NEVER TOO LATE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 29, 2020 

Reference:

Henry, a retired teacher of chemistry and something of a prolific author, especially on matters of governance and community action. I was moved by this remark recently from him:

Currently working on a piece about my younger years and how things appear to follow from other happenings. Not an agreeable assignment I laid upon myself. Hope it will work out reasonably well some time.

I wrote this to him:

Trust me, Henry, it will! You will find evidence in a very real sense of why that is so in this chapter from my book CONFIDENCE IN SUBTEXT (2017), published on Amazon’s KINDLE. It is priced at $66 so I don’t expect you to purchase the book.

Your modesty is becoming. It is apparent in all your missives which are universally stimulating. But it also causes me a little trepidation. Contrast your this style with my own.

I read a lot, as do you, often of people with sterling reputations as thinkers and philosophers and often scientists as well. I read them from what I can learn from them, but never to put them above myself, never!

No one can be a better expert in my laboratory, which is my life, than myself. It amuses me when people think they can.

People want to be saved from themselves by others when others often cannot save themselves. It is a losing proposition to imitate what is important to others at the expense of discovering what is important to you.

As a consequence, I don’t apologize to readers for using myself as reference in describing my position on this or that subject. Nor do I mount causes, join crusades, or campaign for this or that person, or this or that special interest.

If the reader cannot resonate with me, that is okay. It means we have little in common. I am not looking for an army of believers, only a few learners who have a common interest in growing.

Charles D. Hayes, whom I consider the best writer I know, personally, has much to say.  I have encouraged him for years to give his wisdom a personal touch.

It is not important to be anointed by society, but is important to share your special gifts with society. If everything revolves around imitation, no one will ever get off the dime.

The toxic disease of modern society is comfort and complacency where people think life is all about having “fun.”

My twin grandsons turned 15 on the 28th of January 2020. One is very tall – six-five – blond and beautiful, and everyone dotes on him. I wrote him in my card, “Your grandpa remembers when people made a big deal about him. Don’t fall for that malarkey! Follow your own passions, not someone else’s.”

My other grandson, also tall – six-one – has his head more firmly on his shoulders as his twin brother gets most of the attention. I wrote him, “I share your grandmother’s sentiments (she encourages him to follow his passion for music). Live life to bring your natural music to the surface.”

These and other Centennials are the innocent who will be inheriting a hundred yearlong mess of self-indulgence where politicians, the media, pundits, educators, industrialists, theologians and entertainers act as if they never left the sixth grade.

Can Centennials right this sinking ship? I don’t know. I won’t be around to find out. What I do know is that the world is plum out of excuses for doing so little.

Everyone dies. Why are so many people afraid to live?

Your sincerity, and the lessons you have learned over your long life may not resonate with Centennials until they are thirty, which they now believe is an eternity away.

Write of the lessons learned when you were young, and they and others will find them! That is what Ben Franklin did with his Almanac. He wrote about his “lessons learned,” not from other people but from his own life. I believe that is the case with Harry Louis Bernstein in the chapter that follows, and with you as well.

Be always safe,

Jim

Chapter from CONFIDENCE IN SUBTEXT (2017):

GENIUS REALIZED: 

GETTING FIRST PUBLISHED AT AGE 96

“Genius is only the power of making continuous effort. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it, so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success. As the tide goes clear out, so it comes clear in. In business, sometimes prospects may seem darkest when really they are on the turn. A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success. There is no defeat except from within; there is no failure except in no longer trying, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856 - 1915), American pragmatic philosopher

IT IS NEVER TOO LATE!

Harry Louis Bernstein (May 30, 1910 – June 3, 2011) was a British-born American writer with his first published book, The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers (2007) at the age of ninety-six.

The novel dealt with Bernstein’s long suffering mother Ada's struggles to feed her six children while putting up with Yankel, her abusive and alcoholic husband.

It is also the story about the anti-Semitism that Bernstein and his family experienced growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in a Cheshire mill town called “Stockport” (now part of Greater Manchester) in northwest England.

Stockport was a community of Jews and Christians many of whom were lost in World War I. Bernstein shapes his story around the Romeo and Juliet-like romance that his sister Lily experienced with her Christian boyfriend.

The Invisible Wall tells the story of his older sister doing the unthinkable. She falls in love with a Christian boy. But they are separated culturally by an “invisible wall” that divides the Jewish families on one side of the cobble stone street from the Christian families on the other.

Harry Bernstein at home in New Jersey in 2007, age 96, when “The Invisible Wall” appeared. He holds a portrait of his wife, Ruby. Mike Mergen, New York Times.

When the young Harry Bernstein discovers the secret affair quite by accident, he has to choose between the strict morals that he has been taught all his life, his loyalty to his religious and selfless mother, and what he knows is right in his own mind.

The book was started when Bernstein was 93 and was published in 2007, three years later. The loneliness he encountered following the death of his wife, Ruby, 91, in 2002, after 67 years of marriage, was the catalyst for him to begin working on his book.

His second book, The Dream, published in 2008, centered on his family’s move to the West Side of Chicago in 1922 when he was twelve.

In 2009, Bernstein published his third book, The Golden Willow, which chronicled his married life and later years. A fourth book, What Happened to Rose, was published posthumously in 2012. Bernstein lived in Brick Township, New Jersey. He died four days past his 101st birthday.

Before his retirement at age 62, Bernstein worked for various movie production companies, reading scripts and working as a magazine editor for trade magazines. He also wrote freelance articles for such publications as Popular Mechanics, Family Circle and Newsweek.

THE PATIENCE OF GENIUS

From Harry Bernstein’s earliest recollections, as early as when he was four-years-old and started to read words on a page, he felt an urge to write. Through grammar school and high school, composition was his favorite subject.

As a young man out of high school, he attempted to publish, but received only rejection slips. He persisted, finding work editing the works of other writers, but the passion to be an author in his own right never left him.

He met his wife, Ruby, at a dance, and it was love at first sight. He loved her to pieces and took a job reading movie scripts of authors’ books, but changed his focus from his writing obsession to enjoying her completely.

They had two children, and a happy home, but he was put into a total funk when she died, and found the only way to fill his loneliness was writing, which he had always done throughout his life, publishing an article here and there, but never able to capture enough attention to make a living at it.

The Invisible Wall at first experienced a fate of which he was only too familiar – constant rejections. He attempted to write a novel after a short piece generated enough interest that an editor asked him to give the novel idea a try, which he did, but without success.

After Ruby died, he decided to go back to the beginnings of his life, nearly ninety years in the past, and found that he had a retentive memory of those early days as if they were only yesterday.

Instead of being discouraged at the rejections The Invisible Wall generated, he admits in the afterward of the book that he’s never lacked confidence in himself or his ability to write. In an amusing aside, he admits to being a rather cocky soul.

In any case, an editor from Random House called, and said she had read his manuscript and that Random House would like to publish it in a small printing. He was so elated he couldn’t believe his good fortune.

Random House published the book, and the book reviews were unanimously positive, while The New York Times put his picture on the front page of the newspaper celebrating his being a published author for the first time at the age of 96.

Columnists from across the Western World called or visited him for interviews. He was in demand on radio, television and in magazines. He satisfied all these demands willingly and enthusiastically.

Other publishers wanted to publish his works. So, at 96, he wrote a sequel to The Invisible Wall and followed it with another published novel of his family history during his lifetime, with one published posthumously.

Were Elbert Hubbard alive, he would have joined the celebration as he believed with his whole heart that genius was not rare, but common. The problem, he argued, was that people pay too much attention to those who say “you’re wasting your time” and not enough time listening to those who hear an inner voice telling them success is right around the corner!

CONFIDENCE & SUBTEXT – THE ETERNAL KEYS

Harry Bernstein lived in his subtext. It was personified in the love he had for his wife, Ruby, which as he explained was love at first sight. With such love, he escaped self-consciousness and self-regard, and although he wanted to be a writer, adjusted to the reality of his circumstances and enjoyed a very happy and productive life with her and his two children while working on the creative works of others for a living.

All the while, the writing bug or his ability to write – “I am a bit cocky,” he says – never left him. His love of his wife that emanates from his subtext fueled his mind and gave purpose to his life. When she was gone, with a hole in his heart, he reached down into his subtext where all his stories were incubating finding new purpose in living.

The stories started with the forbidden love of his sister with a Catholic boy, which he remembered with crushing horror as he was a devout Jew equal in devotion to that of his parent’s. Only a child, he had to make a terrible choice between being loyal to his faith and his parents, or loyal to his sister with her great secret. He chose to be loyal to her with no idea that this was the response of a healthy subtext.

For nearly ninety years, the creative juices in subtext would come to produce a fine wine of stories in his last years as he approached the age of 100. Like Golda Meier, Stephen Jay Gould, Yehudi Menuhin and many others (see chapter Twenty Six), the confidence of subtext was apparent at a young age, but only in reflection as these stories epitomized what his life was all about.