Topical Guide 802
Mark Dorset
Toys: Marbles: Cat’s Eyes
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 5:
I let them win my old marbles, the ones that were chipped and milky, and thereby whittled my collection down to the best of the transparent marbles—the clear, the tinted, the brilliant reds and greens—and the cat’s eyes—best of the best, clear marbles with a twisted leaf of color in the center that from certain angles resembled the pupil in the eye of a cat.
Work: Efficacy of Labor Vigorously Continued
Allusion, Quotation
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 5:
These dazzlers I protected with all my skill and effort, and because I always won with these marbles, my students came to think of them as charmed, in the manner—as I later came to learn—of so very many people who, confronted with someone who has achieved something by dint of honest labor vigorously and unstintingly applied, would rather think of it as unfairly won, the product of an unfair advantage, like luck or talent or magic or divine election.
Samuel Johnson, Rambler no. 25
Every man who proposes to grow eminent by learning should carry in his mind at once the difficulty of excellence and the force of industry; and remember that fame is not conferred but as the recompense of labour, and that labour, vigorously continued, has not often failed of its reward.
See also:
Toys: Models: Ship Models TG 36; Toys and Games TG 166; War Toys TG 436; Sand-Brick Maker TG 470
Work, Labor TG 5; Endless Tasks TG 86; Tasks, Sisyphean TG 89; Day Jobs; Working at Cross-Purposes TG 120; Educational Publishing TG 111; Work versus Play TG 367; Work as a Stultifying Waste of Time TG 485; Work, Persistence, Endurance, Survival, Humiliation TG 527; The Light Touch TG 617; “The Builder’s Look,” Self-Congratulation, Disappointment TG 617; The Right Thing and the Time It Takes TG 618, TG 719
Allusion; Quotation TG 140, TG 455, TG 462, TG 502, TG 506, TG 532, TG 559, TG 583, TG 592, TG 626, TG 654, TG 657, TG 714, TG 735, TG 736, TG 738, TG 780, TG 781
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