Some of life’s greatest truths are told via the most clever settings. (Maybe we listen better that way.) From the witty 1973 novel that evolved into the movie, The Princess Bride, by William Goldman…
It’s one of my biggest memories of my father reading. I had pneumonia, remember, but I was a little better now, and madly caught up in the book, and one thing you know when you’re ten is that, no matter what, there’s gonna be a happy ending. They can sweat all they want to scare you, the authors, but back of it all you know, you just have no doubt, that in the long run justice is going to win out. And Westley and Buttercup – well, they had their troubles, sure, but they were going to get married and live happily ever after, I would have bet the family fortune if I’d found a sucker big enough to take me on.
Well, when my father got through with that sentence where the wedding was sandwiched between the ministers’ meeting and the treasury whatever, I said, “You read that wrong.”
My father’s this little old barber – remember that too? And kind of illiterate. Well, you just don’t challenge a guy who has trouble reading and say he’s read something incorrectly, because that’s really threatening. “I’m doing the reading,” he said.
“I know that, but you got it wrong. She doesn’t marry that rotten Humperdinck. She marries Westley.”
“It says right here,” my father began, a little huffy, and he starts going over it again.
“You must have skipped a page then. Something. Get it right, huh?”
By now he was more than a tiny bit upset. “I skipped nothing. I read the words. The words are there, I read them, good night,” and off he went…
All this was never explained to me till I was in my teens and there was this great woman who lived in my home town, Edith Neisser, dead now, and she wrote terrific books about how we screw up our children… And I remember once we were having iced tea on the Neisser porch and talking and just outside the porch was their badminton court and I was watching some kids play badminton and Ed had just shellacked me, and as I left the court for the porch, he said, “Don’t worry, it’ll all work out, you’ll get me next time” and I nodded, and then Ed said, “And if you don’t, you’ll beat me at something else.”
I went to the porch and sipped iced tea and Edith was reading this book and she didn’t put it down when she said, “That’s not necessarily true, you know.”
I said, “How do you mean?”
And that’s when she put her book down. And looked at me. And said it: “Life isn’t fair, Bill. We tell our children that it is, but it’s a terrible thing to do. It’s not only a lie, it’s a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it’s never going to be…”
“It isn’t!” I said, so loud I really startled her. “You’re right! It’s not fair.” I was so happy if I’d known how to dance, I’d have started dancing. “Isn’t that great, isn’t it terrific?” I think along here Edith must have thought I was well on my way to being bonkers.
But it meant so much to me to have it said and out and free and flying – that was the discontent I had endured the night my father stopped reading, I realized right then. That was the reconciliation I was trying to make and couldn’t.
And that’s what I think this book’s about. All those Columbia experts can spiel all they want about the delicious satire; they’re crazy. This book says, “life’s not fair” and I’m telling you, one and all, you better believe it… we’re not created equal…
Look. (Grownups skip this paragraph.) I’m not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there’s a lot of bad stuff coming up, torture you’ve already been prepared for, but there’s worse. There’s death coming up, and you better understand this: Some of the wrong people die. Be ready for it. This isn’t Curious George Uses the Potty. Nobody warned me and it was my own fault (you’ll see what I mean in a little) and that was my mistake, so I’m not letting it happen to you. The wrong people die, some of them, and the reason is this; life is not fair. Forget all the garbage your parents put out… You’ll be a lot happier.
And yet we live in a society which continues to embrace fairness as a philosophy, arguably believing that such is good and just and will make people happier. Fascinating. The challenge is that each of us have different gifts, different strengths, and even different weaknesses because we are not the same; we have not been created all the same. And yet, there seem fewer adults willing to say it.
Respectfully,
AR