Sunday, November 30, 2008

An Apology for Letter Writing

From a dear Polish boy, a beautiful explanation of the advantages of letters:

"I have to explain You reasons of my willingness of the paper brief writing. There are many of them. It is very (in my opinion) pleasure to write and to receive letters of this kind, so it makes the people closer to each other. It is probably the most important reason of the art of letter writing which is used by the Mankind. And there is my personal reason--With the letter I can recall and develop my vocabulary. And it's the way of the stop to forgetting you language ability. With the letter I, but I think, not only I, but everyone, can focus his opinions, explain them on paper and take the responsibility for them. It's the importance of the text, that you have to treat as something important, as your "declaration of will." The text, especially when it is text from somebody important, known to you, comes into remembrance faster and for longer time. So it gives also a good occasion to writes something distinctive, to touch one theme and to start a discussion."

I couldn't agree more. And I envy his skill at letter writing--the cohesiveness of his letter is quite remarkable.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Marx and Eliot and the Amish

"Emily, would you be Amish if you could?" one of my students asked me. It was because I brought whoopie pies for class (Graham: "If you're going to bring them food, try to make sure it's around the time you hand out class evaluations."). I had to pause and think. But the answer is clearly no: I like make-up too much.

And then, at the end of class, when chatting with two girls who brought cookies to class: "No, I don't want the cookies, why don't you take them, Emily?"

Me: "I don't want them. Why don't you just throw them away?"

The girls: "No! What would Karl Marx say!"

As if Karl Marx (who we'd been discussing in class) had a policy about wasting food! But I took them home, anyway.

I paired Eliot with Marx for this class, mostly because I had to squeeze Eliot in before the end of the term.

From The Waste Land
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'
From "Little Gidding"
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

The first session didn't really get the poems, but the second one certainly did. I let all of my Christian biases out in this class. I just got sick of pretending I didn't have them. And it is too hard to talk about Eliot without them. I talked about St. John of the Cross and how he influenced me and so I made him my confirmation saint (One girl: "Did you convert because you got engaged? Are you engaged?" [Myrrh--she was not very good at checking fingers!] Another girl: "No! She converted because she was influenced!"). I talked about the transcendent intersecting time as an alternative to Marx and the modern alienation that he diagnoses. There you have it.

Friday, November 28, 2008

What Makes Man Different from Animals.7























"His creation, in practice, of an objective world, his working upon inorganic nature, is the proof that man is a conscious species-being, that is a being which is related to the species as its own essence or to itself as a species-being. To be sure, animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwelling places, as the bees, beavers, ants, etc. do. But the animal produces what it needs directly for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, while man produces universally. It produces under the domination of direct physical need while man produces even when he is free from physical need wand produces truly, indeed, only in freedom from such need. The animal produces only itself, while man reproduces the whole of nature. The animal's product is directly part of its physical body, while man steps freely to confront his product. The animal builds only according to the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, while man knows how to produce according to the standard of every species and always knows how to apply the intrinsic standard to the object. Man, therefore, creates according to the laws of beauty."
I like the word, "one-sidedly."

Thursday, November 27, 2008

On Windmills Or Here's to Faith


In Spain, the children (I was chaperoning 20-some highschoolers) didn't really know anything about Don Quixote. I tried to explain it to them, but then the tour guide started to show a movie called "Donkey Hote" about a donkey, which did not help my effort. And another tour guide called him "Don KIX-ZOTE"--once again, the children were confused, and I had to be like, "the donkey-guy." Alas.

But! From the remarkable, remarkable Monsignor Quixote, which is about a priest who is friends with a communist:

[The priest] had dreamt that Christ had been saved from the Cross by the legion of angels to which on an earlier occasion the Devil had told Him that He could appeal. So there was no final agony, no heavy stone which had to be rolled away, no discovery of an empty tomb. Father Quixote stood there watching on Golgotha as Christ stepped down from the Cross triumphant and acclaimed. The Roman soldiers, even the Centurion, knelt in His honor, and the people of Jerusalem poured up the hill to worship Him. The disciples clustered happily around. His mother smiled through her tears of joy. There was no ambiguity, no room for doubt and no room for faith at all. The whole world knew with certainty that Christ was the Son of God.

It was only a dream, of course it was only a dream, but nonetheless Father Quixote had felt on waking the chill of despair felt by a man who realizes suddenly that he has taken up a profession which is of use to no one, who must continue to live in a king of Saharan desert without doubt or faith, where everyone is certain that the same belief is true. He had found himself whispering, "God save me from such a belief." Then he heard the [communist] Mayor turn restlessly on the bed beside him, and he added without thought, "Save him too from belief."


[The picture is from some little town in which Cervantes may or may not have lived. You can just see the tiny, tiny windmills on the horizon.]

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Virtue, Liberty, and Independence.2



I love slinkies! Figures that they are the product of Pennsylvanian imagination and that they're our official state toy.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Whitman and Discussion Section


Last week we read two short poems by Walt Whitman:


HALCYON DAYS.
Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honored middle age, nor victories of politics or war.
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the spirit and frame like freshier, balmier air;
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs
really finished and indolent ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!


AMERICA.
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.


I think (and my students agreed) that this captures the possible problems with democracy (that John Stuart Mill also saw)--the rise of individualism, the reign of mediocrity, etc. Actually, what I think Whitman is really fruitful in relation to is Tocqueville's thoughts on the possibility for quietude in the democratic age. Suddenly, the halcyon days become an undesirable and boring thing (as both my classes pointed out).

Monday, November 24, 2008

Yet There With My Love I'm Home

The Fiddler on the Roof song, "Far From the Home I Love" explores a tension between home and love (the middle daughter falls in love with a man who is, I think, in a camp in Siberia) and resolves this tension in the final line: "Yet there with my love I'm home."

It's seems to me that this is right: at the end of the day, home is a person or relationship. This is paralleled by Augustine's realization of our condition of restlessness until we rest in God. Our home, then, is finally heaven, which is less of a place and more of a relationship to a person.

Good News!

This article is quite hopeful. Although I'm a bit confused: perhaps the Down Syndrome rate is increasing, unless aborting based on a Down's diagnosis has stopped entirely, which strikes me as unlikely.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Serendipity and the Internet

knowledge of self--I love that people look for that on the internet. Of course, I look to my friends for that, so I guess I'm not exactly one to talk.

5 different animals--rhinoceros, alligator, camel, monkey (my two new favorite animals), and chinchilla (Parker's favorite)

lampert are leopards spoke of in bible--Lampert: "Yes. Them is spoke of."

was that they--It was, in fact, they.

love poem ideas for strained relationships--My favorite apology poem (I would say it could be used for relationships, too, although it isn't exactly a love poem [but was, I think, written for WCW's wife]): "This is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

OR

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese could cover a multitude of sins:

What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

(I never fully understood the line about the wine tasting of its own grapes.)

something worse--There can always be something worse, which can be comforting. And the worse things can always be handled, too.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

The Preservation of Difference

So I was wondering for a while why I was fascinated by words ending in "-ide," and then I forgot about my question, and then I read this in Burke:



On the scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order. [Beautiful writing, no?] All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, are only common homicide.



These words represent distinctions! Fitting distinctions, nonetheless (at leaast according to Burke). Killing a king means something different from killing anyone else, just as killing your father is very different from killing a man you've never met. In Tocqueville's democratic age, everything becomes homicide.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

On Elevator Mirrors

For any friends contemplating elevator design, I would like to point out the usefulness of mirrors on elevators. It really doesn't matter where: Mirrors are useful on any of the walls and also on the ceiling; they would quite possibly be useful on the floor, as well. Everyone wants to know in the middle of the day that nothing has gone horribly wrong with his appearance--that the person to whom he was talking who was repeatedly scratching at his face was not indicating the presence of some food or worse--that one's hair is still in the proper place--that one's outfit is smooth and carefully arranged. Elevators are on the way to places where it is important for one to look put together. Therefore, elevators ought to come with mirrors.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Dinner Party.5

The long awaited dinner party: the dinner party with the duke and his dutchess (the duke is, of course, important since he has four names; his son, however, is not allowed a title apart from esquire; his son is one year old, although we hear he's already dancing and on the verge of talking), in order to introduce them to JVS. Also present: Mr. and Mrs. Knox, a vivacious couple who also have three vivacious children who I used to (and will resume, if Mrs. Knox has anything to do with it) babysit, along with Frankinscence, Myrhh, and Warren (I never babysat them; rather, they were present at the dinner party).


Let's see: first of all, the dutchess is charming--I had never met her before. She arrived bearing pink roses ("Roses in America are wonderful--they smell. In Britain, they are bred to live longer and not smell. Who would buy them if they didn't smell?"). Within the first several moments, she gestured to her husband, describing him as "the quintessential British gentleman." And indeed he is! I've never seen him in anything but courdoroys, and this evening he wore a sweater vest and blazer. His manner were impeccable, while his wife's exuberance A) drove the conversation and B) added the ease that complimented his reserve. And her ring! Well, all of her jewelry... The fact that she convinced a Pakistani cab driver to vote for McCain over Obama and her pro-life zeal were also wonderful. Such a lady (literally).

Dear reader, you should have seen how the room came alive when it was announced that Warren is looking to join the marines. The pride and support overflowed.


The food: sweet potato soup with pecans on top (for which Warren darling-ly/manly-ly made an exception from his no-sweet-potato rule); pork with apple and onion chutney; couscous (my mother: "Is that the only thing you know how to make?"); squash and zucchini, and, for dessert, my grandmother's chocolate cake.

Friday, November 7, 2008

Without Comment (How Unusual!)




From Elizabeth Bishop's "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore":

Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,
come like a daytime comet
with a long unnebulous train of words,
from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Monday, November 3, 2008

"Don't say nothin' about cleanin'"

Also, "I'm in the very, very, very beautiful city of Williamsport, Pennsylvania."

Williamsport makes me proud.