But you have to love the unpredictability of human hypothesis, the resilience of a free mind defying imposed guidance for its own good. Talking about Waiting for Snow in Havana. The kid immured in that mean religious education and exiled to America growing up to write such a book, working hotels and factories through high school, learning English beyond fluency, and remembering or imaginatively recreating so much—the pastry man, the firecrackers, the pews and the ocean.
So much, as to argue for the hope that it is not too late to start after childhood itself, so long as the extra, less tangible approaches to knowledge have their room to play out early and often—the roaming the neighborhood, going into town and to court, hearing stories, watching movies and reading comic books.
The reflective capacity, the expressive verve with which to transform this into the evidence of a self-aware life can only come after, and the steps to make it there can be covered at the very highest level quite rapidly if the will is real. And if it is not crystallized in such a beautiful way, open and shut in a book, still we’d have to suppose it is all there in the people who have not written and might never have a chance to write the testament to their truths and stories; yet they have their own ways of expressing themselves, and behind them all a life worth living. It reaches deep to the heart of this belief that we can learn to be something more than bowed heads or sycophants or cogs, that we can get there by books and discussion and thinking, and that they are connected—meaningful life and the words with which to give life meaning. Beyond subtle analysis of a text or its style or comprehension of its internal logic or even its themes, going right to the recognition of something human worth preserving there, worth dwelling on and learning from, imitating, rejecting, or somehow negotiating and adapting.
A good book is not essentially different form all that looser, livelier life—the roaming the neighborhood, the stories and jokes with friends, the whole framework of society adumbrated in our encounters with this or that stranger; it is not better or worse than any other form of expression, artistic or commonplace—but it does tend to raise all the rest to our explicit attention, to achieve some perspective on it, and to begin to make connections.
In this aspect of patterns, connections, allusions and relations Eire is ingenious, full of poetic coincidence with an attuned spiritual expertise brought to bear. He deploys simultaneous irony and innocence, pulling the reader along to those very concrete details from which the elaborate semantic constructions first spring. In the narrative, these details and their extrapolations form circles of meaning, waves of meaning that we have to at last permit ourselves to drift in, weightless as he says, in that aching, laughing, burning and disinterested, above all honest immersion and suspension in paradox, mystery, unjust and right, the world and God, a space suffused with light and lingering by the abyss—that space at the end of a chapter’s last page. The incredible evocations of the smells, sights, sounds of the beach, the park, the houses of the privileged and the wretched poor, ring out and are converted in this brilliant play of hindsight thought and literary artistry, and in lieu of anything more than associative motifs arranged from them, they are allowed to end up once more the ocean, the light, the street, the thing in itself, as far as that is possible. Simultaneity, that’s the effect of great poetic work, reflection and immersion, thought and feeling, all referring to action and experience anterior to them, made still more immediate when shared vicariously, along with a whole set of totally unexpected and free association which we as individual readers bring to the text, and yet never quite capturing, either, all that their author had in mind, all the real thing.
But the dream of education is that we approach that reality, that we share and receive enough of it as to enrich our own experience. And this can be done quietly, I hope, and in fewer words and shorter, plainer ones than these. Just trusting in that beauty, that aesthetic experience first of all, and becoming unashamed of the freedom to do everything, and to choose sometime to read and write, and to know when the time is ripe for each thing—that’s the tall order, and yet the simplest thing of all, if we institute a new school.
If there can be said to be an end beyond the learning itself—really it is more like the same thing seen in another setting—then it would be peace. Do you see how this is the corollary? Through learning, a tending toward peace; through understanding, forgiveness; through creative activity, the sublimation of violence; through the courageous opposition to ignorance, the cultivation of those able to question its most terrible outgrowths, and to nip them in the bud?
I talk too much. Read Waiting for Snow in Havana, and those other books I've listed in the column to the right.
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