Perseverance Isn’t Everything, It’s the Only Thing.
(Pace Vince Lombardi.) This is a big theme with me. It’s the central tenet of my worldwide karate school, whose all-purpose salutation, OSU! (used rather like “Shalom” to mean hello, goodbye, I hear you, I understand, I’ll try hard), is a contraction of Oshi shinobu, “endure under pressure.” It was the epiphany I had from reading the incredible story of the Hubble Space Telescope (I highly recommend this book) . It is the biggest lesson experience—of not persevering, at least as much as of persevering—has taught me.
But what I want to share with you right now is a very small, seemingly trivial example. A puzzle.
An acrostic puzzle, in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, that I worried at like a tenacious terrier all day. I’m usually pretty good at these puzzles, in which crossword-type clues below provide letters to fill into numbered spaces in a passage from a book, above. The initial letters of the solved clues below will spell out the names of the author and the work. As you begin to spot the shapes of words and sentences in the passage and to fill in missing letters, these in turn help to fill in the answers to the clues below. It’s an enjoyable interplay between two kinds of guesswork—solving clues and seeing word-and-meaning gestalts—and I’m much better at the second kind. Often I’ll be able to solve only a few of the clues, but putting just a scattering of letters into the passage may enable me to begin to see what it says. (This is the same autistic-savant talent that once won me a car on Wheel of Fortune.)
So yesterday, when I tackled last Sunday’s puzzle, which my dad had saved for me with one clue filled in, it was an affront to my amour-propre and a challenge to my chops. First of all—no fair!—the answers to three of the clues below (J., “First name of this quote’s author;” Q., “With R., author who wrote about J.”; R., “See Q.”) seemed to depend on having already solved the passage. (It was even worse, and better, than that.) Then, as the passage began to take shape, it didn’t make any sense. OK, that looked like “Young people” at the beginning, but “Young people at the most”? “Young people on the moor”? These young people had something—did it really say “thirty books”?—”in their pouches,” or maybe “in their pockets, or hanging on the pommels of their saddles.” Huh? “Attached books to my ears as pendants”—books? Can’t be. Even more confusingly, as more clues came clear, the “author” of the passage seemed to be a fictional character, Cyrano (J.) de Bergerac, written about, of course, by Edmond (Q.) Rostand (R.). This puzzle was breaking all the rules!
I kept hitting a wall, putting it aside, doing some work, listening to my parents’ delightful anniversary reminiscences about what they were doing on and around their wedding day 70 years ago, and then coming back to the damn puzzle. I couldn’t leave it alone. It was a matter of pride, but far more, a matter of dogged, ornery curiosity. What the hell? Finally, this was it—and it still didn’t make any sense:
Young people of the moon can have thirty books in their pockets or hanging on the pommels of their saddles. They need only wind a spring to hear one. I attached books to my ears as pendants and went for a walk in town.
~ de Bergerac, The Other World
Weirdest of all was that it seemed to be a description of an iPod, as sported by a lunar gaucho, or ???
The payoff for my perseverance (in my experience, it always rewards!) came when I Googled this enigma. Who knew there was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, on whom the fictional lovestruck swordsman was loosely based—a fierce enthusiast of nascent science, a founder of the genre of science fiction? And that, in a book “historically referred to as Voyage dans la lune, ‘A Trip to the Moon,’” but which Cyrano insisted on titling L’Autre Monde ou les états et empires de la lune—a book written in 1650—Cyrano, like Leonardo, had imagined inventions that wouldn’t exist for 350 years? Books attached to my ears as pendants?!
And here is the whole book! And here is a succinct tribute to Cyrano’s “revolutionary spirit.” And here (breaking my usual rule) is a pretty good biography on Wikipedia, in which we learn that Cyrano influenced Jonathan Swift.
Moral of the story: if I had given up on that puzzle, I would never have learned any of this.
Ambiance 
LouiseM said,
May 25, 2012 at 1:54 am
Quest extended.
amba12 said,
May 25, 2012 at 1:57 am
:) I think we’ll be saying that a lot.
kngfish said,
May 25, 2012 at 8:18 am
Ha! Oddly enough. the game I got that “Quest Extended” idea from dovetails nicely with this post. The game is “Tales of The Arabian Nights”, and, as it is a game version of those fantastical stories, many of the things in the book can happen to the players. But perseverance is what lets you win, the rest are mere distractions.
So, we have had a player be a Insane,Diseased, Sex-Changed, Envious,Monkey….but still win!
amba12 said,
May 25, 2012 at 8:48 am
That’s life in a nutshell!
You know I want to write about J and call it “10,001 Transylvanian Nights.”
kngfish said,
May 25, 2012 at 9:29 am
You need the appropriate Eastern European version of Scherazade… Ambviazade?
mockturtle said,
May 25, 2012 at 10:10 am
While I knew Cyrano was real, I’ve never read any of his work. Thank you for the link! As a lifelong admirer of Jonathan Swift, I was intrigued to find that he was influenced by Cyrano’s work. So I shall read L’Autre Monde, maybe a chapter per day. :-) [Do we really need anything outside the Renaissance?]
Perseverance: Noble, to be sure. If only I could distinguish it from ‘beating a dead horse’. Not noble. ;-)
Donna B. said,
May 25, 2012 at 1:09 pm
I was going to ask the name of the game, so thanks. Ambivazade? Perfect!
mockturtle said,
May 25, 2012 at 3:04 pm
I won’t be reading it, after all. The translation is flat and devoid of the satiric edge that the original no doubt displays. I did find an online volume in French http://www.scribd.com/doc/2092769/Cyrano-de-Bergerac-LAutre-Monde-ou-les-Etats-et-Empires-de-la-Lune but, alas, my French, poor at best, has fallen into irreparable decay and just getting through a paragraph is a struggle. :-(
Translation, as I found reading Dostoyevsky, is everything when it comes to foreign novels.
amba12 said,
May 25, 2012 at 3:12 pm
I haven’t tried yet. I was a little put off by the translator’s attempt to be oh so contemporary in his chapter titles; that seemed like straining for relevance, or misrepresentation, or something. But if I do read it and come across good bits, I’ll post them here.
mockturtle said,
May 25, 2012 at 3:27 pm
My copy of Rabelais’, The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel was translated by J.M. Cohen and is excellent!! :-) He has also translated many other French writers but not, apparently, Cyrano.
Ron said,
May 25, 2012 at 4:08 pm
Donna, the current version of the game is this…. http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34119/tales-of-the-arabian-nights
But I’ve known the designer a long time, and he’s sent me each version going back to ’85!
Donna B. said,
May 25, 2012 at 8:03 pm
not in stock at Amazon and the one for sale on ebay is the 1985 version. How much difference between that version and the newest one? I’m browsing the other stuff on Amazon.
kngfish said,
May 25, 2012 at 8:25 pm
The more modern version has “cleaned up” components, but it is essentially the same game as the 85 version!
Donna B. said,
May 26, 2012 at 2:29 am
While I can’t quite see my daughters getting into this game, I can see the men they married gleefully participating. The daughters can bring us wine, beer, and snacks.
:-)
kngfish said,
May 26, 2012 at 7:51 am
I got sent the French version of this game….where tops are viewed as unnecessary for the ladies…even on the map!
Donna B. said,
May 26, 2012 at 8:23 pm
I can see my sons-in-law playing that version, but it’s likely I would be left out.
kngfish said,
May 27, 2012 at 12:49 am
It’s a lot of fun….I’ve played with many folks for years, and it is far easier than most of my games!
Maxwell James said,
May 30, 2012 at 6:50 pm
I learned about Cyrano from the science fiction series Riverworld by Philip Jose Farmer. The series begins when one day, everyone who has ever lived on Earth wakes up, naked and in the bodies they had when they were 25, on the banks of an enormous river that seems to go on forever. The main characters were Richard Francis Burton, Mark Twain, and Alice Liddell – with Cyrano de Bergerac playing a memorable supporting role, including an epic duel with Burton.
I had just read the play in high school, and was utterly stunned that Cyrano was actually an historical person.
While the series was just so-so, the Riverworld itself remains one of my favorite sci-fi inventions.