So I can be awed by the erudition of a Harold Bloom, or any other secondary source on whatever side of the political-academic spectrum, but I can’t go along much with their claims and answers to questions of ‘where is wisdom to be found?’ I agree reading is important, without setting it on quite so hermetic a pedestal or ascribing to certain of its practitioners the indisputable status of gods, dismissing all the rest. The question can’t be just where is wisdom found, if it moves; first thing is to wonder where are we, then what we can do about it—out of these questions, wisdom is created. For each person, personal, but within cultural frameworks, practical considerations, situations or circumstances of life. By itself, reading is paltry. By ourselves, none of us becomes our best self. But it bears asking, still, how to read and why, from this perspective.
Volunteering with 826 again and bringing it to the suburbs—letting it arise in the suburbs, which are their own center anymore—and seeing how to instill or awaken and enrich and cultivate that love of learning whose reality we take as too good to ignore, how to turn it toward a worthwhile book. And after just one, maybe, it leads itself on of itself. Beyond books, too, but not forgetting them. So there should be more of them like Tales from Outer Suburbia, the Moomins, pushing with images against the page; Under Milk Wood, with voices; The Golden Compass, with themes—and yet all these accessible to young people, before they really know what they’re faced with drawn on entranced by stories, curiosity, wonder, why not escapism from dull or bleak or painful reality. And probably bringing them into play, or re-telling them, or wanting to make their own, much more than writing essays or bubbling in tests on them, at least.
In starting from literacy, aiming beyond it, back to the whole human being, holding onto the capability to learn without being carried away by it or paralyzed by it, but having at any rate to take up the mantle of understanding for the full conscience of actions, a better sense of what is possible and a hint of living up to it. Something like the development of subjectivity in community, if you want a more meaningful phrase than themes/units on identity and being yourself—which comes to the same thing, but one implies a lot more the real work it takes to get there, the process of changing that we are, rather than a totemic consistency. Because it is an objective world whose effect on us is practically totally dependent on our response to it—this is the power of thinking, and of reflection brought to bear upon the present. This is the solitary walker today, whatever Rousseau’s was, fully able to drive but choosing not to, if walking does no harm to anything, if the time saved driving is not worth the stress and expense and banal danger—the ultimate threat of dying a senseless statistic, where dying walking hit by a car, even, retains some human element more pronounced. And living being movement and distance, time commitments around the human rather than mechanical scale are not only preferable in thought but eminently practical to live by. Only it doesn’t have to be just stray individuals—it could be a lot less lonely having others join in.
And in this place (St. John’s) a community so pure, as it were, and in line with the kinds of ideals I’m operating on. But still so elite and difficult of access—nurturing those with such ideals, but in what sense, if any, contributing their spark to others without it, or without the courage to pursue it for other considerations. The director kindly took on my brazen availability to conversation, telling me about the Touchstones program and Great Hearts Academies, tangentially related to the college without being linked with it. And I told her about the atmosphere, texture, aura surrounding different great books for me. I did a bad job; if she understood anything from what I was saying, it was thanks to the concrete starting-point, the dark mood with which Genesis closes, from the arch between beginnings and ends. That anyway begins to sketch an explanation for what I was talking about—a sense of the total effect of a work, based on its most basic movement between beginning and end. But of course everything else is in the middle, and all these moments and ideas accumulate into the mosaic of more impressionistic shadings, too, adding them to the total picture. But even with this language we’re still in just a visual phase of conceptualizing the, for me, synesthetic quality of a book’s ambience. It has color and light and even phosphorescence, perhaps, in the case of the Great Gatsby for instance, but also shape and texture and heft and humidity and tone, style, grace, music, taste. Figuratively, of course, more or less. And so of all things this total impression, of a presence cast by books you read enough, with enough of yourself, will be subjectively true and different for each reader. The truth on this basis consisting of their honesty in addressing themselves to the work. And the picture or total impression that they come to associate with the work arising and differing based on the dominant meanings they interpret from it and all they bring to bear on it—the day, other books, and everything else it reminds them of. But somehow, the most important component to this total meaning and its figurative manifestation seems to be the cadence of the writing, the voice, the language in its fullest sense.
Some examples—the full sunlight gold roundness surrounding Homer; the curtain like a starlit sky draped over the Bible; the scratchy red flannel shirt of Montaigne; the green gardens, parks, creeks and jungles Shakespeare plays in. Along with subjective associations, making them your own, books have their beauty more for themselves, too—in the images and truths and stories they hold. However you acquire them, they’re still there, still abiding in themselves and pointing beyond themselves—to ways of living; to their deeper inarticulate inspirations. Where beauty, practice, inspiration meet in a reader, books deserve their value as cultural riches. And where they don’t they can’t support the acclaim, and are more solid hypocrites, bundles of unfulfilled potential. To get someone to want to read is to once have them experience the first way, even with just one aspect of it enjoyable or striking some chord; to lose someone from reading for a long time, there’s enough disgust in one book that failed to connect with them to carry over into many others that might have, without giving them a real chance.
Another analogy—the smells of other people’s houses, somehow hanging on their person to some extent and in character with them, --leading gradually to the realization that your house and yourself have a smell, too, to them, only you’ve grown so accustomed to it you can’t tell what it is. These early hints of subjectivity—the idea that other people think, just as you do; that most of them think in some other language when they think in words, and call to mind other images and melodies and dreams when they think of the most fundamental things—food, home, love—and want, for just as good reasons or just as unreasoningly, things other than you want; that they must have as much to tell you as you would tell them, if circumstances allowed. Fiercely aware of their favorite, beloved things, and that these are different is disarming at first—we are so open before enough happens to close us for a long time. Maybe part of what is so awful about school to a child is the sense of an imposition on nascent subjectivity, and being told and surrounded with competing wills and wants and valuations which seem to come from no recognizable person, but are simply thick in the air and the walls of the building—the first impression of what institutions mean for the free play of humanity.
This is the fundamental stumbling block and strike against education, which I don’t know if I can overcome—if it amounts to being responsible for your neighbor’s morality, and willing instead of your neighbor’s will, for his own good, very well, but for your own good, too—making yourself the arbiter of what is good, and going about inculcating it all around. There are at least a couple of possible ways out of this, though. There is Rousseau’s appeal to nature, as good letting itself be known through lessons of necessity, and leading anyone open to it back to it. And there is the step beyond the non-profit industrial complex, substituting community action for outside-provided services—in the case of education, amounting to a sharing of ideas on curriculum, values, policies among as many of the vested parties as possible, to restore everyone’s faith in the efficacy of the teaching and making all the voices heard.
It all sounds very nice, of course, and yet between these two ways there is an evident contradiction, if we understand nature as Rousseau understands it, particularly the question of childish unreason. But if, as seems plausible, it is the nature of children to love and imitate and acquire rational thought through a process of learning and socialization, not being struck by it as by a thunderbolt one day around age ten—though this could admit of occasional leaps and plateaus—then they could be reasonably supposed to be valued members of the community after their fashion, and a kind of role model even to the adults of what authentic freedom, happiness, honesty look like. So that there is some connection between the two promising solutions, mutually reinforcing one another, if some kind of unselfish love is present, at work. It might be possible to give an evolutionary account of where this love comes from, but for now allow that is had to be believed to be seem, leave it a presupposition as pervasive as Rousseau’ s nature. And for now all that is implied in community love, as good and bad in its manifestations as Rousseau’s self-love, should demand recognition, from the possibility of a network of little utopias to the rise of fundamentalist entrenchments, depending on what the values are that the community comes up with, and how jealous and angry, or how free, it is in its love.
For a long time we have been wrestling with the kind of nature we want to believe in, and the kind of love appropriate to it. We haven’t been able to quite let go of the dream of a love at first sight that endures, nor of the childhood so sufficient in itself to learn what is best through play, spontaneously. We balk at a love that can be conditioned by circumstance of place and movement, inconstant in emotions, analyzed to the point of distrusting them as real indicators of what we feel. We don’t like at fist the suggestion that is made in NurtureShock, either, about the kids going over how they will play, even writing a plan to the best of their ability, then going to play with all this held in mind or prompted by the teacher’s questioning, yet the results for their mental and social development are so impressive we then want to find a way to finesse the means that the end might be justified. Again, wouldn’t it come down to a revision to our understanding of nature to include an element of reflection alongside spontaneous action? Even in kids, the action is better when it is understood as play—the more nuanced the understanding, the more sustained the play. Perhaps it is too difficult to say whether it is as fun. There still seems to be lurking something monstrous there, in the kindergarteners who didn’t join in the food fight, in the stillness of the kids told to imagine they were soldiers.
Yet the imagination, too, has at least an aspect that needs to be sparked from somewhere, including the moral imagination, if the child is to develop. And in the same breath there must be reserved some space the play-plan doesn’t intrude into, and more free and spontaneous play, if the child is to be a child. The key seems to be to develop as quickly as possible, once you’ve once interfered, the kids’ ability to ask those questions for themselves, internalizing and making their own that suggestive imagination and reflection. When there is a story to be followed in the game, there’s the possibility of changing the story, adding onto it, and deriving something more from it than just the kind of overflowing of energy that unstructured play is, rather a kid of meaning that is missing or at least not yet found in ordinary life. Without getting too psychoanalytical, this amounts to a sublimation of some inner yearning into external and comprehensible significance, not very different from any artistic or relational significant, except in its level of sophistication and maturity.
And the relative admixture of spontaneity to self-awareness is still high, giving the art and play of children a vibrant quality even when we recognize some element of reflection appropriate to their age interfering. The attempts to approximate this kind of innocence are varied, from dada or even prior in the roots of romanticism on through to Picasso and Pullman’s reimaging of Milton and Blake. To recover in maturity a kind of wise innocence not lost by experience but enriched by it is more or less a statement of the humanistic aspiration I have for my life, but it is helpful not to think of it as necessarily coming about in solitude, rather in relationships and community, and so the definition has to be broadened to include all people who might aspire to something like that, together.
A huge piece of it does seem to be in the raising of children and the ongoing process of education, for children and adults, this process entails. And the kind of education that would be, clearly dialogic, has to include in some way the inarticulate, spontaneous impulses as well, at least allow for them, from childhood on up. Obviously the emphasis would be not on technical knowledge acquired in this education, though that would follow of itself, but on the process itself, by which interlocutors grow in self-knowledge and mutual understanding, subjectively, even if the objective quality they are seeking remains doubtful, their opinions on it opposed, and the result a kind of humbleness or frustration as the case may be.
Only, as I’ve lately been realizing, not everybody has the perspectives on community, education, and a well-lived life that I’ve been pointing towards. If they do value technical prowess and possessions and hierarchical prestige above their human developments, then this kind of dialogue has its work cut out for it in reaching them. To say nothing of violent fanatics, merely vain or greedy or insecure people may not be amenable to dialogue. This amounts to saying, I don’t understand them, as they don’t get me, in our shared humanity, only in our interests and differences. But if it is not impossible to shift such basic presuppositions as seem opposed to dialogue back into line with the kind requisite to it, most likely this is more difficult the more time passes, and the more those presuppositions entrench themselves, but easier the younger the person, the more they experience this education as play and the more naturally they enter into it together with others. All the same, it is too sad and too blanket to think that no one who’s grown up into a closed-off, fiercely divided state, can be talked down from it, but will only ever spin harder off into destruction. The conversions and development of full-grown people are well-documented; and it’s too easy to make of all people two camps, whatever you call them—dialogic and conversant, radical and Mr But, socialist and capitalist—because the reality is much more various, and in changing circumstance and surroundings we turn coat. All the time.
Still it seems important to stress the education of kids as a inclusive community endeavor, as benefitting the kids as well as their parents and neighbors, bringing all of us closer together, making all of us more participant, curious, and intelligent. It’s a commonplace teachers love to remark on, that they learn as much as the kids, but in a sense it is true—while ideally the presence of more teachers and students of different ages, mentors young and old, visitors, would blur the lines of student and teacher, and bring the school closer to the vision of a community in dialogue with itself and with other communities, and the kind of learning the teachers enjoy would be in the reach of the students as well—things like self-reflection, humility, peacemaking—at a level proper to them.
This is where I fall back on terms and concepts too much, maybe—natural and spontaneous, reflective and dialogic, authentic, proper. What is natural is natural to someone at some stage of development, in relation to an underlying dynamic nature, conditioned by an external cultural lens. We’re less concerned with the kind of knowledge or skills students acquire at school leading directly to an ideal job or station, but with instilling and growing their love of learning, the possession of which will make their way to a fulfilling job and lifestyle the natural result of their ongoing development, and each step of the way valuable in its own right, for being what they are. These stages are particular to each student, and might not depend simply on age or physical development. These benchmarks of value, nature, dialogue, authenticity depend on the community and culture around the children, educating them and judging their progress.
Again, though, about as soon as elements of self-awareness and responsibility may be discerned, it seems crucial that the child feel a part of that community and that education, for herself and others, younger and older, and have an equal say in points of judgment, value, and the rest. She can begin to articulate what is natural for her, and knowing what she feels, she may do a better job than her sister or her mother, who only remember what it felt like—yet they have the advantage of knowing somewhat how it will change. In turn, they benefit from recognizing how it hasn’t. All I’ve been trying to get at here is another perspective on the school, as not just an admirable preparation of students, but a source of purpose, delight, and meaning for the whole community.
