Affection

[Affection] lives with humble un-dress, private things; soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog's tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing-machine, a gollywog left on the lawn. . . .

Affection at its best wishes neither to wound nor to humiliate nor to domineer. You may address the wife of your bosom as "Pig!" when she has inadvertently drunk your cocktail as well as her own. You may roar down the story which your father is telling once too often. You may tease and hoax and banter. You can say "Shut up. I want to read." You can do anything in the right tone and at the right moment -- the tone and moment which are not intended to, and will not, hurt. The better the Affection the more unerringly it knows which these are. . . .

[C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves]

True Grit

And true focus:

What is it about classical subject matter that has the capacity to train minds? Consider a small sampling of the demands placed upon a boy in the latter part of the seventeenth century in England.

"In the fourth form the boys also tasted the delights of the Muses through a serious inquiry into the art of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The method of analysis was as follows: Each scholar had to memorize half a dozen verses, then construe the passage verbatim, parse it grammatically, list all the tropes and figures he could find, give the derivations of words, and show the extent of his Latin vocabulary by finding synonyms for them; after that he must scan each verse. So far, the pupil had performed only half of the usual assignment. Next, he must turn Ovid's passage into elegant English prose in order to turn it back into proper Latin, 'rightly placed according to the rules of rhetorical composition'; finally, he had to unscramble it again into a variety of English verse."

And why did that age produce so many intellectual giants?

[Douglas Wilson, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning]

Good ol' Sam Loyd

Polar Bride:

On a recent expedition to the North Pole, a member of the exploring party attempted to capture for himself a bride. Natives of the region all sleep in bearskin sacks, and the custom is for the lovesick swain to creep in and steal the sack containing his prospective mate.

In this case the lover had quite a distance to journey, but he made the trip there at a rate of five miles per hour, and returned with his burden at a rate of three miles per hour, taking exactly seven hours for the entire round trip. When he opened the sack to show the prize to his shipmates, he found that by mistake he had carried away the girl's grandfather.

The story is no doubt exaggerated, but will our experts tell us just how far the explorer traveled on this memorable journey?

[Sam Loyd, Mathematical Problems of Sam Loyd]

Scriptural Maturity

For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.

Hebrews 5:12-14

Rejecting Art

We have come to the point of high circularity where our culture defines art as anything done by an artist, and an artist as one who has the right and authority to produce art. The detritus of this approach can be viewed at a tax-funded gallery near you.

Because of widespread relativism in aesthetics, it has come about that art cannot be evaluated in accordance with any objective criteria. Rather art must be evaluated in accordance with credentials of the artist. But these credentials are necessarily something other than competence in the field, for competence implies a standard. In order to bluff one’s way into the status of artist, therefore, the right subjectivist aura must be confidently exuded.

Continuing reading. . .

[Douglas Wilson, "Humbling the Arts"]

Reason and Parental Authority

The freedom then of man, and liberty of acting according to his own will, is grounded on his having reason. . . .

To turn him loose to an unrestrained liberty, before he has reason to guide him, is not the allowing him the privilege of his nature to be free; but to thrust him out amongst brutes, and abandon him to a state as wretched, and as much beneath that of a man, as theirs. This is that which puts the authority into the parents' hands to govern the minority of their children.

And so lunatics and idiots are never set free from the government of their parents.

[John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, sections 60, 63.]

Reading

There is a reason why certain folks love books and why others don't know what to make of them. Those who enjoy good books enjoy them because they've read them as wee tots on up. For those who don't like books, or who "don't have time to read," it is because they didn't read much (or properly) when they were little.

An alternative exists, though: watching and listening to stuff on a gadget. Well, they think it's an alternative. Instead of getting information and entertainment from a book, those things instead comes from images and sounds.

Not reading has consequences, though. Gadget Gurus don't know how to read when they need to. Unfortunately, for instance, biology textbooks don't come in Music Video form. Kant's Categorical Imperative can't be learned by playing Halo with a cyborg warrior named Kant. Consequently, a teacher says "Please read Aristotle's Poetics," or "please study the chapter on glycolysis." Afterward, there comes the amazing, inevitable interchange:

"What is Aristotle's definition of tragedy?"

"Umm. I don't know." (And thinks to himself "Why do I even need to know this anyway? It's the technological age.")

And then, "What gets split apart in glycolysis?"

"Umm. I don't know."

Perhaps they don't know because they are bums and haven't read the assignment at all. But that's not what I'm talking about. Nor am I talking about a difficult concept that needs extensive explanation. These students have "read" the assignment. But immediately afterward, they don't know a thing about the material. This is because they actually have not read anything. They have simply recognized consecutive words. No effort has been made to extract meaning from the combination of words.

This is what I mean by "not reading." Recognizing words on a page isn't reading. Reading is comprehending ideas and concepts. And if those ideas and concepts are not comprehended, real reading is reading it all again until you do understand. Real reading is not getting through 25 pages before 9pm at all costs.

An ability to read goes further. Reading (real reading) from an early stage develops not just proper habits for comprehension but also a love for stories, ideas, and well-formed sentences. There are many great and funny books that, after "reading," people say of them "It was okay." You ask them, "Why was it only okay?" and they answer, "I don't know, it just wasn't that great."

This is not a valid opinion. It is not an opinion at all. This is an example of a person speaking out of turn. They have not really read the book and therefore cannot legitimately speak of it. Great books (objectively great, time-tested books) certainly don't have to be liked by everyone. But in order to not like a book, you must have actually read it and be able to say specifically why it isn't all that. But more likely, if you know how to really read, you have a greater appreciation for the subtleties and richness and blindingly vast expressiveness of language. And that tends to reduce the instances of "it-was-okay-ing" a book.

Reading is an inherently better, an inherently wiser activity than iPods and Blackberries, iPhones and Wii's. This is not opinion either. Go forth and read. And read the good books.

Ultimate Questions

Standing in the cool of the newly covered threshing barn, with fragrant leaves still clinging to the hazel rods pressed to the freshly peeled aspen rafters of the thatched roof, Levin gazed now through the open doorway in which the dry and bitter dust of the threshing hovered and sparkled, at the grass of the threshing floor lit by the hot sun and the fresh straw just taken from the barn, now at the white-breasted swallows with multi-coloured heads that flew peeping under the roof and, fluttering their wings, paused in the opening of the door, now at the people pottering about in the dark and dusty threshing barn, and thought strange thoughts.

"Why is all this being done?" he thought. "What am I standing here and making them work for? Why are they all bustling about and trying to show me their zeal? Why is this old woman toiling so? (I know her, she's Matryona, I treated her when a beam fell on her during a fire)," he thought, looking at a thin woman who, as she moved the grain with a rake, stepped tensely with her black-tanned bare feet over the hard, uneven threshing floor. "That time she recovered; but today or tomorrow or in ten years they'll bury her and nothing will be left of her, nor of that saucy one in the red skirt who is beating the grain from the chaff with such a deft and tender movement. She'll be buried, too, and so will this piebald gelding -- very soon," he thought, looking at the heavy-bellied horse, breathing rapidly through flared nostrils, that was treading the slanted wheel as it kept escaping from under him. "He'll be buried, and Fyodor, the feeder, with his curly beard full of chaff and the shirt torn on his white shoulder, will also be buried. And now he's ripping the sheaves open, and giving orders, and yelling at the women, and straightening the belt on the flywheel with a quick movement. And above all, not only they, but I, too, will be buried and nothing will be left. What for?"

[Taken from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy]

I speak, therefore I am right.

A brief review of the history of ideas on our planet should show that smart people have generally been able to say pretty much anything they have wanted to. But nimbleness of wit does not always function as wisdom, and the fact that the boys down at the body and fender shop cannot see through the mathematical smoke screen does not mean the impressive display means anything.

[Douglas Wilson, The Paideia of God]

All roads lead to Rome, and by Rome I mean Sex

I sure could've used the companionship of Chesterton in my college English and Art classes.

I was once sitting on a summer day in a meadow in Kent under the shadow of a little village church, with a rather curious companion. . . .

My companion said to me: 'Do you know why the spire of that church goes up like that?' I expressed a respectable agnosticism, and he answered in an off-hand way, 'Oh, the same as the obelisks; the Phallic Worship of antiquity.' Then I looked across at him suddenly as he lay there leering above his goatlike beard; and for the moment I thought he was not Pan but the Devil. No mortal words can express the immense, the insane incongruity and unnatural perversion of thought involved in saying such a thing at such a moment and in such a place. For one moment I was in the mood in which men burned witches; and then a sense of absurdity equally enormous seemed to open about me like a dawn. 'Why, of course,' I said after a moment's reflection, 'if it hadn't been for phallic worship, they would have built the spire pointing downwards and standing on its own apex.'

[G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man]