Wise men, and Garth Brooks

'Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go," was the daily thought printed at the bottom of December in the 2007-2008 academic monthly calendar I bought at my son's college. The apercu, written by T.S. Eliot, was appropriate for a collegiate calendar, not only because it was perspicacious but because its author was an academic himself. I was tickled that Eliot was captured in a kleptomaniac frame of mind, as his axiom was a direct lift from Oliver Cromwell's observation, "No man goes further than he who knows not where he is going."

It reassured me to find the most famous poet of the 20th century represented so well here, as it did when I found similarly pithy remarks by Abraham Lincoln ("Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought"), Gandhi ("You must be the change you wish to see in the world") and George S. Patton ("Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom"). These were titans of one sort or another, and all were offering the kind of advice that students could conceivably find useful, if not today, perhaps tomorrow.

Paging through the calendar, I found astute observations by novelist John Gardner ("Life is the art of drawing without an eraser") and Ralph Waldo Emerson ("We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit"), while Pablo Picasso, enigmatic to the last, logged in with the solipsistic but illuminating disclosure: "I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."

Things rippled along at a nice, inspirational pace with "You don't have to be tall to see the moon," a sweet African proverb, and "There are two lasting gifts you can give your child. One is roots, the other wings." The author of this observation was listed as "Anonymous," and, as was so often the case with the thoughts of those identified only as "Anonymous," it was very sagacious indeed.

Then things took a jarring turn. Opening the page for February, I was greeted by the words "Life is not tried, it is merely survived, if you're standing outside the fire." This observation, fusing the hackneyed with the corny in a vapid stew of flatulence and pretentiousness, had issued from the pen of Garth Brooks. Yes, that Garth Brooks. This floored me.

Here I was, paying $40,000 a year to send my son to a university to study the classics, to devour the works of Homer, Virgil, Suetonius, Tacitus, Ovid, Herodotus and, yes, even Hesiod, only to find that it was selling academic calendars that contained the wit and wisdom of Garth Brooks.