apocryph.org Notes to my future self

Quotes from Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love"

A few months back I finally finished reading Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi opus, Time Enough for Love. It’s a long, sprawling, ambitious book which made me glad my first exposure to Heinlein was the life-changing Starship Troopers, for I fear Time Enough would have put me off Heinlein indefinitely.

Don’t get me wrong, the book is classic Heinlein, full of contradictory character traits and the most un-PC of dialog. Free love and quasi-anarchistic distrust for authority blends seamlessly with a very authoritarian streak which seems antithetical to the rest. That, to me, is one of the reasons why Heinlein’s work is so compelling: he has so many disagreeable positions, and so many agreeable ones, you must reflect on which is which, unlike a less unconventional author who would be easily placed in the ‘like’ or ‘hate’ bucket.

I don’t much enjoy writing book reviews, so here are some quotes from the book that struck me as quintessentially Heinlein:

• “Having any trouble with the democrats these days?”

  “Democrats? Oh–you must mean ‘equalitarians.’ I thought at first you meant the Church of the Holy Democrat. We leave that church alone; they don’t meddle. There is an equalitarian movement every few years, certainly, under various names. The Freedom Party, the League of the Oppressed–names don’t matter as they all want to turn the rascals out, starting with me, and put their own rascals in. We never bother them; we simply infiltrate, then some night we round up the ringleaders and their families, and by daylight they are headed out as involuntary migrants. Transportees. ‘Living on Secundus is a privilege, not a right.’”

• “…I took it to mean ‘Sleep whenever you can; you may have to stay awake a long time.’ Early rising may not be a vice, Ira, but is it certainly no virtue. The old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed. I can’t stand people who are smug about how early they get up.”

  “I didn’t mean to sound smug, Grandfather. I get up early from long habit–the habit of work. But I don’t say it’s a virtue.”

  “Which? Work? Or early rising? Neither is a virtue. But getting up early does not get more work done…any more than you can make a peice of string longer by cutting off one end and tying it onto the other. You get less work done if you persist in getting up yawning and still tired. You aren’t sharp and make mistakes and have to do it over. That sort of busy-busy is wasteful. As well as unpleasant. And annoying to those who would sleep late if their neighbors weren’t so noisily active at some ungodly cow-milking hour. Ira, progress doesn’t come from early risers–progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”

• Before and after school he had to do chores on his family’s farm, which he hated, as they were what was known as “honest work”–meaning hard, dirty, inefficient, and ill-paid–and also involved getting up early, which he hated even worse.
• “But a reform politician has no such lodestone. His devotion is to the welfare of all the people–an abstraction of very high order and therefore capable of endless definitions. If indeed it can be defined in meaningful terms. In consequence your utterly sincere and incorruptible reform politician is capable of breaking his word three times before breakfast–not from personal dishonesty, as he sincerely regrets the necessity and will tell you so–but from unswerving devotion to his ideal.

  “All it takes to get him to break his word is for someone to get his ear and convince him that it is necessary for the greater good of all the peepul. He’ll geek.

  “After he gets hardened to this, he’s capable of cheating at solitaire. Fortunately he rarely stays in office long–except during the decay and fall of a culture.”

• Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
• An elephant: A mouse built to government specifications.
• A woman is not property, and husbands who think otherwise are living in a dream world.
• A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a well, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
• Beware of altruism. Is is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.
• Dear, don’t bore him with trivia or burden him with your past mistakes. The happiest way to deal with a man is never to tell him anything he does not need to know.
• If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for, but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.

  If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time on it that truly intelligent exercise of franchise requires.

• To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.
• This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother’s side. I did not laugh; people who boast of their ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply.
• The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
• Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
• Does history record any case in which the majority was right?
• The greatest productive force is human selfishness.
• Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors–and miss.
• A whore should be judged by the same criteria as other professionals offering services for pay–such as dentists, layers, hairdressers, physicians, plumbers, etc. Is she professionally competent? Does she give good measure? Is she honest with her clients?

  It is possible that the precentage of honest and competent whores is higher than that of plumbers and much higher than that of lawyers. And enormously higher than that of professors.

• Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely the are to think so.
• Never try to outstubborn a cat.
• Tilting at windmills hurts you more than the windmills.
• Yield to temptation; it may not pass your way again.
• Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime. For the first offense, that is.
• Political tags–such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth–are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. the latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.
• Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other “sins” are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful–just stupid.)
• Being generous is inborn; being altruistic is a learned perversity. No resemblance–
• Pessimist by policy, optimist by temperament–it is possible to be both. How? By never taking an unnecessary chance and by minimizing risks you can’t avoid. This permits you to play out the game happily, untroubled by the certainty of the outcome.
• A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.
• “In my early days it was an article of faith among a self-styled ‘intellectual elite’ that they could teach calculus to a horse…if they started early enough, spent enough money, supplied special tutoring, and were endlessly patient and always careful not to bruise his equine ego. They were so sincere that it seems downright ungrateful that the horse always persisted in being a horse. Especially as they were right..if ’starting early enough’ is defined as a million years or more.”

Only a few of the above are quoted from actual dialog. Large chunks of the book consist of one or two line entries in Lazarus’ Notebook, which makes me think Heinlein got stuck somewhere and just started brain-dumping sage advice until he picked up the thread again. Time Enough is twice as long as it needs to be, but then if it were a minimalist tale, it wouldn’t be Heinlein.