Oh, the irony, but also the utility. I recently recalled that somewhere in my college years I had come across a passage in a text that gave a lovely, elaborate definition of irony versus satire. In my memory, it was quadripartite and involved satire, irony, sarcasm, and a fourth term. It was, I swore, in Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years. I found my copy, yellowed and hauntingly close to saw dust after all these years and flipped through it, hoping some bit of juvenile marginalia would quicken my search.
No such luck. I did not mark up my books in my youth, apparently. And if I made a note of it in a notebook somewhere, those notes are long gone or are practically unsearchable — another reason why I prefer to keep most of my notes in MacJournal, where they are all searchable.1
With no way to discover if Shattuck’s book was indeed the source of the definition that I remembered outside of re-reading the book itself, I turned to a resource I have used before for books I do not own: Google Books. I found “their” copy of The Banquet Years (link is to Google Books version) and then searched inside of it for satire:
How amazing! I now have three pages at which to look to see if they hold the beloved definition of my youth.
There is an unhappy ending to this story, alas: the definition in Shattuck is not what I remembered, but I include it here for those readers who have followed this tale to its melancholy end:
Humor describes the world exhaustively and scientifically just as it is, as if that were the way things should be. Irony haughtily describes the world as it should be, as if that were just the way things are. Bergson calls them the two aspects of satire. (32)
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My current setup in MacJournal is to keep two journals, one public and one private. The public journal feeds this blog. MacJournal still has a few more steps to take to be a great blogging application — it doesn’t update entries that you have changed via other means, for instance — but it’s good enough for now and it lets me have one place to go to when I need to search through my notes. That’s nice. ↩