All day, we can do no more than putter. Not here, because preoccupied with there. But how to get there, when locked down here?
We putter, yes. Though where's the shame in that? At least if done well? With honor?
Of course, the most important discourse on the importance of knowing how properly to putter occurs in Frank Capra's "Platinum Blonde" (1931).
The exchange dramatized is between Smythe, master putterer and butler, and Smith, free spirit tamed despite himself, who marvels at how to become One with this rare and fine art. How to putter? How to do it well? Who even can?
The scene can be viewed here (at a little over two minutes).
Smith: "How 'bout me? Do you think if I concentrated and put my whole SOUL into it, that some day I might be a putterer, hm?"
Smythe:"You sir? Mm-mm. You could never be a putterer. Not a good putterer, sir."
Actor Halliwell Hobbes played the role of Smythe when he was in his mid-50s. Hobbes' career went back decades, though chiefly on the stage. Notably in Shakespearean roles.
Watch the Capra bit again. It's a two person scene. Note Hobbes' command of timing. His centeredness, poise, his gesture that amounts almost to mime. The quickness of his alternation between snap and restraint. The thrust and parry of his exchanges with his fellow actor Robert Williams (in the latter's final role).
Is Smyth, the puttering butler, a weary, defeated, regretfully sad remnant of a man? No!
Rather he is a servant who is also a master, who acknowledges as it were that his Aristotlean entelechy gives him limits but also strength. He has achieved the highest potential of his personal, ontological envelope, as could a fish only in water or an eagle on a mountaintop.
"For instance, a . . a fish can putter in water but not on land, because he'd be out of place. An eagle can putter around the rugged mountaintops but not in a cage, because he'd be restless, and unhappy."
Smyth the character has clearly given puttering a lot of thought.
Hobbes the actor brings the depth of his past experience, in embodying,TiR would go so far as to say, coiled but casual strength, in put over what you'd guess would be a rather humble bit part (if it were not a Capra bit part).
Hobbes is the same seasoned actor who wowed them with the combustion and violence, decades earlier, of his on-stage embodiment of Tybalt, in Romeo and Juliet.
"Mr Halliwell Hobbes acts the fiery Tybalt to the life; his wiry figure and choleric eyes help him much in giving us the reckless duelist of the Capulet faction -- and the combats, by the way, are as good as they could be."
Here's Eric Clement Scott in The Bystander (3/25/08):
"Why, the fight in which Tybalt and Mercutio receive their death hurts would quicken the blood of the most lethargic audience. Up and down the stage range the combatants with 'business' betokened in every gleam of the eye and turn of the skillful wrists. . . . Small wonder, after such bouts as these, that Mr. Halliwell Hobbes, who plays the raging Tybalt, when alive, cannot restrain his heaving chest so as to give a presentment of Tybalt lying dead!"
Some typically Tybaltian lines;
"Peace? I hate the word!"
"Fetch me my rapier, boy."
"Look upon thy death!"
Would Tybalt, had he lived, gone into butling? No. Or puttering? Probably not.
Hobbes, however . . .
Does he not, in "Platinum Blonde"'s puttering scene, subtly channel the Tybalt embedded deep in his bones?
"Now sir, if you'll pardon me, with all respect, as a Smythe to a Smith, YOU are an eagle in a cage."
Note Smythe's hand gesture when he delivers the above line, with a rapier jab that stops short inches from Smith's heart.
Smith figuratively is indeed cut to the quick. A breakthrough of realization strikes him in that moment on which the whole plot pivots.
Could one not imagine Smythe, if called upon to do so, perhaps to protect the homestead mansion or its mistress, summoning up his body's memory of its younger self, and having a sporting chance at a moment's notice to run the intruder through with an improvised kebab skewer from the kitchen, or at least to clobber them senseless with a pewter serving tray? Though then likely after all the excitement to need a long sit down rest with a hot water bottle.
Puttering! Who among us can truly learn to putter?
