day, in Tel Aviv -- I was about twelve -- I asked a passerby for the time.
“Why do you care,” he retorted and walked away. A few days later, as I rummaged in search of shoelaces at a Jerusalem bazaar, the merchant informed me with studied indifference that he’d run out but would be happy to sell me toothpaste. I could have demurred but I didn’t. This sort of pluck, this archetypal chutzpah, would teach me, as my ancestors called their “pedagogics” -- two basic lessons:
Time swallows everything; then it swallows itself. To know the time is a nuisance. It does nothing to alter its course.
Without a trace of irreverence, malice or lunacy, wit is humorless.
I would seize the moment one day and get even. Call it atavism or chromosomes on speed. In 1956, shortly after I immigrated to America, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. The recruiter asked if I could swim.
“Why,” I asked without a trace of irony, “don’t you have ships?” I no longer wonder whether the recruiter had ever, even for a moment, envisaged the rib-splitting perspective of a fleet bereft of vessels.
“Why are you enlisting in the Navy?”
“So I don’t have to swim across the Atlantic.”
I know the martial soul of the military. It’s a soul that asks itself few questions. Its optic reveals a grimness and narrowness of mind that forbids it to ponder abstractions or hypotheticals. My deadpan baiting would qualify me as an “agitator” in U.S. Navy files. I would later be branded a gadfly, a muckraker, a heretic, and worse.
RULES OF THE GAME
By the age of thirteen I could recite tens of dictums, epigrams and barbs. Their origin is lost in time. I imagine each had sprouted spontaneously in response to some stimulus or vexation, all the echo of the sardonic genius, the iconoclasm of my dynasty. Surely some go back centuries. Recast, amended and fine-tuned over the years, others exude a scent of faded modernity. I’ve since retouched and rejuvenated those that needed to harmonize with the vagaries of my era. I’ve added many more of my own:
ACQUAINTANCE (1): Someone we know sufficiently well to borrow from but not well enough to lend to.
ACQUAINTANCE (2): Degree of friendship dismissed as insignificant if the subject is poor but described as intimate if he is rich or famous.
ADMIRE: To recognize oneself in the object of our infatuation.
ALLIANCE: In politics, the union of two crooks whose hands are so deeply buried in each-other’s pockets that they’re incapable of robbing a third.
AMBITION: The uncontrollable urge to be scorned by those who have none.
BACK: That part of a friend’s anatomy we can admire when we’re down and out.
BEGGAR: Someone who once relied on his friends.
BIRTH: The beginning of the end.
BORDER: In geopolitics, an artificial line between two regions that separates the imaginary rights of one from the fictitious claims of the other.
BRAIN: Organ that allows humans to pretend that they’re capable of thought.
BREASTS: Milky ways.
CLEAN CONSCIENCE: Faulty memory.
CANNON: Instrument used to redraw borders.
CONGRATULATE: To cloak jealousy in garments of gallantry.
CONVICTION: Inflexible belief, generally absurd.
COWARD: Someone who thinks with his legs.
CYNICISM: To see things as they really are.
DEMOCRACY: Self-destructive political system that tolerates the existence of undemocratic institutions.
DIGESTION: The process that reminds us what we’re really made of.
DICTATOR: Statesman who turns to despotism when anarchy threatens him.
DIPLOMACY: The art of lying on behalf of one’s country.
EGOTIST: Someone who cares more about himself than about me.
EXCUSE: Ruse that paves the way for a future affront.
FAILURE: Virtual success.
FAITH: The illogical belief in the occurrence of the impossible.
FELLOW MAN: Mythical being we are ordered to love as ourselves and who does everything to make us disobey.
FRIENDSHIP: Invitation to ingratitude.
FUTURE: The refuge of optimists.
GIFT: Investment without guarantee of dividends.
HOPE: Antidote against reality.
KILL: To create an opening without naming a successor.
LIFE: Nightmare of the wide-awake.
LOYALTY: Virtue of those who have not yet been betrayed.
NATIONALISM: Flag-draped racism and xenophobia.
NEUTRALITY: Crime of indifference; aloofness further sullied by cowardice and opportunism.
OPINION: Second-hand conviction often modified according to need.
OPPORTUNITY: Prospect susceptible to disappointment.
OPTIMISM: Baseless faith in intangible results.
ORPHAN: Someone whose parents’ death prevents him from being ungrateful.
PATIENCE: Waste of time.
PATRIOTISM: (See NATIONALISM).
PEACE: Brief intermission between wars.
PESSIMIST: Someone who is never disappointed.
PHILOSOPHY: Speculative art whose objective is to render all things simple complicated or incomprehensible.
PLAN: Method that leads to unintended consequences.
POLITENESS: Two-faced courtesy.
PRAGMATISM: Selfishness disguised as realism.
PUBLICITY: Mass-deception.
RHINE: Eau de Cologne.
SOLITUDE: In the best of company.
SPECIALIST: Amateur who knows almost everything about very little and nothing about the rest.
TRUTH: A lie we can believe in.
USURY: Crime of interest.
WISDOM: Form of intuition and circumspection that blossoms with age; the conscious but reluctant control of reckless instincts.
NEVER FAR FROM THE TREE
I descend from a long line of mavericks, thinkers, would-be prophets,