Proverbs

My father was self-educated and a voracious reader, and was attracted to proverbs. I do not mean the book in the Bible found after the Psalms, purportedly written by King Solomon, but rather short pithy wisdom statements of the sort made famous by Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanac. And he used them as a teaching tool all the time – almost as a form of punctuation, or as the moral of the story after something happened to illustrate the proverb.
For example, he hated to argue. Once, I watched him and another man talk about something they disagreed on. It was rather embarrassing, because I knew Dad was right, and yet Dad didn’t even really try to convince the guy that he was wrong. The teenage me was all about winning and dominating your opponent, and here my father was, literally refusing to argue. Later, I asked him why he didn’t try to convince the guy.
“It would have been a waste of time,” he said. “He wasn’t ready to hear it. You can’t convince a man to change his mind if he has made up his mind not to change it. It’s like wrestling a pig – you both get dirty, but the pig’s having fun.”
I laughed at the pig comment.
“Mark Twain said that.” Dad said. He loved to attribute the quotes he knew, probably as a compensation for his lack of formal education, and as an appeal to authority. As if to say that these are not just the thoughts of a working class man from rural Mississippi, but those of one of the great writers of our culture. Sometimes, his attributions were wrong, but always enthusiastic nonetheless. I joked once that all of his quotes were from either Benjamin Franklin or the Bible.
Like the time he told me, “Son, remember, like it says in the Bible, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
“Dad, Franklin Roosevelt said that.”
He said, “Sure, but he was quoting the Bible when he said it.”
I didn’t argue with him. He wasn’t ready to hear it. After all, like Benjamin Franklin said, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”