Lifelong Learning

quod si non hic tantus fructus ostenderetur, et si ex his studiis delectatio sola peteretur, tamen, ut opinor, hanc animi remissionem humanissimam ac liberalissimam iudicaretis. nam ceterae neque temporum sunt neque aetatum omnium neque locorum; at haec studia adulescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solacium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur.

Even if there there were no great profit to be made out, and even if it were pleasure alone that was sought from these studies, I still believe that you should consider them a most refined and most liberal vacation for the mind. For other pursuits are unsuited for every time, age or place; but these studies nourish youth and entertain old age, augment prosperity, provide a refuge and solace in adversity, offer entertainment at home without impeding public life, they are with us at night, when we are abroad or in the countryside.

Cicero, Pro Archia, 16. My Translation.

Dying for a Literary Education

Εἰς δὴ τοῦτον ἄγουσι μὲν ἱεροὶ λόγοι, δι’ ἀποῤῥήτων ἡμᾶς ἐκπαιδεύοντες· ἕως γε μὴν ὑπὸ τῆς ἡλικίας ἐπακούειν τοῦ βάθους τῆς διανοίας αὐτῶν οὐχ οἷόν τε, ἐν ἑτέροις οὐ πάντη διεστηκόσιν, ὥσπερ ἐν σκιαῖς τισι καὶ κατόπτροις, τῷ τῆς ψυχῆς ὄμματι τέως προγυμναζόμεθα, τοὺς ἐν τοῖς τακτικοῖς τὰς μελέτας ποιουμένους μιμούμενοι· οἵ γε, ἐν χειρονομίαις καὶ ὀρχήσεσι τὴν ἐμπειρίαν κτησάμενοι, ἐπὶ τῶν ἀγώνων τοῦ ἐκ τῆς παιδιᾶς ἀπολαύουσι κέρδους. Καὶ ἡμῖν δὴ οὖν ἀγῶνα προκεῖσθαι πάντων ἀγώνων μέγιστον νομίζειν χρεὼν, ὑπὲρ οὗ πάντα ποιητέον ἡμῖν καὶ πονητέον εἰς δύναμιν ἐπὶ τὴν τούτου παρασκευὴν, καὶ ποιηταῖς, καὶ λογοποιοῖς καὶ ῥήτορσι καὶ πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις ὁμιλητέον, ὅθεν ἂν μέλλῃ πρὸς τὴν τῆς ψυχῆς ἐπιμέλειαν ὠφέλειά τις ἔσεσθαι. Ὥσπερ οὖν οἱ δευσοποιοί, παρασκευάσαντες πρότερον θεραπείαις τισὶν ὅ τι ποτ´ ἂν ᾖ τὸ δεξόμενον τὴν βαφήν, οὕτω τὸ ἄνθος ἐπάγουσιν, ἄν τε ἁλουργόν, ἄν τέ τι ἕτερον ᾖ· τὸν αὐτὸν δὴ καὶ ἡμεῖς τρόπον, εἰ μέλλει ἀνέκπλυτος ἡμῖν ἡ τοῦ καλοῦ παραμένειν δόξα, τοῖς ἔξω δὴ τούτοις προτελεσθέντες, τηνικαῦτα τῶν ἱερῶν καὶ ἀπορρήτων ἐπακουσόμεθα παιδευμάτων· καὶ οἷον ἐν ὕδατι τὸν ἥλιον ὁρᾶν ἐθισθέντες οὕτως αὐτῷ προσβαλοῦμεν τῷ φωτὶ τὰς ὄψεις.

It is Holy Scriptures, by instructing us in sacred mysteries, that lead us into this other life. But as long as our age prevents us from penetrating the depths of their meaning, with the help of those books whose spirit is not entirely opposed to them, we exercise the eye of our soul as if on shadows and on mirrors; in this we imitate those who perform military exercises, and who having made themselves skilful at shadow-boxing and dancing, reap the profits of their training in battle. And so we also must believe that the greatest of all battles is set before us, and that in order to prepare ourselves for it we must do everything and endure everything to the extent of our power in preparation for it. We must associate with poets, historians, orators and all men who might be of some use to us in the cultivation of our souls. And so just as dyers, first prepare the cloth with certain treatments before it receives the dye, and then apply the colour, whether it be purple or some other shade, so we must first also in the same way, if we would preserve with us indelible for all time the splendour of the good, be instructed by these external means; and like those who have become used to seeing the sun’s reflection in the water, so we shall become able to turn our eyes upon the sun itself.

St. Basil of Caesarea, Ad adolescentes, de legendis libris Gentilium, II. My translation.

Hero-worship

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity. The omniscient historian would display the masterpieces, their causes and their inter-relation. The study of literature is hero-worship. It is a refinement, or, if you will, a perversion of that primitive religion.

Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1952; 1910), p. 7.

A University Should Be Like a Poet's Garden

Mark Pattison,'Oxford Studies' in Essays, ed. by Henry Nettleship, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889), I, 415-494 (p. 420):

A university should be situated, like the poet's garden, 'Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite beyond it.

Canon

David Damrosch, We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 109:

Too often both sides [progressives/’great tradition’ traditionalists] take absolutist positions, as though our intellectual traditions must either form an invariant and unquestionable unity or else be a specious fiction serving the corrupt self-interest of an elite few. Any canon is indeed a construct; particularly in the extremely selective form of a two-semester course, any representation of "the" tradition of Western literature or social thought is bound to leave out important texts, ideas, movements. Yet this does not mean that a necessarily artificial construction of the canon has no value. The real problem is that at the present time the core itself is largely hollow. Debates over particular inclusions or exclusions often amount to little more than the replacement of a few deck chairs as general education continues slowly, majestically, to sink out of sight.

Chinese Books

Duarte de Sande, Diálogo sobre a missão dos embaixadores japoneses à Cúria Romana, ed. by Américo da Costa Ramalho & Sebastião Tavares de Pinho, 2 vols (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2009; 1590) , II, pp. 719-21:

Veniamus nunc ad eam artem quam Sinae summopere profitentur, eamque merito litteraturam possumus appellare. Quamuis enim uulgata fama sit, a Sinis multas ingenuas artes coli, praesertimque utramque philosophiam, quae de rerum natura et moribus agit, et apud eos esse Academias, ubi huiusmodi artes traduntur haec tamen opinio magna ex parte popularis potius, quam uera censenda est.
   Dicam tamen quid huic opinioni occasionem dederit. In primis ergo Sinae litterariam artem praecipue profitentur, eamque diligentissime ediscunt, longum tempus totamque fere aetatem ea in re consumentes. Eam ob causam in omnibus urbibus et oppidis, immo et in exiguis pagis sunt magistri, mercede conducti, qui pueros litteras docent. Cumque illae iuxta nostrum etiam communiorem morem sint infinitae, ab ineunte aetate, tenerisque unguiculis pueri libros in manus sumunt, quos tantum illi deponunt qui parum habiles ad hoc munus iudicantur, et ad mercaturam, uel artes quae manibus exercentur, animum applicant. Reliqui uero tanto studio ad litteras incumbunt, ut mirabiliter in praecipuis libris sint uersati, et in quauis pagina quot sint litterae, et in quo situ rogati, facile respondeant.

Let us now to that art in which the Chinese cultivate the most, and which we may rightly call literature. For although it is popularly known that the Chinese cultivate many ingenuous arts, and especially the two branches of philosophy, which deal with the nature of things and manners, and that there are academies among them, where such arts are taught, yet this opinion is by and large more commonplace than it is true.
   However, I will comment on, what gave rise to this opinion. Firstly, therefore, the Chinese especially profess the art of letters and learn it with the greatest diligence, spending a long time and almost and almost their entire lives in study. For this reason, in all cities and towns, even in small villages, there are hired teachers who teach characters to children. And since their characters are infinite compared to our alphabet, from the earliest age children carry books in their hands, and only those who are considered inept put them down and apply their minds to trade or the manual arts. As for the rest, they devote themselves so ardently to letters that they become marvellously versed in the canonical books, and when asked how many letters there are and where on each page, they easily answer.

My translation.

Grammatical Training

Ohne sichere grammatische Schulung und weitausgreifende Lektüre ist nichts zu erreichen . Germanistik , Romanistik , Anglistik entbehren alter Tradition . Sie fallen darum den Moden und Irrungen des « Zeitgeistes » leicht zum Opfer.

Without solid grammatical training and extensive reading, nothing can be achieved. German studies, Romance studies, English studies lack ancient tradition. They therefore easily fall victim to the fashions and aberrations of the ’spirit of the times'.

E.R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur Und Lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: A. Francke AG, 1948), p. 386. My translation.

Reading, Rambling and Education

    In intellectual matters things were no better with me. I have before me a small paper book containing a ‘Diary’ for parts of the years 1830, 1831, 1832. Its childishness is astonishing. I had read much more than most boys of my age, but I did not seem to understand anything. This was the want of companionship; I had no one except the sons of the village cottagers to play with. We had a man-servant indoors, and a farming- man out of doors; I was much with them, and learnt much from them; but there was nothing to replace the collision of wit with wit, which takes place between boys. One of these men was a dalesman, native of Hawes, and from him I had stories of the old wild life of the dales, mixed largely with the supernatural, which germinated afterwards into a strong turn for county history, and walks of exploration. I read enormously. Constable’s Miscellany, Murray’s Family Library, the publications of the Useful Knowledge Society, were coming out at that time; we took them all, and I read them. I read ten times as much as I remembered; what is more odd, I read far more than I ever took in the sense of as I read it. I think the mechanical act of perusal must have given me a sort of pleasure. Books, as books, irrespective of their contents, were my delight. The arrival of a new book in the house was the event of the week. I took in the Magazine of Natural History; the anticipation of the first of the month, and the reception of the parcel from the Richmond bookseller, were an excitement that I can remember to this day. I walked up and down in the lane waiting for the butcher's cart, which acted as carrier for the village, to come, snatched up Bell’s parcel, and rushed in with it. I was already marked out for the life of a student, yet little that was in the books I read seemed to find its way into my mind. There was no mind there! My outdoor life, long solitary days’ fishing, and long rides across country – in 1831 I had a pony and went hunting – rambles over the moor, were doing more for my education than my incessant reading.

Mark Pattison, Memoirs of an Oxford Don (London: Cassell, 1988; 1885), pp. 32-33.

Society Inebriated by Technology

   For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality – modern American philosophy was in fact one of the causes of that weakness – and generally it, too, prefers to tinker and to tweak.
   
   The machines to which we have become enslaved, all of them quite astonishing, represent the greatest assault on human attention ever devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual dispersal, which make us wider only by making us less deep. There are thinkers, reputable ones if you can believe it, who proclaim that the exponential growth in computational ability will soon take us beyond the finitude of our bodies and our minds so that, as one of them puts it, there will no longer be any difference between human and machine. La Mettrie lives in Silicon Valley. This, of course, is not an apotheosis of the human but an abolition of the human; but Google is very excited by it.

Leon Wieseltier, ‘ “Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture” A Defense of the Humanities’, The Commencement Ceremony of Brandeis University, 19 May 2013

Bald Heads

Knowledge is the web to be filled and colored with feeling and desire. Looking back to the curiosities and perceptions of boyhood’s years, I recall my capture by phrenology. A shop was given to it on Broadway, where I bought a plaster head showing all the bumps. Church hours were beguiled by the study of bald heads around me.

Henry Osborn Taylor, A Historian’s Creed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), pp. 80-81.

The End of Learning

 The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching. And seeing every nation affords not experience and tradition enough for all kind of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the languages of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom; so that language is but the Instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only.

John Milton, ‘Of Education’ in John Milton: a critical edition of the major works, ed. by Stephen Orgel & Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: OUP, 1991), pp. 226-36 (pp. 227-28).

Poor Dear Old Oxford

 ...Poor dear old Oxford! if I live till I am eighty, and were to enjoy all the happiness that the warmest wish could desire, I should never forget, or cease to look back with something of a painful feeling on the years we were together there, and on all the delights that we have lost; and I look forward with extreme delight to my intended journey, down to the audit in October, when I shall take a long and last farewell of my old haunts, and will if I possibly can, yet take one more look at Bagley Wood, and the pretty field, and the wild stream that flows down between Bullington and Cowley Marsh, not forgetting even your old friend, the Lower London Road. Well, I must endeavour to get some such associations to combine with Laleham and  but at present all is harsh and ruffled, like woods in a high wind, only I am beginning to love my own little study, where I have a sofa full of books, as of old, and the two verse books lying about on it, and a volume of Herodotus; and where I sit up and read or write till twelve or one o’clock.

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D., 5th edn, 2 vols (London: B. Fellowes, 1844-1845), I, pp-58-59 [II. To Rev. George Cornish, Laleham, September 20, 1819].

Weltliteratur

Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 128-29:

Just as our students should know something about the major classics of Western literature, so they should know something about the major classics of non-Western literature, because even the understanding of our own Western civilization is distorted and incomplete unless it is seen in a global and not merely in a regional and parochial context. After all, Western civilization did not spring like Aphrodite from the sea foam. It has been enriched by contributions from many different sources, including the Islamic world and even the remoter regions of Asia and Africa. Without a recognition of that diversity of origin, our education and our self-perception are flawed and falsified. The interdependence of human existence at the present time, the unity of human culture, which is becoming more of a fact every day in spite of the political and other differences that divide us, require such mutual study. I stress the word “mutual.” It is good that our students should study the Mu’allaqāt; it is also good that Arab students should study Beowulf.

Literary Theory

‘Critical thinking #4: Daniel Mendelsohn’, Interview by David Wolf, Prospect, 5 Dec. 2013:

First of all, I think undergraduates should be kept away from Theory at all costs. I don’t think people should be allowed to even hear the word “theory” until they’re doing graduate work—for the very good reason that it’s impossible to theorise about texts before one has deep familiarity with them (not that that stopped anyone in the 1980s when I was in grad school). Undergraduates should be taught to have a clean appreciation of what texts say and how they say them, and learn how to write intelligently and clearly about that. If undergraduates had to have a model of criticism it ought to be popular criticism rather than traditional academic criticism.

Later on, when they’ve had experience in close reading, when they have a number of works under their belt, they can be introduced to theory—to the wide array of approaches to texts that they already will have “owned,” in some small way. That is exciting. But to flatter the vanity of 19-year-olds by letting them think they know about “theory” before they have read anything in real depth strikes me as preposterous. That very approach bred a generation of academics whose approach to literature is contemptuous.

Training and Talent

Neque enim ingenium sine disciplina aut disciplina sine ingenio perfectum artificem potest efficere.

For indeed neither raw talent without instruction nor instruction without raw talent can make a perfect artisan.

Vitruvius, De Architectura, I.3. My translation.

Choosing Books to Read

Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913), p. 362:

The room for choice is so limitless that to my mind it seems absurd to try to make catalogues which shall be supposed to appeal to all the best thinkers. This is why I have no sympathy whatever with writing lists of the One Hundred Best Books, or the Five-Foot Library. It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good books; and if he is to go off for a year or so where he cannot get many books, it is an excellent thing to choose a five-foot library of particular books which in that particular year and on that particular trip he would like to read. But there is no such thing as a hundred books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or for one man at all times; and there is no such thing as a five-foot library which will satisfy the needs of even one particular man on different occasions extending over a number of years.

The Thing with Children

Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot: A Novel (London: Viking, 2024), p. 42:

That’s the thing with children. So often what they do, or what they think they should do, or what they think they are good at is just some product of something someone told them that they would be good at. If you’re tall people say, Surely you’re magnificent at basketball. If you’re a girl shaped like a block without hips, people say swimming, boxing, the discus, and then one thinks, Am I good at these things? Surely if people say it, it must be true.

Leaving Children to Themselves

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair or, A Novel without a Hero (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, n.d.; 1847-1848), p. 51:

If people would but leave children to themselves; if teachers would cease to bully them; if parents would not insist upon directing their thoughts, and dominating their feelings—those feelings and thoughts which are a mystery to all (for how much do you and I know of each other, of our children, of our fathers, of our neighbour? and how far more beautiful and sacred are the thoughts of the poor lad or girl whom you govern likely to be, than those of the dull and world-corrupted person who rules him?)—if, I say, parents and masters would leave their children alone a little more—small harm would accrue, although a less quantity of as in praesenti might be acquired.

Future Office Cows

Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars: a novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024), p. 219:

School was a waste of fucking time. Literally. A factory farm for future office cows.

Next Best Thing

It was good to be born rich, because if you’re rich, you have freedom. But if you can’t be born rich, then the next best thing is to be a professor.

Attributed to E. Digby Baltzell