WOW! I read that in line at the grocery store when I was just a wee little Ghengis, and it has stuck with me to this day. I can still remember the last couple of frames: Lucy standing there, having ridiculed Linus, then suddenly becoming aware herself, and shouting “I oughta knock your block off!” at Linus off-page.
I am not positive, but I think mine comes from The Once and Future King. There’s a line in there about how a person rarely looks above his own head after adolescence.
That notion comes back to me one every walk I take, and I always make sure to look at the trees and sky above me now.
One passage from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes work, A Study In Scarlet, comes back to me all the time. When Dr. Watson first meets Mr. Holmes, he is intrigued by the contrast in Holmes’ knowledge: near encyclopedic with respect to some things but near total ignorance in others (“Botany: well up in poisons, but seems to know nothing of practical gardening; appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century”).
His amazement is complete when Holmes professes ignorance of the Solar System’s arrangement, with the Sun at the center, and then goes on to say that he will do his best to forget that factoid now that Watson has apprised (reminded?) him of it, saying: “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic. […] It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
When I first read this as a teenager who prided myself on reading widely and being well-rounded in general knowledge, I scoffed. Why, I remember so much of everything I’ve read, I don’t see why I can’t go on learning more and more about everything that interests me!
But it’s true. Some time in my early- to mid-20s, I think, I became aware that I was forgetting things I knew I used to know. I don’t mean just forgetting little things I had memorized at some point for a test, like the date of the Treaty of Westphalia (I’ve never had a photographic memory after all), but things like, say, my fifth-grade classroom number, which I wrote on a piece of paper every day for 8 months of my life just 10 or 15 years earlier. It had simply atrophied and been pushed out of My Little Attic as no longer necessary.
In W.E.B. Griffen’s series The Brotherhood of War on of the main characters talks about how his family made their fortune. Every time they bought land they never sold it. It stuck with me and is now how I plan to help to build my fortune. Taking my financial planning from that series is why at 25 I own a condo and a townhome.
That reminds me of another reference: My name is Elmer J. Fudd, Millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht.
I will know I have hit the big time riches if I ever own a Mansion and a Yacht. I will not settle for a McMansion and a McYacht.
James Patterson had a wise old woman tell his troubled cop, “Don’t mistake the edge of your rut for the horizon.”