, so thank you so much for having me. It was a lovely conversation. Okay, so the first book I'd like to recommend is this book called "The Elements of Eloquence" by Mark Forsyth. So he also wrote a more well-known book called "The Etymologicon," which I'm sure you're familiar with, where he looks at kind of the etymologies of the English language. It's a really fun book. I especially love this one, though, because he goes through all these rhetorical devices or figures of speech chapter by chapter. It kind of breaks down what makes sentences pop, basically, right? So he starts with obvious ones like alliteration, but then he moves into these increasingly obscure ones like chiasmus, which is one where the second half of a sentence mirrors the first. So, you know, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," or, you know, according to JFK, that's a good example of chiasmus, you know, and and it's memorable for that reason, or or another one is hendiadys, which is when we we say something like, "Oh, I'd like to get that," you know, "I want to get the bath good and warm." We don't want to get it good, we just want to get it warm, but we kind of add a second word and use a conjunction. A more famous example, that's kind of a colloquial one, a more famous example would be Shakespeare's line, "the sound and the fury," or "full of sound and fury." I don't think, you know, what is it? "Life's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing." Most scholars would say what he really means is "full of furious sound," right? The tale isn't full of fury, it's full of this kind of furious sound, but turning it into two nouns instead of an adjective and a noun, that's hendiadys. Anyway, this book is full of those. I got a real kick out of kind of in his looking at like little passages from literature showing all these great literary devices.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I loved it, too. I have it somewhere back here on my bookshelf. Yeah.
Eli Burnstein: Oh, amazing, amazing. And then another one that I like is this book called "How Fiction Works" by James Wood. So James Wood is a New Yorker book critic. I think he's a staff writer at The New Yorker. He's written lots of book reviews for them, but I think he has… He's also, I think, a literature professor. But he's just got a beautiful writing style, very accessible, and he just goes through, you know, what it is that makes fiction great, character, story, the telling detail. He's philosophical without being too dry. I found it just a very thought-provoking read. It's a quick little read. He's also got collections of book reviews that are great, too. And again, as you could tell, I've got a bit of a I've got a soft spot for kind of theory and literary criticism, and I think that he just makes it really accessible. But my third is a novel, so it's not it's not it's not all, uh, you know, theory, although both those books are really fun and light. But here's a novel I read earlier this year called "The Anthologist" by Nicholson Baker, and I just thought it was, again, not a huge read, but I just thought it was so fun, so funny, light, but at the same time kind of very tender and philosophical. It's about a poet who has been assigned a project of writing an introduction for a poetry anthology, and he basically spends the book doing anything but that. So it is all about procrastination, so it is extremely relatable in my life, and I'm sure for the many writers listening, it will be relevant in theirs. You don't need to be a writer to know about procrastination, actually, but it's just funny, but kind of deep and a little bit sad, and I think Nicholson Baker's just got a beautiful turn of phrase.
Mignon Fogarty: That sounds wonderful, wonderful. Oh, well, thank you so much, Eli. Again, Eli Burnstein, his book is "Phrased and Confused," and I loved it. Eli, where can people find you?
Eli Burnstein: They can find me online at eliBurnstein.com. I'm also on Substack and Twitter and Instagram, and you can find my book "Phrased and Confused" wherever you get your books.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Thanks so much for being here.
Eli Burnstein: My pleasure. Thank you so much, Mignon.