That Sense of Hairbreadth Escape

The "Mariposa Special" steam train, Orillia, Ontario, 1967

by Anne White 

"Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride...You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word ‘Victoria,’ it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed ‘Victoria’; it is the victory of Adam.” (G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday)

Certainly the question why one thing follows another must still be answered in Eliot as in Donne, though the answer be more implicit in one than in the other. Neither an emotional nor a musical effect, if it is really such, can be founded on incoherence. This study assumes that poetry as meaning is neither plain sense nor nonsense, but a form of imaginative sense.  (George S. Williamson, A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot)

Now, one thing following another is necessary and good, as both of the quotes above point out. But by itself, that is not enough. Quite awhile back, my husband and I watched a T.V. miniseries about shipboard adventures in the early 1800's, very colourful and exciting. Still, it seemed to me  that something was a bit off. At the end, the main character searches for some sort of deep meaning in the voyage, but he is told by another character that it "was not an odyssey...It is, or rather it was, what it was. A series of events." Which raised the question of why we had wasted all that time watching it. 

It turned out that the miniseries was based on a trilogy of novels written in the 1980's, which explained a lot. Some critics have said that the author intended an opposite meaning, that of course the story was more than just a "series of events"; but I believe the speech had its intended effect, bursting any romantic balloons we might have held about the meaning of life or the importance of story. 

A lesson which had laid such literature beside the advertisement and really discriminated the good from the bad would have been a lesson worth teaching. There would have been some blood and sap in it — the trees of knowledge and of life growing together. (C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man)

Maybe Chesterton was right, and we should celebrate the fact that timetables and train tracks help keep the world moving smoothly. But also the equally important truth that story, poetry, art and music, in their best forms, are neither inconsequential nor incoherent, and woe to those debunkers who try to make them so, who drain them of their blood and sap. 

Because in their own way, they also cry "Victoria." 

Catchwords Floating In the Air

"Clouds," by Tom Thomson, 1915; also titled "The Zeppelin(s)" or "Zeppelin, Algonquin Park"

In 1915, Canadian artist Tom Thomson took one of his famous canoeing/creating trips to Ontario's Algonquin Park. More than likely he didn't have any of his usual painting cronies with him, as most of those who would become the Group of Seven were caught up one way or another in World War I. It's never been completely explained why Thomson wasn't in the army (there might have been medical reasons), but it does seem clear that his wilderness trips at that time gave him not only a chance to paint, but also provided an escape from people who assumed he should be more actively involved.  Anyway, with whatever reasons Thomson went off to the wilderness, plus the fact that at least three of his art colleagues were serving in the Canadian military forces, plus the general news of battles (Ypres was a major one in the spring of 1915), it is not that surprising that an oil-on-wood sketch of clouds ended up somewhat resembling German zeppelins; so much so, in fact, that in its first public exhibition (about ten years later) it was titled "The Zeppelin." And the only relevant point about all of that, perhaps, is that people walking through the exhibit would have gotten it. "Zeppelin" was a spring-loaded word.

When I was in university (forty years ago, which is rather terrifying), "postmodernism" was something I was only hearing about for the first time, mostly in literature studies. But media theorist and sociologist Dick Hebdige was already publishing a book that talked about how "postmodernism" was creeping into every part of western culture, somewhat like zeppelins masquerading as clouds:

When it becomes possible for a people to describe as 'postmodern' the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a 'scratch' video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the 'intertextual' relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the 'metaphysics of presence', a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age...the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a 'media', 'consumer' or 'multinational' phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of 'placelessness' or the abandonment of placelessness ('critical regionalism') or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates – when it becomes possible to describe all these things as 'Postmodern' (or more simply using a current abbreviation as 'post' or 'very post') then it's clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.(Hiding in the Light, 1988, quoted in Wikipedia article "Criticism of postmodernism")

I've kept most of that intact just to show how long Hebdige's list was. In other words, he thought the Postmodern Zeitgeist was now everywhere and everything, although that in itself implied that it was running out of Geist. You might be innocently looking at clouds and get fired at by a Postmodernism.

And now? You might not be that worried about Postmodernism, but you can apply the same thinking to just about any other current "ism." When you hear it all the time, you can start to find it everywhere you look.

ALFRED: A lot of bad "isms" floating around this world... (Miracle on 34th Street, 1947 film)

Charlotte Mason suggested a tried-and-true antidote both for those who find themselves obsessing over "isms," and those who would rather ignore them: read. Read wisely. Read widely. Read orderly.

Here, again, we have a reason for wide and wisely ordered reading; for there are always catch-words floating in the air, as,––'What's the good?' 'It's all rot,' and the like, which the vacant mind catches up for use as the basis of thought and conduct, as, in fact, paltry principles for the guidance of a life. (Charlotte Mason, Philosophy of Education, p. 62)

 To misquote Michael Pollan, "Read books. Not too much. Mostly classics."  

And let the clouds be clouds.

CM's Paraphrases Are In Print (again)!

 I don't know if anyone else is like me, but when I first started this CM journey, I was not a huge reader. The first book I read about the Charlotte Mason method was For the Children's Sake, and the first time I read it, I read Susan Schaeffer Macaulay's text but skipped right over all the long CM quotes. They were just too long and difficult; I couldn't make sense of them. It wasn't until my third time reading For the Children's sake that I even attempted to read those CM quotes.

During my last pregnancy, I decided to read all of Charlotte Mason's volumes, and to make sure I didn't skip over anything that seemed cloud in my brain, I paraphrased each sentence as I read into easy language that even I could understand. That forced me to unravel the long sentences in my mind, try to make sense of vague concepts, and actually look up references that illustrated her point. By the time my daughter was born, Home Education was completely paraphrased. While she napped, I continued with Volume 6, then Volume 3, and on until I had been through the entire Series.

If you're like me and want to understand Charlotte Mason's ideas without having to first get over the language difficulty and more complex sentence structure of Victorian English, a paraphrase may be a helpful way to get from Point A to Point B. And now all six paraphrased volumes are in print and available directly from Amazon.com! Of course, they are still (and will always be) available to read online for free, and you are welcome to download them from the AO website and put them on your Kindle or other device, or print yourself a copy to read offline. But if you'd like to read them from a "real book," there are purchase links at https://www.amblesideonline.org/CMM/ModernEnglish.html.

Confronted With an Idea

by Anne White

A slide popped up a couple of days ago on my social media. I couldn’t track down the author's account, which is one reason I think it may have been floating around for awhile. Nevertheless, what it had to say was intriguing: 

“Reading books is so profound because it denies you the ability to speak when confronted with an idea. You must listen. It isn’t a conversation. Sometimes it shouldn’t be a conversation. Sometimes we should just listen. Just listen.”

Now, that (as many commenters squawked back) flies in the face of much we’ve been told about reading and books. Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book  famously compares reading to a game of catch, which demands at least some amount of back-and-forth activity. In an age when what students do in class is discuss things; in a time when we’re encouraged to leave comments and feedback on every post and every video (because it helps with the ratings), to be told we should listen in silence… just listen…feels heretical.

And yet. And yet.

What do Charlotte Mason students do? Narrate. As opposed to Vanity Fair’s  young whippersnapper George Osborne, whose little essay is derided by Charlotte in Home Education. “And well might Mrs George Sedley be delighted. Would not many a mother to-day triumph in such a literary effort? What can Thackeray be laughing at? Or does he, in truth, give us this little 'theme' as a tour de force?” (p. 244)

And what comes before narration? Listening. Attentiveness. Observation. Hearing, in the Biblical sense.

In Ragman and Other Cries of Faith, Walter Wangerin Jr.  wrote about his experiences as a young pastor, visiting an older woman from his church who was facing an unknown future after cancer surgery. One day as he talked about the weather and how nice it would be when she was feeling better, this woman became exasperated with his chatter and told him to “Shut up.” So he did: “I entered her room at noon, saying nothing. I sat beside her through the afternoon, saying nothing…; but with the evening came the Holy Spirit. For the words I finally said were not my own…”

Learning to shut up allowed Wangerin the needed space for the Spirit to minister.

Learning to listen first, including as we read, may do the same.

It's something to think about, anyway. 

We would not willingly educate [a child] towards what is called 'self-expression'; he has little to express except what he has received as knowledge, whether by way of record or impression; what he can do is to assimilate and give this forth in a form which is original because it is modified, re-created, by the action of his own mind; and this originality is produced by the common bread and milk which is food for everyone, acting upon the mind which is peculiar to each individual child. (Philosophy of Education, p. 66)