This talk is interesting not because it has something new to share with us, nor is it some age old wisdom…yet it is refreshing. In fact TED talks has categorized this and similar talks as the ones that you could listen to on one of your bad days…Charming Talks for a boost on a Bad Day. There are five of them in this category and the one that is being reviewed today is by poet John G Rives. And what is his talk about? About four in the morning.
Rives begins by telling us how the time of four in the morning first caught his attention in a poem. The poem was by the Polish Nobel award winning poetess Maria Wislawa Ana Szymborska titled “Four in the Morning” and first three lines are as follows:
The Hour from Night to Day
The hour from side to side
The hour for those past thirty…
There was something déjà vu about the poem for Rives and as he went on he found four in the morning figured as a metaphor in everything he watched or listened to. He shows a clip from a Charlie Chaplin movie where the time is mentioned, a snippet from a Seinfeld show and a line from Elton John’s video where he was crooning, “At four o’ clock in the morning….”
“Obviously the demi-gods of co-incidence were messing with me. Some people get a number stuck in their head or a song or a name…but four in the morning was in me now…I thought it would go away but it did not…,”says Rives. He found four o’clock in the morning in Isabelle Allende’s novel, in Bill Clinton’s autobiography, in Matt Groening’s works and so on. And so when in 2007 he gave his first TED talk, he spoke of the many four in the mornings that he had collected. It was then that he, “…started receiving emails and the best yet is the one which says, ‘It is the friends whom you can call at four in the morning who matter’ by none other than Marlene Dietrich. The saying was so popular that Rives shows us Hallmark cards carrying the quote.
His talk then shows many comic strips and one that is hilarious is:
Didi Pickles, “It is four o’clock in the morning, why on earth are you making chocolate pudding?”
Stu Pickles, “Because I have lost control of my life.”
There is also a clip from the movie “Close Encounters” where aliens have chosen four in the morning to show themselves to earthlings.
“So four in the morning is the scapegoat hour when all these dramatic occurrences allegedly occur…” says Rives.
As the talk given by Rives alerted more and more people to the time of four in the morning, they started sending him messages showcasing the time. “I received so many songs, TV shows, movies from dismal to famous…,” says Rives as he shows snippets from many films where the time is significant. “Somewhere along the line I knew I had a hobby which I did not know I had and it was crowd sourced. There are a couple of three in the mornings in Shakespeare…but there is so much in literature about four in the morning…Shakespeare in ‘Measure for Measure’, Leo Tolstoy in ‘War and Peace’, Charlotte Bronte in ‘Jane Eyre’, Emily Bronte in ‘Wuthering Heights’, Mark Twain in ‘Huckleberry Finn’, Vladimir Nabokov in ‘Lolita’, H.G. Wells in ‘The Invisible Man’, Fitzgerald in ‘Great Gatsby’ and the most famous wake up in literature perhaps, Kafka in ‘Metamorphosis’ where he says, ‘Could the alarm have failed to ring? One saw from the bed that it was properly set at four o’clock. Certainly it must have rung.’…First paragraph where the main character wakes up to transform into a giant cockroach…something is wrong with that person. What kind of person would do that…wake up at four o clock…”
And so a ten minute interlude into your day, entertainingly told by John Rives.
sudhamahi@gmail.com
Web link: http://www.ted.com/playlists/167/charming_talks_for_a_boost_
