January 1, 2014

My love affair with metaphorical quotations began exactly 51 years ago today, and I have to thank Henry David Thoreau for making the introduction.

In the middle of my junior year at the University of North Dakota, I was also in the middle of the darkest and most depressing period of my life. While I was formally majoring in psychology, my true major was College Life. I was president of my fraternity, vice-president of the Student Senate, a member of the prestigious Blue Key service fraternity, and an officer in Golden Feather, a cool pep club that had the enviable task of selecting cheerleaders for the school’s athletic teams. To use a popular expression of the era, I was a BMOC (Big Man on Campus).

From the outside, I was leading a full and exciting life. On the inside, I felt cold and hollow.

In hindsight, all of my extra-curricular efforts were attempts to bolster a shaky sense of self-esteem. But instead of feeling good about my accomplishments and better about myself, I was discovering that the path I’d been walking down was not taking me to a place I wanted to go.

Just before Christmas vacation in 1962, my house of cards crumbled. Nowadays, we’d say I was having an “Identity Crisis,” but that term had not yet been coined. I abruptly—and somewhat ungracefully—resigned from all the groups that had previously been so important to me. My actions angered almost all of my friends, and I soon became persona non grata around campus. Feeling lonely and confused, I took a small room in the basement of a dark and dingy off-campus apartment. I also scheduled an appointment at the college counseling center.

I immediately hit it off with my counselor, a warm and quirky fellow named “Dr. Sprinkle” (yes, his real name). He was not a big fan of fraternities, cleverly tweaking Thoreau by calling them “places of noisy desperation.” At the end of our first session, he succinctly stated the task at hand: “Your goal is to find yourself.”

During our second or third session, Dr. Sprinkle asked me if I had ever read Walden. When I said I was familiar with the title, but had not read the book, he said simply, “I believe Thoreau was thinking about someone like you when he wrote it.” Intrigued by this curiously attractive recommendation, I checked the book out of the college library just before it closed for school vacation. I vowed to begin reading it on January 1, 1963, figuring it might be a good way to begin the new year.

Not long into the book, I was struck by the parallel between my recent choices and Thoreau’s decision to “live deliberately.” I resonated deeply to his goal:

“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

Life, of course, doesn’t have marrow; bones do. But Thoreau was writing metaphorically, not literally. And by crafting his words in this way, he created an unforgettable image. As I continued reading, passage after passage gripped me. Near the end of the book, the following words almost jumped off the pages:

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

I had already begun to think of Thoreau as a valued new friend and, here he was, eloquently describing my own recent situation. If I ever had any doubts about the wisdom of my decision to walk down a different path, they completely evaporated in that moment. I immediately wrote the passage on a three-by-five index card and thumb-tacked it on the wall above my desk.

As I delved deeper into the works of Thoreau and other authors, I continued this simple ritual of recording quotations on index cards and tacking them up on the wall. Another Thoreau quotation, this one from his journal, also spoke to me:

“Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.”

By relating human lives to the course of a river and suggesting that life flows much like a river does, Thoreau was continuing his metaphorical ways. Yes, Shakespeare had said pretty much the same thing about following our deepest inclinations in “To thine own self be true,” but that line had already become hackneyed. The Thoreau observation seemed new and special.

After several months, the dark cloud that had been hovering over my life slowly drifted away, the confusion I’d been experiencing turned to clarity, and my dingy apartment was transformed into a space alive with powerful ideas posted all around. I was, to return to the goal my counselor had set for me a few months earlier, beginning to find myself. Many years later, I would come across a Rudyard Kipling quotation that helped to illuminate the whole experience:

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

Thus began my life as a quotation collector—which continues to this day—and which ultimately resulted in six published quotation anthologies, including I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like (2008). That book contained nearly 2,000 metaphorical quotations out of more than 10,000 filed away in my personal collection. I wondered back then if I would ever get a chance to share them with others. It now appears that I will—and more.

In April of 2013, I discussed the concept of BHAGs (pronounced “BEE-hags”) in a weekly e-newsletter I’ve been sending out for many years. First introduced by the bestselling business author Jim Collins, BHAG is an acronym for “Big Hairy Audacious Goals.” In that issue, I formally announced my own:

“Within the next several years, my goal is to put together the largest collection of metaphorical quotations ever assembled and make the entire collection freely available to people around the world. I'm envisioning a compilation of over 100,000 quotations (that's about the size of five Bartlett's quotation books), organized in an A-to-Z format. So for anyone who wants to see the greatest metaphorical quotations ever authored on adversity, aging, or art (or life, love, and laughter; or science, sex, and success; or several hundred other topics) the information will be available instantaneously. And unlike the error-plagued quotations found on most current websites, the ones I feature will be authenticated and sourced.”

When I first announced my BHAG, I had no idea exactly how I would do it. That’s the way it often is with audacious goals. But with advice from friends and technical assistance from a talented webmaster, the path soon became clear. So, for the past ten months, I’ve worked long hours to turn my dream into a reality. And with the official launch of Dr. Mardy’s Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations on January 1, 2014, I’ve made an important first step toward achieving my goal.

Will I ever make it to my goal of 100,000 quotations? Who knows? But two things are clear. One, I’m having the time of my life working on this project. And two, at age seventy-one, I know exactly what I'll be doing on the day I eventually depart this mortal coil.

To the best of my knowledge, nothing quite like this has ever appeared (or even been attempted) on the Internet. The collection is meant to be a major reference tool that is also a browser’s delight. In a World Wide Web teeming with quotation sites that routinely make egregious errors, it’s an oasis of rigorously authenticated and fully sourced quotations. And never with an annoying pop-up ad!

It’s all the work of a single person: me (standing, of course, on the shoulders of innumerable quotation collectors who have preceded me over the centuries), and encouraged and assisted by friends and supporters from around the globe.

I've had a full and satisfying life and career, and this is my legacy project. I view it as a loving and lasting gift to language and quotation lovers everywhere. A remark made by writer Allan Gurganus in a 1989 interview captures my approach to this project:

“My relationship to language is like a carpenter’s relationship to wood. I didn’t invent the twenty-six letters of the alphabet any more than a carpenter invents the trees. The goal is to take that material and make something beautiful and lasting, decorative and enduring.”

Thanks for indulging me in my personal reflections. Enjoy!