{"id":31442,"date":"2016-11-20T01:00:33","date_gmt":"2016-11-20T06:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31442"},"modified":"2016-11-10T09:03:14","modified_gmt":"2016-11-10T14:03:14","slug":"qotd-the-diary-of-a-nobody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/11\/20\/qotd-the-diary-of-a-nobody\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: <em>The Diary of a Nobody<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Life\u2019s hardest lessons are often learned most easily when taught with a smile. Crash Davis, the over-the-hill catcher in <em>Bull Durham<\/em>, taught his girlfriend, a believer in reincarnation, a priceless lesson in the vanity of human wishes by asking her this teasing question: \u201cHow come in former lifetimes, everybody is someone famous?\u201d George Grossmith, the author of <em>The Diary of a Nobody<\/em>, put his finger on a similarly hard truth \u2014 most of us, no matter how well we may think of ourselves, are unimportant to the rest of the world \u2014 with equally diverting results.<\/p>\n<p>Grossmith\u2019s book, published in 1892 with deadpan illustrations by Weedon Grossmith, the author\u2019s brother, is a fictional chronicle of the life of Charles Pooter, an obscure London clerk. He begins by asking the reader a rhetorical question worthy of Crash Davis: \u201cWhy should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see \u2014 because I do not happen to be a \u2018Somebody\u2019 \u2014 why my diary should not be interesting.\u201d What follows is a brilliant one-joke comedy in which an infinitely and ingeniously varied number of changes are rung on the same note. In addition to being a \u201cnobody,\u201d Pooter is humorless and self-important \u2014 yet he thinks himself a great wit and a man of consequence. As a result, he is forever falling victim to comical embarrassments produced by his inability to see himself as he really is.<\/p>\n<p>What I find most striking about <em>The Diary of a Nobody<\/em>, though, is the cumulative pathos of Pooter\u2019s serial humiliations, with which it is impossible not to empathize. Yes, he\u2019s both preposterous and pitiful \u2014 but as you chortle at him, you\u2019re likely to ask yourself whether you might look just as ridiculous to the rest of the world\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Terry Teachout, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/aboutlastnight\/2015\/05\/im-nobody-who-are-you.html\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;I\u2019m nobody! Who are you?&#8221;, <em>About Last Night<\/em><\/a>, 2015-05-08.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Life\u2019s hardest lessons are often learned most easily when taught with a smile. Crash Davis, the over-the-hill catcher in Bull Durham, taught his girlfriend, a believer in reincarnation, a priceless lesson in the vanity of human wishes by asking her this teasing question: \u201cHow come in former lifetimes, everybody is someone famous?\u201d George Grossmith, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,57,28,41],"tags":[1077],"class_list":["post-31442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-humour","category-media","category-quotations","tag-autobiography"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8b8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31443,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31442\/revisions\/31443"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}