You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. (Deuteronomy 6:7)
My wife and I refer to this as the “Aaron Sorkin method” of parenting.
I have spent many hours listening to people extol the importance of education, reading about how education ought to be done, not to mention being educated myself. What I’ve come to realize is that discovering a method that works is actually the easy part of education. The hard part is making the learning stick. You can spend years inculcating a student with Latin and high-brow literature, but unless you can get them to love it for themselves, it’s all whistling in a hurricane. You have to tutor their loves, as well. Ultimately, we become what we love, as Jamie Smith would say. If you love what’s worthless, you will become worthless. If you love what’s true, your whole life will be characterized by truth.
Of course, I’m not saying anything new. I do, however, have another source to support it. In his wonderful anthology of George MacDonald quotations, C. S. Lewis included the following excerpt from a sermon:
[Man] is so constituted as to understand [true things] at first more than he can love them, with the resulting advantage of having thereby the opportunity of choosing them purely because they are true: so doing he chooses to love them, and is enabled to love them in the doing, which alone can truly reveal them to him and make the loving of them possible. Then they cease to show themselves in the form of duties and appear as they more truly are, absolute truths, essential realities, eternal delights. The man is a true man who chooses duty: he is a perfect man who at length never thinks of duty, who forgets the name of it.
First, choosing true and good things is purely a matter of duty. Dare I say, often a matter of conscripted duty. If you don’t choose the good and the true, you will be punished. Over time, that action of choosing the good and the true over and over becomes a genuine love. The teacher (parent, pastor) hopes that the student will develop a taste for truth and goodness. Eventually, the student puts duty to the side and pursues his loves, for his loves are “absolute truths, essential realities, eternal delights.”
Is there any way to cultivate that taste? Another MacDonald quote from the same sermon puts us on the right path.
The truth of a thing, then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing; truth in a man’s imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing.
According to MacDonald, the truth of a thing — a rock, an animal, an idea — is the “topmost stone,” the final cause. Its telos. Since we are bound in time, we can’t see the life of something all the way through to the end. It’s no exaggeration to say that if you knew the entire history of one thing, from its creation to its end, you would know the entire history of the universe. That knowledge (that truth) is hidden from us. But, MacDonald says, it is not completely out of our sight. We can recognize the a thing’s truth through the imagination.
This is one of art’s abilities. In life, we don’t often see all wrongs righted, all sins brought to light. We don’t always see where the small choices lead. But in a novel, movie, poem, or painting, we can and do see them through the imagination. By artistic representations of the “ends” of things, we learn to recognize their true natures. Good art creates good taste.
I watch good movies because it makes me think, “This is worth doing.”
I watch mediocre movies because it makes me think, “I can do this.”
In looking for commonplace books available online for free, I came across a volume by H. Rider Haggard in which he chronicles his first year of farming the family plot of land. No great agricultural insights will be unearthed in his book, Haggard admits. He is really interested in the experience of learning to farm.
I would like to do the same thing on my blog. I rarely post updates about my writing because it feels like Monday morning quarterbacking. Why write about writing when writing itself needs to be done? I have a deathly fear of being one of those people who talk rather than do. But, thinking about it, I realize that, in my case, a little bit of self-reflection could be a kind of tonic that may actually strengthen my writing constitution.
All that to say, I have been chipping away at a middle-grade novel set in Philadelphia that I call “FB” for short. (I haven’t thought up a title I’m happy with.) I’ve finished a complete first draft of FB, which, though a horrendous, mutant mess, does have good bones. My main challenge over the next few months will be moving through that manuscript chapter by chapter, nipping and tucking. The task daunts me. But there are moments when I forget to be daunted and enjoy myself.
On Sunday, my father preached a wonderful sermon at TPC. One of his best, I think. He spoke of Christ’s loneliness on the cross, and afterward, a parishioner asked him if he knew of any artistic representations of that kind of loneliness. We have gory images in art, so we can imagine Jesus’s pain. But do we anything that communicates his abandonment?
Some suggestions were thrown out: Harry entering the forest at the end of Deathly Hallows; the film version of Endo’s Silence; part of The Power and the Glory. I mentioned Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest, which is a real bummer of a book. My dad brought up a John Buchan novel called Sick Heart River, which he had read years ago. It’s about a man who goes out into the Canadian wilderness to die. Google didn’t give us much information, until I discovered that the book was published in the US under a different name: Mountain Meadow.
I’ve been collecting books that have been released from Samford’s library. They put them on a little red roller shelf that sits in the lobby with a sign taped to it that says “FREE BOOKS.” One of the many volumes I’ve schlepped back to my office over the past few months is Mountain Meadow. When I picked it up, I knew nothing about it except that it was written by John Buchan. Now I know it is good enough for my father to remember it after twenty years.
Here are some photos of the object of my good fortune.
We are called to honor this very long gallery of ancestors in its fullness, not just our fathers and mothers. How can we “honor” this chain of begetting and being begotten that disappears into pre-history, and earlier still, the chain of creation’s fecundity in producing and being produced?
Environmentalism is partially a response to the claim that we have evolved from the Earth. If the Earth produced us, then we ought to worship Her.
The quote above is from a First Things piece by Remi Brague, which is thought-provoking – even if many of the thoughts are along the lines of “what nonsense!” I’m sure Brague would dispute my interpretation of his question, since he’s a Christian, but it does help me understand the reverence with which some evolutionists speak of Nature.
I have just finished reading J. C. Ryle’s fat book Holiness. Ryle’s style is a shade pompous for my taste, but he does pack a lot of richness in these pages. Here are a few quotes that leapt out at me.
A religion which costs nothing is worth nothing.
I wish to be as broad as the Bible, neither less nor more.
On sin:
Dim or indistinct views of sin are the origin of most of the errors, heresies, and false doctrines of the present day.
The more real grace men have in their hearts, the deeper is their sense of sin.
On death & resurrection:
Nothing, I am convinced, will astonish us so much, when we awake in the resurrection day, as the view we shall have of sin, and the retrospect we shall take of our own countless shortcomings and defects.
Most men hope to go to heaven when they die; but few, it may be feared, take the trouble to consider whether they would enjoy heaven if they got there. Heaven is essentially a holy place; its inhabitants are all holy; its occupations are all holy. To be really happy in heaven, it is clear and plain that we must be somewhat trained and made ready for heaven while we are on earth.
Death works no change. The grave makes no alteration. Each will rise again with the same character in which he breathed his last. Where will our place be if we are strangers to holiness now?
Nothing, surely, is so likely to prepare us for that heaven where Christ’s personal presence will be all, and that glory where we shall meet Christ face to face, as to realize communion with Christ, as an actual living person here on earth. There is all the difference in the world between an idea and a person.
Of all the things that will surprise us in the resurrection morning, this I believe will surprise us most: that we did not love Christ more before we died.
Auden famously wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” This has been interpreted by many to mean that poetry is really a frivolous enterprise, something you’d only engage in for fun. There’s something to that interpretation. After all, Auden said elsewhere that he thought of himself as “God’s fool,” good for entertainment only—an important but very much extraneous job.
Alan Jacobs has a slightly more nuanced view. In a talk he gave here in Birmingham last fall, he said the emphasis should be on the second word: “makes.” Poetry makes nothing happen, Jacobs explained, but it can prompt a lot. It’s a carrot and perhaps a stick, but not the horse itself.
Like generations of upstarts before me, I’m here to suggest yet another interpretation, one that hopefully complements Jacobs’ rather than refuting it. Mine is based on a pun that Auden was probably familiar with: the similarity of the words “nothing” and “noting” (that is, paying attention). As countless highschool students have been told, the title of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing carries both of these meanings. The play is about eavesdropping, miscommunication — noting — and, ultimately, a big fuss over nothing at all. (Yet it’s still amazing and wondrous. How do you do that, Bill?)
If we read Auden’s line as “poetry makes noting happen,” we hear him say that, though poetry doesn’t do much, it does make people pay attention. This wouldn’t be the first time Auden pointed out such a thing. In his Horae Canonicae, he spoke of “that eye on the object look” that artists display. Artistry means paying attention, for the artist as well as for the audience.
Does it work in the context of the poem? Here’s the second part of Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” from which the line is taken:
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
It seems to me that both meanings make sense here: poetry does not force anything, does not fix anything. But it does survive as “a way of happening, a mouth.” Though it may not do much, it creates an opening. And open spaces can draw the eye.
Back when I wrote reviews for Film Fisher, I had to pick which actors to “tag” in any particular film. The first review I wrote was for Short Term 12. When I posted it, I mulled over who I should tag. As the star, Brie Larson was an obvious choice — her career since has justified that instinct. Keith Stanfield (a.k.a, Lakeith Stanfield) got some big moments in the movie, so I put him in there, too, as well as Kaitlyn Dever, who hasn’t gone on to do much of note.
If you scan the credits for Short Term 12, you’ll find one big name I left off my list. I say “big” because he just won the Oscar for Best Actor.
Yeah, it’s Rami Malek. Whups.
Christian Leithart 