count your own blessings
and let your neighbor count theirs –
secure as a vault …

Based on the James Thurber Further Fable for Our Time, The Philosopher and the Oyster.

By the sea on a lovely morning strolled a philosopher — one who seeks a magnificent explanation for his insignificance — and there he came upon an oyster lying in its shell upon the sand.

“It has no mind to be burdened by doubt,” mused the philosopher, “no fingers to work to the bone.

It can never say, ‘My feet are killing me.’

It hears no evil, sees no television, speaks no folly. It has no buttons to come off, no zipper to get caught, no hair or teeth to fall out.”

The philosopher sighed a deep sigh of envy.

“It produces a highly lustrous concretion, of great price or priceless,” he said, “when a morbid condition obtains in its anatomy, if you could call such an antic, anomalous amorphousness anatomy.”

The philosopher sighed again and said, “Would that I could wake from delirium with a circlet of diamonds upon my fevered brow.

Would, moreover, that my house were my sanctuary, as sound and secure as a safe-deposit vault.”

Just then a screaming sea gull swooped out of the sky, picked up the oyster in its claws, carried it high in the air, and let it drop upon a great wet rock, shattering the shell and splattering its occupant.

There was no lustrous concretion, of any price whatever, among the debris, for the late oyster had been a very healthy oyster, and, anyway, no oyster ever profited from its pearl.

MORALS: Count your own blessings, and let your neighbor count his.

Where there is no television, the people also perish.

I quote from Mr. Thurber today because, if you subscribed to the New Yorker Magazine in the year 1956, and on this day in 1956, you got your copy of the New Yorker from your mailbox and read later that night after dinner, on page 19, you would have read The Philosopher and the Oyster as that was when the story was first published.

Seventy years ago today or as Mr. Lincoln might say, Three Score and Ten.

The Further Fables, according to one biography were all written in a Columbus, Ohio hotel where Thurber was staying as he visited with his family for a month in 1955.

According the biography, James Thurber : his life and times by Harrison Kinney (Holt: New York, 1995), Thurber began a new series of fables. Thirty-seven of them ran in the New Yorker from May 12 to October 13, 1956. Katharine White had obtained permission from Harper & Bros, to run certain illustrations from the 1940 Fables for Our Time with the new fables, and, beyond her official call of duty, obtained additional permission for their use in both the American and British editions of Further Fables for Our Time. Most of the other illustrations in the books are composites of Thurber’s cartoons and spots over the years.

Mr. Kinney continues: Further Fables for Our Time, complete with the New Yorker rejects, was published October 31, 1956, with a first printing of thirty thousand copies. The Book Find Club accounted for another fifteen thousand, and the New Yorker s business department had five thousand complimentary copies bound to send to advertising space buyers. S. J. Perelman let it be known that the fables contained “the finest writing of our time,” but Thurber was upset to be told that one reviewer had called them “the tired writing of a tired man.” That another critic had said, “He writes with the verve of a young man” didn’t compensate him for the put-down.

In a letter to a Miss Carolyn Wilson, dated West Cornwall, Connecticut, May 2, 1960, Mr. Thurber writes:

Our mutual friend Libba Thayer has given me your address and reminded me that you and I were great friends of Elmer Davis,’ so I felt like writing to you. 

Elmer Davis was my favorite American of this century, as I have said in private and in print, and I was happy that he lived to read my dedication to him of Further Fables for Our Time. He wrote me a brief, painful, but bright note about it, saying that it made him feel like a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Schweitzer. I know a great many other admirers of Elmer, including Edward P. Morgan, who broadcasts for WABC, and many newspapermen. (Selected letters of James Thurber by James Thurber (London : Hamish Hamilton, 1982)).

Mr. Kinney commented: The dedication page of Further Fables for Our Time reads: “To Elmer Davis, whose comprehension of people and persons has lighted our time, so that we can see where we are going, these fables are dedicated with admiration, affection and thankfulness.” Thurber had been a faithful listener to Davis, whose defiant radio broadcasts against McCarthyism had somehow stayed on the air despite warnings to the ABC network from Vincent Hartnett, editor of Red Channels. Davis was in the hospital with an illness that would prove fatal. He was moved by Thurber’s compassionate efforts to cheer him, and wrote Thurber that given his years of blindness, Thurber surely had too many He was moved by Thurber’s compassionate efforts to cheer him, and wrote Thurber that given his years of blindness, Thurber surely had too many of his own travails to worry about Davis’s.

According to Wikipedia, Elmer Holmes Davis (January 13, 1890 – May 18, 1958) was an American news reporter, author, the Director of the United States Office of War Information during World War II and a Peabody Award recipient. Beginning on January 3, 1954, he had a program on ABC Radio on Sundays from 10:15 to 10:30 Eastern Time. Davis used the platform to criticize Senator Joseph McCarthy for his anti-communist investigations.

To repeat, Thurber had been a faithful listener to Davis, whose defiant radio broadcasts against McCarthyism had somehow stayed on the air despite warnings to the ABC network from Vincent Hartnett, editor of Red Channels.

And again, His defiant radio broadcasts against McCarthyism had somehow stayed on the air despite warnings to the ABC network.

Ripples from little stones dropped in the pool.

You can see all of the Thurber images online that I have collected at For Muggs and Rex.