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)

Here Because We're Here

(The photo: My grandmother, my mother, and baby me.--A.W.)

by Anne White

While trekking through Parents and Children for besides-the-point reasons, I found myself almost at the end of the book, and was struck by one of those should-be-obvious things Charlotte Mason likes to throw at us:

It cannot be too strongly urged that our education of children will depend, nolens volens, upon the conception we form of them. (Parents and Children, p. 260)

 The Latin nolens volens can be translated as "willy-nilly," or whether we like it or not, and that actually matters here. A leads inevitably to B; we have no choice about that. New homeschoolers are often encouraged to "philosophy shop," picking a method, or combining two or three, to suit their particular inclinations--"I'm not a very good reader, so I guess classical/Charlotte Mason isn't for me." The advice is well meant, but it points people in the wrong direction. We cannot paste one method of education on top of quite another belief system, and expect to see success. Mason's use of the word "conception" is interesting there as well: it can be defined simply as "idea," but it has more depth than that. It could be rephrased as "the belief we have of children (or human beings)," or "the way we perceive them as existing," or "the essential nature of childhood."

Well, this much we know:

1. Children are born persons.

And, as we sometimes missed in the earlier days of reading Mason, but as has been pointed out more and more in recent years, that does not mean only that our teaching/raising must respect a child's individuality, but (possibly even harder for us to get a handle on), his/her status as a member of the human race. What makes me a person applies equally to him and her and you. And what is that?

[Children are] instruments fit and capable for the carrying out of the Divine purpose in the progress of the world. (p. 260)

There is a Divine purpose: children have a relationship with God.

There is a Kingdom purpose: children are here to carry out God's plans in the world.

Children have been created "fit and capable" for those purposes; "they are "perfectly fitted to receive those ideas which are for the inspiration of life" (pp. 260-261);  but the right sort of education makes them even more so. And if you think all this sounds like another Mason principle, you're right.

13. Education is the Science of Relations; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we must train him upon physical exercises, nature, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books...

So here, from the same passage, are our directives as educators:

1. "Endeavour to discern the signs of the times," or what Mason referred to elsewhere by its German term, the Zeitgeist. What are the good points (yes, there must be some!) of the current state of the world? What pieces are missing? Look and listen. Pray for discernment.

2. "Perceive in what directions we are being led." In two confusing chapter titles near the end of Parents and Children, Mason asks "Whence" and "Whither," but she later unpacks them as "What is the history, where are the roots of this philosophy? In the 'potency' [potential] of the child," and then "Where does this take us, where will the branches grow? In the living thought of the day." In School Education, Mason pointed out that the Zeitgeist of turn-of-the-century England would not necessarily be the same as that of the future, but that each time and place would have its big questions, big needs.

3. "Prepare the children to carry forward the work of the world," which Mason believed in her time to be "the advancement of the [human] race." How was this to be done? "By giving them vitalising ideas." And then, with her hand perhaps shading her eyes as the crew of the Dawn Treader did when they glimpsed something "beyond the End of the World," she said:

We find that all men everywhere are keenly interested in science, that the world waits and watches for great discoveries; we, too, wait and watch, believing that, as Coleridge said long ago, great ideas of Nature are imparted to minds already prepared to receive them by a higher Power than Nature herself. (Parents and Children, p. 261)

Check that last bit out carefully: Mason believed that God was doing amazing things and giving great ideas to people: but that the minds of those future adults, who happened to be children right now, needed to be prepared to receive them. They needed to be taught to use their reason, but not to depend on it uncritically. They needed to develop all the body, mind, and heart habits that are outlined in Ourselves. They needed some Formation of Character so that they could live with Will. And they needed to acknowledge Authority, since to reject it also rejects its Author.

Zeitgeists change, but minds don't.

Nolens volens.

Pain Relief

Most people know what a Vulcan mind meld is, don't they? In Star Trek: The Original Series, Mr. Spock, like other Vulcans, has the ability to tap into someone else's consciousness, usually by placing his fingers on their head (or the appropriate parts of a Horta).

In the 1989 Star Trek movie The Final Frontier (the one that comes after the whales), Mr. Spock's long-lost half brother Sybok has a weird twist on the mind meld: he uses his telepathic abilities to draw out an individual's most deep-seated painful experiences, and help them experience a kind of catharsis or purification from that pain. Each person who experienced this was immediately so grateful to Sybok that they would put aside all other loyalties and do whatever he asked. Captain Kirk is one of the only holdouts to Sybok's brain-meddling; he tells Sybok that he doesn't want his pain taken away, it's part of who he is. (Those who have read Brave New World will see some parallels there.)

Is Sybok the antagonist of the story? The actor who played Sybok, Laurence Luckinbill, recalls how he thought of the character while playing him:

...his impulse is good, is really good. He is not a villain. He is someone who has made mistakes. You and I might make those mistakes. And in terms of trying to change your family or hold the community better, or something like that, you might get nuts and say, ‘No, you will do it this way.’ But the impulse [is] to make things better, and really, at its heart, is let me take your pain away. Let me make life better for you. So, that was what that is. That is my take on it. And I resisted the idea of being the villain. And I told Bill [Shatner] that. I said he's not a villain. He's a heroic guy. And he's just, he's just in the way of the legal stuff, you know. That's what I would say.

Sybok, according to the actor who, we might say, knows him best, is not villainous, but well-meaning. However, this well-meaningness nearly causes untold destruction, and, on a smaller, moral scale, he's going where no man has gone before and really shouldn't. 

Charlotte Mason knew about this too. In Parents and Children, she wrote:

...our feelings are educable, and that in educating the feelings we modify the character. A pressing danger our day is that the delicate task of educating shall be exchanged for the much simpler one of blunting the feelings. (p. 199)

She then goes on to speak, as she has in other places, about the great amount of standing back that parents and teachers must do, especially as young people must learn to choose their own actions. Luckinbill calls Sybok "heroic," but Charlotte would certainly not use that word to describe someone so manipulative, even if (as Luckinbill says) the character's desire is to make everyone's life better. And, as Kirk says, we don't need our pain to disappear completely.  It may be something that has helped shape our character, something that is there inside us but which we have mastered. Having developed the strength to keep fighting that thing may be what helps us deal with other struggles. The characters who had all their traumas blotted out by Sybok seemed floppy, without any will. They were cheerful and co-operative, but they were not choosing to submit, they were unable to do anything else.

The mother may do a good deal to avert serious mishaps by accustoming the younger children to small feats of leaping and climbing, so that they learn, at the same time, courage and caution from their own experiences, and are less likely to follow the lead of too-daring playmates. Later, the mother had best make up her mind to share the feelings of the hen that hatched a brood of ducklings, remembering that a little scream and sudden 'Come down instantly!' 'Tommy, you'll break your neck!' gives the child a nervous shock, and is likely to cause the fall it was meant to hinder by startling Tommy out of all presence of mind. (Home Education, p. 84)

We don't want to see our children suffer. Our natural urge is to protect them wherever we can. But lest we find our good intentions taking us "just in the way of the legal stuff," by which I think Luckinbill means stepping over moral lines, we need to become less--and therefore more--heroic, by stepping back.

A baby falls, gets a bad bump, and cries piteously. The experienced nurse does not "kiss the place to make it well," or show any pity for the child's trouble––that would make matters worse; the more she pities, the more he sobs. She hastens to 'change his thoughts,' so she says; she carries him to the window to see the horses, gives him his pet picture-book, his dearest toy, and the child pulls himself up in the middle of a sob, though he is really badly hurt. Now this, of the knowing nurse, is precisely the part the will plays towards the man. It is by force of will that a man can 'change his thoughts,' transfer his attention from one subject of thought to another, and that, with a shock of mental force of which he is indistinctly conscious. And this is enough to save a man and to make a man, this power of making himself think only of those things which he has beforehand decided that it is good to think upon. (Home Education, p. 324)

And that is the power of the Charlotte Mason mind: un-melded.

Words that hover above the page

by Anne White

Ideas are everywhere, in the words and, so to speak, behind the words, present because they are literally present and present even if they appear to be absent. A writer may despise the idea of zoos and communicate that hatred by writing a book about animals in the bush, never mentioning zoos, never alluding to zoos or dropping a hint about zoos. Because of the way the mind works, we get the message...If you picture a page of writing as three-dimensional, with the words hovering a half-inch or so above the paper, then you begin to see where the ideas are: behind the words, between the words, really everywhere. (Eric Maisel, Deep Writing)

In Jan Karon’s novel Out to Canaan, people in Mitford are feeling overworked and stressed by a variety of situations. Partway through the book, Father Tim invites his parishioners to a special evening church service, and as they recite the prayer of confession, we are given a glimpse of what is going on in their minds.

“Most merciful God,” Esther Bolick prayed aloud and in unison with the others from the Book of Common Prayer, “we confess that we have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed…” She felt the words enter her aching bones like balm.

“…by what we have done,” prayed Gene, “and by what we have left undone.”

“We have not loved You with our whole heart,” intoned Uncle Billy Watson…He found the words of the prayer beautiful. They made him feel hopeful and closer to the Lord, and maybe it was true that he hadn’t always done right by his neighbors, but he would try to do better, he would start before he hit the street this very night.

Now, setting questions of religious faith aside just for the moment, the point is that there is something going on here that transcends the levels of understanding, the social backgrounds and whatnot of the people praying. One big reason that this prayer speaks to Esther, Gene, Uncle Billy, and others I did not include here, is that the words, as Eric Maisel says, have dimensionality. The words, the sentences, are allowed to live, and to give life. There is enough space above them, between them, and underneath them, for each person to find green pastures and quiet waters. 

This is, in effect, the definition of a living book, and also of a living education. In Home Education, Charlotte Mason acknowledges that much good educational theory has been "conceived and perfected by large hearted educators to aid the many sided evolution of the living, growing, most complex human being"; it respects our own dimensionality (perhaps another way of saying "personhood").

The wind has painted fancies

on my wings.

Fancies...

Where was I?

O yes! Lord,

I had something to tell you:

Amen.

("The Prayer of the Butterfly" in Prayers from the Ark)

However, we tend to take such vital, free-fluttering ideas, and pin them down on collecting boards, labelling and cataloguing them, but ignoring the fact that they will never fly again. Charlotte says, "but what a miserable wooden system does it become in the hands of ignorant practitioners!...the observing of rules until the habit of doing certain things, of behaving in certain ways, is confirmed, and, therefore, the art is acquired––is so successful in achieving precise results, that it is no wonder there should be endless attempts to straiten the whole field of education to the limits of a system" (p. 9). 

These systems, these books, these artificially-generated things, are "precise" but also "straitened"; there is no room in them for us to move or breathe. I once wrote on our family blog:

... the stuff that gets used the least here is usually something produced specifically for the classroom...Case in point: a music-and-math resource book...which has such classic songs in it as this (sung to the tune of Three Blind Mice): "Let's make a people graph / Let's make a people graph / Of all our friends / In the classroom. / Boys stand over here. / Girls stand over there. / Then line up in two rows / So we can compare, / So we can compare." My daughter says she'd rather sing "Aiken Drum" any day.

Charlotte said the same thing:

The promoters of the kindergarten system have done much to introduce games of this, or rather of a more educational kind; but is it not a fact that the singing games of the kindergarten are apt to be somewhat inane? Also, it is doubtful how far the prettiest plays, learnt at school and from a teacher, will take hold of the children as do the games which have been passed on from hand to hand through an endless chain of children, and are not be found in the print-books at all. (Home Education, p. 82)

Near the end of Home Education, Charlotte discusses the religious training of young children, and she pulls no punches on what we might call un-dimensional teaching: 

There is no more fruitful source of what it is hardly too much to call infant infidelity than the unreal dead words which are poured upon children about the best things, with an artificial solemnity of tone and manner intended to make up for the want of living meaning in the words. Let the parent who only knows one thing from above teach his child that one; more will come to him by the time the child is ready for more. (pp. 346-347)

So, let the parent who knows no more than one prayer-book prayer, one or two good hymns by heart, a couple of folk songs, a favourite tale, and the names of one butterfly, two trees, or three wild flowers, share these things freely.  Let the ideas that are present take flight, and those that are absent also be noticed by their absence. God will surely bless such an education more than He will a whole heap of unreal dead-leaf words, though they be raked ever so neatly into piles. 

As the butterfly said...Amen.

A reading challenge for friends (and enemies)

by Anne White

In Arnold Bennett's 1910 book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, he proposes that novels should be excluded from serious reading. Now, everyone, keep your literary shirts on while Bennett gives his reasons:

1. Bad novels ought not to be read in the first place, so they're ruled out.

2. "A good novel rushes you forward like a skiff down a stream, and you arrive at the end, perhaps breathless, but unexhausted. The best novels involve the least strain."

3. It is only the bad parts of [otherwise good] novels that are difficult.

4. If you're working hard at learning to think better, read more deeply, dig more skillfully, it seems (according to Bennett) that all of that inspiration is going to require a bit of perspiration. Novel reading (in his terms) is just a bit too much fun! He says, "You do not set your teeth in order to read 'Anna Karenina.' Therefore, though you should read novels, you should not read them in those ninety minutes [of serious reading]."

What sorts of books do qualify then? Bennett mentions history or philosophy, but he has a preferred alternative for beginners: poetry.

Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there is nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of the fact that the majority of people do not read poetry...Still, I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

How should we start? Here are Bennett's suggestions:

1. William Hazlitt's essay "On Poetry In General," which you can read here. Why? Here's Bennett's review: "It is the best thing of its kind in English, and no one who has read it can possibly be under the misapprehension that poetry is a mediaeval torture, or a mad elephant, or a gun that will go off by itself and kill at forty paces. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the mental state of the man who, after reading Hazlitt's essay, is not urgently desirous of reading some poetry before his next meal." A warning: it's fifteen pages long, so pour yourself a large cup of something first. Here's a short excerpt: 

We are as prone to make a torment of our fears, as to luxuriate in our hopes of good. If it be asked, Why we do so? the best answer will be, Because we cannot help it. The sense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as the love of pleasure. Objects of terror and pity exercise the same despotic control over it as those of love or beauty. It is as natural to hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to express our hatred or contempt, as our love or admiration. "Masterless passion sways us to the mood / Of what it likes or loathes."

2. Next, try reading some "purely narrative poetry." Bennett suggests Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, which (he says) is a novel written in poetic form, and which you can read here. Here is his advice: 

Decide to read that book through, even if you die for it. Forget that it is fine poetry. Read it simply for the story and the social ideas. And when you have done, ask yourself honestly whether you still dislike poetry. 

Here is an excerpt of Aurora Leigh to whet your appetite:

    I, Aurora Leigh, was born
    To make my father sadder, and myself
    Not overjoyous, truly. Women know
    The way to rear up children, (to be just,)
    They know a simple, merry, tender knack
    Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
    And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
    And kissing full sense into empty words;
    Which things are corals to cut life upon,
    Although such trifles: children learn by such,
    Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play,
    And get not over-early solemnised,—
    But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love’s Divine,
    Which burns and hurts not,—not a single bloom,—
    Become aware and unafraid of Love.
    Such good do mothers. 

3. And after that? Bennett recommends that apprentices in serious reading should take, oh, about a year to build up muscle on such poetry. Then we'll be "fit to assault the supreme masterpieces of history or philosophy. The great convenience of masterpieces is that they are so astonishingly lucid."

4. Of course, reading some Arnold Bennett wouldn't hurt either. Or maybe he'd be rated as too much fun.

What do you think about this literary "no pain, no gain?" Have you read Hazlitt's essay, or Aurora Leigh? Do you agree that good novels should whish you along the mental stream without effort, or is Bennett perhaps not giving writers of prose (including himself) enough credit?

Let's Be Diggers and Shakers

Mary Cassatt, Children At the Seashore

 by Anne White

"When I was young I told a tale of buried gold, and men from leagues around dug in the woods.  I dug myself."
"But why?"
"I thought the tale of treasure might be true"
"You said you made it up."
"I know I did, but then I didn't know I had." (The 13 Clocks, by James Thurber)

"I was playing the part of a good wife and mother quite successfully in the outward ways but that, I saw now, was not enough. That was not love. Creative love meant building up by quantities of small actions a habit of service that might become at last a habit of mind and feeling as well as of body. I tried, and I found it did work out like that.'" (Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree)

Is it better to dig for gems that might be only a tale, and somehow profit by the act of digging; or to hold back because they might no longer be there, or might never have existed at all? Lucilla, in The Bird in the Tree, had dreamed of a fairy-tale love, but found that what she was looking for could only be found by putting her shovel to the ground, even if that ground was unyielding and had to be dug a tiny bit at a time.

But the duty of praise is not for occasional or rare seasons; it waits at our doors every day. (Charlotte Mason, Ourselves Book II)

Is it an act of faith to give our children picks and shovels, and ask them to do this thing with us? Yes, and more than that, it is badly needed.

"We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year and when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run...When the war's over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world." (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451) 

What will you do this week to love creatively?

What will you do to remember?

"Days when the air is full of fallacies"

by Anne White

A due recognition of the function of reason should be an enormous help to us all in days when the air is full of fallacies, and when our personal modesty, that becoming respect for other people which is proper to well-ordered natures whether young or old, makes us [too] willing to accept conclusions duly supported by public opinion or by those whose opinions we value. (Charlotte Mason, Philosophy of Education, p. 143)

Let's pick that apart, shall we?

If we, adult or child, teacher or student, have a well-ordered nature, we will display a certain respect for other people, adults or children, teachers or students, nice or irritating. Full stop. As in, first of all, we are born persons, and so are they; and, second, within that ordered nature, we recognize the need for authority. There are captains in the army, bosses in the office, monitors in the hall, and at any given time, you may find yourself holding one of those roles--or having to obey someone who does. Now, at this point we're only talking about outward behaviour, right? We walk this way or that, we turn in the report, we don't shout in the library. We don't get in trouble.

But the respect owed to others takes us beyond simple behaviour, from  listening to what people command us to do, to listening to and agreeing with what they say. Don't speed over this, now--Charlotte says this is still part of our well-ordered natures. A default setting, maybe, if our dials haven't already been turned too hard towards "cynical." A certain amount of agreement and trust is, we assume, going to be part of a relationship that goes beyond captain-private, foreman-line worker, hall monitor-late student, and more into parent-child, tutor-learner, rabbi-disciple. Or, maybe, just a peer relationship: neighbour to neighbour, colleague to colleague. These are people whose opinions we value. We don't expect to be always disagreeing and arguing, or disbelieving and ignoring. As Charlotte says, a certain amount of that is necessary to keep us modest. 

However, there are days when the air is full of fallacies, and, as that line supposedly written by Martin Luther goes, you can't keep those birds, or fallacies, from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair. The tension comes not so much from the vultures we shoo away (or the Canada geese we run from), as much as friendly sparrows arriving from people we know and respect.

"Reasonable and right are not synonymous terms" (Philosophy p. 142). Respect is one thing, Charlotte says. Reason is another. We owe it to our own minds, our own wills, and our own loyalty to the One we serve, to look for the deepest truth, to do what's right.

Even if it's not reasonable.

Always something happenin' and nothing goin' on
There's always something cooking and nothing in the pot...
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Strange days indeed, strange days indeed
(John Lennon, "Nobody Told Me")

"To work on what has been taken in": this says it all

by Anne White

I've heard the same thought about food a couple of times recently (you may have seen the same video): that it's a good practice to bless the cheese, the eggs, the fresh vegetables, the life-giving meat as these things come into your kitchen, because, sooner or later, they're all going to be YOU and your family.

Consider this quote from Laurie Bestvater's The Living Page:

Parents also need time to assimilate that 'notebook' is actually a misnomer. We are not note-taking at all; by notebooks we simply refer to Mason's various paper activities...[a] child's notebooks are not primarily products...[they are] not so much to directly reproduce knowledge but to allow personality to work on what has been taken in.

This applies not only to notebooking, but to oral and written narration as well: the success of a lesson is not based on perfect reproduction, any more than we are attempting to become carrots and ground beef by eating dinner. The food becomes part of us, not the other way around.

Now read what Denise Gaskins says in Prealgebra and Geometry: Math Games for Middle School:

When we give students a rule, we give them permission not to think. All they need to do is remember our instructions. But it is only by thinking — by struggling their way through mental difficulties — that our students can build a foundation of mathematical knowledge strong enough to support future learning.

The knowledge that is thought for, and fought for, gives us energy and also becomes part of our bones and muscles. The well-studied painting, the narrated story, the notebook-chronicled history event or literary quotation, all become us, as our minds go to work on them. These blessed things we take into ourselves change us, and we change them.

As a postscript, here's something I found in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders.

What is it, exactly, that fiction does? Well, that's the question we've been asking all along, as we've been watching our minds read these Russian stories. We've been comparing the pre-reading state of our minds to the post-reading state. And that's what fiction does: it causes an incremental change in the state of a mind.

So--eat with grace. 

Revisiting A Touch of the Infinite

 

by Anne White

In 2016, Megan Hoyt published a book especially for the C.M. community, titled A Touch of the Infinite: Studies in Music Appreciation with Charlotte Mason.  Mason’s own books recommend composer study, singing, ear training, and instrument lessons, but often in too-brief snippets. The original Parents’ Union School programmes refer to specific music books, or (later on) to detailed term notes published separately, but these have also been hard to access. Hoyt’s book fills in the gaps: it's a how-to, a what-to, but, even more importantly, a why-to.

A few years ago, I planned to use A Touch of the Infinite with a local study group, as a change from Mason’s own books. That particular study, unfortunately, was a bomb, for a couple of reasons: people had to buy copies of the book, which was a deterrent; our group was moving into a low period anyway; but the biggest one, I think, was that people assumed that a book About Teaching Music, even if it was About Charlotte Mason and Teaching Music, would have little to say about Everything Else. For many people, music seemed optional, something to think about once the math and reading were in hand (as we have been told so many times by so many homeschool experts). This was an unfortunate (and incorrect) assumption, as Hoyt points out:

There is beauty all around us and the possibility of experiencing great joy. But in our quest to fill our minds with tiny packets of news and sayings on social media, we have quickened the pace of thought and neglected to slow down long enough to examine meaning or notice the beauty that is so near. And if we are not noticing what our eyes can see, how will we notice what our ears should hear? (Chapter One: Our Reason For the Journey)

Recently I wondered, if I were bringing the book back to our group-study table, what might I do to bypass the objections? The everybody-has-to-buy-a-copy-of-the-book problem is one I can’t help with, unfortunately. But I think I would try to make it clearer that this is a book about Charlotte Mason, and the arts, and education, and life stuff, written by a longtime C.M. educator with a particular passion for music. 

I should not have been, but I was surprised (in a good way) to learn that each book Miss Mason chose for composer study and music education was littered with those same thoughts and principles she placed within her volumes: the importance of relationship, the value of ideas over dry facts, the use of story to engage a child’s mind with the subject at hand. (Introduction)

Talking about music, in a sense, is a doorway into the rest, just as a book about history, literature, or even mathematics could be, with the guidance of the right person.

God can use music in innumerable ways to get our attention. It inspires us, heals us, blinds us with its glory, tears at our despairing souls until we choose to seek Him, for nothing else will suffice. (Chapter One: Our Reason For the Journey)

On the practical side, A Touch of the Infinite is a handbook for the C.M. educator who wants to know more about ear training (it's important!), and composer study, and what sort of piano or violin lessons should be part of the curriculum. But it occurs to me that it would also be a very good follow-up to Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, which is the sort of teaching/parenting book that makes you want to open the world up a little more for your children, if only in a bit of rebellion: in time spent outdoors, in good books, in human relationships, and in things like art and music that used to be integrated into life.

This life is glorious, isn’t it? All of this—the entire universe of living ideas—belongs to every human being…The world is in desperate need of this universe of thoughts and things. We pine for them and fill our lives with busyness because they are missing. And most of us don’t even realize what it is we’re pining for. (Introduction to A Touch of the Infinite)

I don't know if or when our local group will get another chance to read Hoyt's book together. But in the meantime, I can at least recommend it for the bookshelves of those who want to look at Charlotte Mason's educational philosophy from the orchestra seats. 

Lovin', really livin'

Without it you ain't livin', boy

You're just gettin' up each day

And walkin' around

Your world is cryin' now, my friend

But give it love

And it will mend 

And teach you all the music

(Ian and Sylvia, "Lovin' Sound") 

Generosity: A Certain Large Trustfulness

by Anne White

Many years ago, I read Susan Cooper’s fantasy novel The Grey King. In a key scene, young Will Stanton is commanded to answer a riddle: “Who were the three generous men of the Island of Britain?” Will, having been granted an exceptional knowledge of such things (it’s a long story), digs through his memory, and then says boldly, “The three generous men of the Island of Britain. Nudd the Generous, son of Senllyt. Mordaf the Generous, son of Serwan. Rhydderch the Generous, son of Tydwal Tudglyd. And Arthur himself was more generous than the three.”

Now, first of all, I didn’t know that Cooper did not make up that triad of names—they’re part of a very old British tradition. Second, that didn’t sound like any kind of riddle I had ever heard; it wasn’t meant to be funny, it was more like the “Riddles in the Dark” in The Hobbit. And, third, I wondered about that word “generous.” “Generous” as in "maybe they gave great birthday presents" didn’t seem quite intense enough for this scene.

It turns out I was right. Yes, “generosity” means a willingness to give of oneself and one’s possessions; and it means an ability to go beyond one’s own desires, for instance “generously” forgiving someone for a wrong.  But its early meaning is closer to other words that English also borrowed from Latin and Old French, such as "gentility" and "gentlemen." The word has its roots in the Latin genus, referring to one’s stock or race—so, well-born, noble, and possessing the characteristics that were believed to belong to a person of such birth, such as courage, honour, kindness, gentleness. In short, magnanimity (with one caveat which we'll get to in a minute).

So, when Charlotte Mason states, not once but twice in her principles of education, that children should have a generous curriculum, is she perhaps saying not just that they should have teetering stacks of schoolbooks, but that, even more so, they need a curriculum based on generosity?  Consider this, from Philosophy of Education page 111:

All roads lead to Rome, and all I have said is meant to enforce the fact that much and varied humane reading, as well as human thought expressed in the forms of art, is, not a luxury, a tit-bit, to be given to children now and then, but their very bread of life, which they must have in abundant portions and at regular periods. This and more is implied in the phrase, "The mind feeds on ideas and therefore children should have a generous curriculum."

“This and more.” Yes, we want to keep these children well fed, we want to be as generous to them as we can; but we also want them to have minds and hearts that give to others out of that abundance. And why? On page 249 of the same book, Mason refers back to John Milton, who said that “a complete and generous education” is “that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and public of peace and war.”

And, to go even further, Charlotte wrote a whole chapter on "Generosity", in Ourselves Book I, in which she straight off acknowledges the noble roots of the word, but makes it clear as well that Generosity is for everyone.

At first sight it seems as if Generosity were not a Lord in every bosom, but ruled only the noblest hearts; but this is not the fact…The nature of Generosity is to bring forth, to give, always at the cost of personal suffering or deprivation, little or great. There is no generosity in giving what we shall never miss and do not want; this is mere good-nature, and is not even kindness, unless it springs out of a real thought about another person's needs.

She not only notices the connection to Magnanimity, but adds a distinction between them:

...what Magnanimity is to the things of the mind, Generosity is to the things of the heart…It is a certain large trustfulness in his dealings, rather than the largeness of his gifts, or the freedom of his outlay, that marks the generous man… There are so many great things to care about that [the generous person] has no mind and no time for the small frettings of life; his concerns are indeed great, for what concerns man concerns him.    

We do often use the word “magnanimous” to describe generous acts, so perhaps the lines between them don’t have to be so strictly defined. However, what is more important here is something that brings us back to my puzzlement over the Three Generous Men. Generosity is not “the largeness of [a person’s] gifts, or the freedom of  his outlay,” Charlotte says; it is instead “a certain large trustfulness in his dealings.”

The generous man escapes a thousand small perplexities, worries, and annoys [sic]; he walks serene in a large room.

In To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings, John O’Donohue wrote this:

Try, as best you can, not to let

The wire brush of doubt

Scrape from your heart

All sense of yourself

And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous,

Time will come good;

And you will find your feet

Again on fresh pastures of promise,

Where the air will be kind

And blushed with beginning.

As magnanimity keeps our minds occupied and helps us to back-burner our own problems, generosity keeps our hearts so busy that we don't have time to feel offended, resentful, or, just possibly, anxious. Generosity gives at a personal cost, but out of a firm belief that God will make up the difference one way or another. 

So let's "remain generous"; and, someday, maybe, our names will be added to the riddle.

Photograph by Bryan White.

As Many Begin the School Year

by Anne White

If you are familiar with the priest/poet Malcolm Guite, you may also have followed his You-tube study visits over the past few years. In one of the most recent, he read from the chapter “The Three Sleepers” from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Guite titled the video “At Aslan’s Table,” referring to the way that the scene and certain objects described in it mirror those of older legends and even Scripture. In this passage, a group of  travellers land on an island and are invited to feast from a well-spread table.

But on the table itself there was set out such a banquet as had never been seen, not even when Peter the High King kept his court at Cair Paravel. There were turkeys and geese and peacocks, there were boars’ heads and sides of venison, there were pies shaped like ships under full sail…there were nuts and grapes, pineapples and peaches, pomegranates and melons and tomatoes. There were flagons of gold and silver and curiously-wrought glass; and the smell of the fruit and the wine blew towards them like a promise of all happiness.

However, wary from previous experiences with Turkish Delight and other nasty enchanted things, they hold back. It is the chivalrous and swashbuckling mouse Reepicheep who takes the leap of faith.

…the Mouse, standing on the table, held up a golden cup between its tiny paws and said, “Lady, I pledge you.” Then it fell to on cold peacock, and in a short while everyone else followed its example. All were very hungry and the meal, if not quite what you wanted for a very early breakfast, was excellent as a very late supper.

Lucy (we all know Lucy, don’t we?) asks their hostess (whose name we don’t yet know) why the place is called “Aslan’s table.” “It is set here by his bidding,” said the girl, “for those who come so far.”

Sometimes food, even in Narnia, is just good food.

We may approach the educational table with some of that same nervousness. Are we even supposed to be here? The food looks good, though not what we’re used to; but, on the other hand, those three hairy men sleeping around the table might throw up some red flags. (Later it turns out that their enchanted state had nothing to do with the food.) The sane, sensible, cautious adults may hang back, wondering what they’ve gotten themselves and their children into. We are invited, our children are invited, and yet we hesitate.  This does not look like food from the children’s menu. The peaches and grapes should be okay, but cold peacock?

I cannot possibly describe my bewildered, fascinated disbelief when the first batch of books arrived. Of them all, 'Plutarch's Lives' hit me hardest. Those long, measured periods in difficult language! Alison, at eleven, would not understand a word! How on earth was Robin going to assimilate 'Mankind in the Making' and 'The Spangled Heavens'? What was Charles going to make of 'Pilgrim's Progress'? ("To Prosper in Good Life and Good Literature" by Joyce McGechan, in The Parents’ Review, January 1967)

Even those who have been here before may feel a bit of hesitation, an uncertainty over these new-again pomegranates and pies shaped like ships. But we nevertheless light the candles, bake the back-to-school cookies, and raise our cups of tea.

We bashed--and that is the only verb that describes our progress in those early days--through the text-books, got the gist of them by determined attention, and miraculously found ourselves enjoying every minute. Narrations were wobbly affairs, half inarticulate, half incorporating remembered phrases from the reading. Parsing and Analysis they found absorbing and rewarding. French and Latin were fun. After all, languages were words, weren't they? A sudden word-hunger seemed to grip them all; and a new world had opened up. When, at morning prayers, they sang: 'Praise for the singing! Praise for the morning! / Praise for them springing / Fresh from the Word!' their eyes shone. They were not thanking God as a dutiful routine, but joyfully. (Joyce McGechan, same)

We come by invitation, "for those who come so far." Languages are words, and food is food. We eat and drink by God’s provision, and under his protection. And we pray that this small leap of faith will bring others to the table as well.

We Need More Gargoyles

by Anne White 

Reflecting on the way the brave new world was going in the 1940’s, scholar and critic Russell Kirk wrote, “The men of the Enlightenment had cold hearts and smug heads; now their successors were in the process of imposing a dreary conformity upon the world, with Efficiency and Progress and Equality for their watchwords--abstractions preferred to all those fascinating and lovable peculiarities of human nature and human society which are products of prescription and tradition.” Referring to his admiration of Gothic architecture, he added, “I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.”

In an article written years later, Kirk added, “What we have lacked more than anything else since the Second World War, I suspect, is poetic imagination in the minds of public men.”

John Ruskin, also a huge fan of all things Gothic, predated Kirk’s words about “fascinating and lovable peculiarities” in The Stones of Venice:

For the very first requirement of Gothic architecture being that it shall admit the aid, and appeal to the admiration, of the rudest as well as the most refined minds, the richness of the work is . . . a part of its humility [which is] shown not only in the imperfection, but in the accumulation, of ornament… if the co-operation of every hand, and the sympathy of every heart, are to be received, we must be content to allow the redundance which disguises the failure of the feeble, and wins the regard of the inattentive.

For Russell Kirk, keeping the “poetic imagination” alive meant sidestepping abstractions and going straight to the gargoyles.

For C. S. Lewis, I think, it meant including a bear as part of the household in That Hideous Strength. Without a great deal of explanation as to why.

With that she opened the bathroom door. Inside, sitting up on its hunkers beside the bath and occupying most of the room was a great, snuffly, wheezy, beady-eyed, loose-skinned, gor-bellied brown bear…”Why don’t you go out and take some exercise that lovely afternoon, you great lazy thing?” said Mrs. Maggs. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, sitting there getting in everyone’s way.”

What might poetic imagination mean for us, in a time when dreary conformity has indeed knocked many gargoyles on the head? What might it require of us?

Possibly more humility, with minds that can celebrate the richness of imperfection.

Sometimes more redundance. And certainly less efficiency. It’s harder to take a bath when you have to push the bear out first.

But also…co-operation, sympathy, and “the regard of the inattentive.” Poetic imagination allows grace which is sufficient to “disguise the failure of the feeble.” Efficiency clears out anything or anyone that cannot be conformed or categorized; but imagination finds a place for such things; even, if necessary, turning them into water-spouting gargoyles.

This is our “human nature and human society,” in all its “prescription and tradition.”

Now we must deal with a child of man, who has a natural desire to know the history of his race and of his nation, what men thought in the past and are thinking now; the best thoughts of the best minds taking form as literature, and at its highest as poetry, or, as poetry rendered in the plastic forms of art: as a child of God, whose supreme desire and glory it is to know about and to know his almighty Father: as a person of many parts and passions who must know how to use, care for, and discipline himself, body, mind and soul: as a person of many relationships,––to family, city, church, state, neighbouring states, the world at large: as the inhabitant of a world full of beauty and interest, the features of which he must recognise and know how to name, and a world too, and a universe, whose every function of every part is ordered by laws which he must begin to know. (Charlotte Mason, Philosophy of Education, p. 157)

(“Kirk out.”)

Thomas Carlyle’s Really Ripping Yarn

by Anne White

In the depths of Charlotte Mason’s Formation of Character (p. 280 to be exact), we are given some life history about someone, apparently fictional, named Diogenes Teufelsdröckh.

This chapter, all by itself, may be one reason homeschoolers quietly slip Formation of Character  to the bottom of the C.M. volume stack.

Why does Charlotte drag this person with the hard-to-pronounce name into the chapter (which, she admits, is an already tenuous comparison of two other obscure German characters)? It might have been because she was discussing a novel by Goethe, and one of Carlyle's chapters is titled "The Sorrows of Young Teufelsdröckh," which is a riff on Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. Charlotte had the kind of mind that liked to dredge up weird things like that. She would have been a terrific blogger.

However, whether Charlotte intended it or not, her use of Teufelsdröckh as a character pasted on top of other characters is not that far removed from his original appearance in Thomas Carlyle’s un-novelish novel Sartor Resartus, which also contains a story within a story. Diogenes Teufelsdröckh is a professor “of everything,” which tells you something right off. (His name is also an indicator that, as Charles Kingsley said a generation later, you must not take this story as anything other than a fairy tale.) As the story begins, this Professor Teufelsdröckh has written a rather massive book, in German, about the “philosophy of clothes.” An English editor has been given the task of explaining the book to English readers, and he has also been sent several bagfuls of stuff documenting Teufelsdröckh’s so-average-it’s-funny early life. In the best Ripping Yarns style, our editor plunges in, making his best guesses about his subject’s childhood, schooling, love life, and later career. Along the way we get slices of Teufelsdröckh’s magnum opus, carefully translated and cited. If we make it to the end, we ask: was Professor Teufelsdröckh a sane genius, an insane genius, or just a fool? The same might be asked of the editor, and/or the author. Hopefully it won’t be asked of Charlotte for including it in an otherwise serious chapter about how children (even fictional ones) grow and learn from what’s around them.

Here are a couple of other things you might or might not know about Sartor Resartus. Carlyle started writing it in 1831, when he was in his thirties (a good age to be writing satire, or fairy tales). It was serialized in a magazine over the next couple of years—more to public puzzlement than acclaim, but at least it won the admiration of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who arranged for it to be published in Boston in 1836. The first British edition did not appear until two years later. The Latin title (which helped ensure that the book would be forever ignored) can be translated "The Tailor Re-Tailored." In her book English Literature for Boys and Girls, H. E. Marshall gave up on trying to explain it to students, but she did write this:

I do not think I can make you understand the charm of Sartor. It is a prose poem and a book you must leave for the years to come. Sartor Resartus means "The tailor patched again." And under the guise of a philosophy of clothes Carlyle teaches that man and everything belonging to him is only the expression of the one great real thing--God. "Thus in this one pregnant subject of Clothes, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been." The book is full of humor and wisdom, of stray lightenings, and deep growlings. There are glimpses of "a story" to be caught too. It is perhaps the most Carlylean book Carlyle ever wrote. But let it lie yet awhile on your bookshelf unread.

Did Marshall fully get the gist of the book? Is that what Carlyle was actually trying to say? Perhaps. My take on it is something more like “The world is pretty nutty and it’s full of pompous, presumptuous people who will try and tell you what it’s all about; and in that situation, the most meaningless thing you could spend your life studying might be the philosophy of clothing. However, when you really get down to it, perhaps that tells us all we need to know…and it actually starts to make some sense, in a Fish Called Wanda kind of way.” To extend the John Cleese analogy, Sartor Resartus is believed to be the first literary use of the phrase “The Meaning of Life.”

And if you can read it in that way, it’s rather a ripping yarn.

Stay tuned for, quite possibly, some more thoughts on Diogenes Teufelsdröckh.

In Which Tom Learns His Lesson

 by Anne White 

In English, a sentence stretches from left to right…A writer composes a sentence with subject and verb at the beginning, followed by other subordinate elements…Think of [the] main clause as the locomotive that pulls all of the cars that follow…If the writer wants to create suspense, or build tension, or make the reader wait and wonder, or join a journey of discovery, or hold on for dear life, he can save subject and verb of the main clause until later…[but] this variation works only when most sentences branch to the right, a pattern that creates meaning, momentum, and literary power. (Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer) 

Every sentence speaks of someone or of something, and tells us something about that of which it speaks…In our sentence we speak of 'Tom.' We say about him that he 'has learned his lesson.' The thing we speak of is often called the SUBJECT, which just means that which we talk about. (Charlotte Mason, Home Education) 

Listen.

If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.

If they tell you that that is all the story is about, they are very definitely wrong.

Any story is about a host of things. It is about the author; it is about the world the author sees and deals with and lives in; it is about the words chosen and the way those words are deployed; it is about the story itself and what happens in the story; it is about the people in the story; it is polemic; it is opinion. (Neil Gaiman, introduction to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451)

 Listen. I will tell you a story about stories.

In high school we were handed a book of classic short stories. We handled that book objectively, tightly, scientifically, trying to identify the exact bacteria on the lens of “The Most Dangerous Game” and “The Rocking Horse Winner.” We mapped the rising action, the climax, the denouement; wrote up our lab reports; got our marks.

In university, we had a course on The Short Story that took the opposite, subjective, biblio-therapeutic approach. If “Young Goodman Brown” or “Bartleby the Scrivener” reminded us of our boyfriends, landlords, weird uncles, that's what the story meant. Well, as Neil Gaiman says, if a reader tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.

However, as every sentence speaks of someone or of something, so does every story. A good story deserves more than the reader’s subjective reaction. It is, though, about more than stuffing a square peg of character, voice, polemic, opinion, into a round hole of rising action, saying that's "all the story is about." Writing professor George Saunders has expanded on the idea of “someone”:

… perhaps the most radical idea of all [is] that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind. (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain)

Saunders also says that, as we read a particular story by Tolstoy,

we begin living it; the words disappear and we find ourselves thinking not about word choice but about the decisions the characters are making and decisions we have made, or might have to make someday, in our actual lives. (same)

So, what is a better way to read, to write, or to teach novels, plays, stories? We go back to what Charlotte told us about sentences: they speak of someone, they speak of something that happens. We follow someone around as they swim in a pond in the rain, or drive through a blizzard, or surreptitiously slip a book into their pocket. As musical compositions begin with a theme and then introduce variations, so do stories. You thought the wolf was going to blow the brick house down, but surprise, you’re wrong. And here is the kicker: the story, as we receive it, is not only about the decisions made by the characters, but also by the author.

As apprentice writers, we watch for the ways the words themselves, the shapes of the sentences, the parallels and variations build suspense, fear, relief, delight. As readers, we are allowed to let them disappear, but only so that we can make even more discoveries (beyond weird uncles); so that we can begin living it. 

Start with subjects. Continue with verbs. If it worked for Tom, it can still work for us.