THAT'S LIFE, ETC.

WITH a little practice, anyone can be a cliche expert. There is a choice of diplomas: either a look of pained contempt or amused pity. Some sophisticates own both. The ability to recognize a cliché and scorn it is a necessary passport to literate circles.
Intolerance is justified, of course. Through incessant repetition, cliches become mere automatic verbal responses to given stimuli.
But there ought to be a postgraduate course, for few things are harder to manufacture than cliches. A successful cliche is (or was originally) the keenest view of a subject and the most concise way of expressing it.
Psychology textbooks need chapters to state: What can't be cured must be endured; take it (an insult or hurt) whence it comes; sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me; that's life; go fight City Hall; here today, gone tomorrow; into every life a little rain must fall; this, too, shall pass; every cloud has a silver lining.
The trouble is not the content or phrasing of the cliche—except that, if done with extreme acuteness and compression, the observation becomes easy to remember and use. People are not likely to say: The tendency to dwell on past errors is an indication of emotional immaturity and must be rigorously checked by recognition of the fact that no amount of such regret can alter a prior experience. Not when the same lesson can be put this clearly: Don't cry over spilled milk.
Whoever first said It's not the heat; it's the humidity undoubtedly made a first-rate scientific observation and did so with the word-economy of a Newton or, for that matter, a Shakespeare.
The actual difference between a cliché and a potential one is purely subject matter. Many masterpieces of clarity and pithiness don't—well, make the grade because they're too specialized. A statement must be usable often and widely before it can qualify as a cliche.
Remember Poe's "The Purloined Letter"? He showed that the best place to hide something is right out in full view, where it's sure to be overlooked. Well, a guaranteed way to take over an alien world is to inflict its knowledge on it in the form of cliches. Finding a startling truth in a brilliant new simplification is a lot easier than peeling the verdigris off an old one.
When a statement that qualifies in every way somehow fails to achieve clichedom in 400 years, I suppose it never will. I don't understand how Michelangelo's Only work can eliminate the traces of work escaped. It was fortunate for me that it did —not having been deafened to his lesson, I was able to apply it to my writing and editing. This editorial you're reading, for example, is the fifth version I've written. Whatever you may think of it, it's clearer and more readable than the first four, which is all Michelangelo was saying.
There are two other entrants that I'm anxious to share, though I know they won't ever be petrified into standard speech.
One is by the late Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Continuity with the past is not a duty; it is only a necessity.
Any number of civilizations might have been saved from extinction if they'd been relieved of mandatory veneration of the past. Literally, there's no future in ancestor worship.
Holmes's injunction also has considerable personal value. Undue attachment to, one's own past can be equally ritualistic and equally disastrous.
As a possible cliché, his statement might, like Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, have a very restricted currency. Certainly neither one fits broad daily needs.
The same, of course, is true of Mankind is just emerging from antiquity, which was said by Bernard Berenson, octogenarian philosopher and expert on Italian painting.
"Oh, we are, are we?" is a good healthy first reaction. "And how about all our scientific progress? What other era in history can match it?"
Exactly. No other era can ... which is why many people, perhaps the majority, blame our current problems on science. But no blame is called for if it's true that mankind is just emerging from antiquity.
Our discoveries are not at fault. We primitively use them as bigger and more destructive balistae, our bomb shelters are larger shields, and radioactivity and disease germs are only the present-day equivalent of plowing salt into the soil of Carthage so nothing may ever grow there again.
See what I mean? I needed all this room to explain the concept. A historian would devote a whole book to it.
Berenson made the point in six words.
—H. L. GOLD