Relocating To Elfland

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head. (C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 24)

Would God give us a drama? He makes a Shakespeare. Or would he construct a drama more immediately his own? He begins with the building of the stage itself, and that stage is a world – a universe of worlds. He makes the actors, and they do not act, – they are their part. He utters them into the visible to work out their life – his drama. When he would have an epic, he sends a thinking hero into his drama, and the epic is the soliloquy of his Hamlet. Instead of writing his lyrics, he sets his birds and his maidens a-singing. All the processes of the ages are God’s science; all the flow of history is his poetry. His sculpture is not in marble, but in living and speech-giving forms, which pass away, not to yield place to those that come after, but to be perfected in a nobler studio. What he has done remains, although it vanishes; and he never either forgets what he has once done, or does it even once again. As the thoughts move in the mind of a man, so move the worlds of men and women in the mind of God, and make no confusion there, for there they had their birth, the offspring of his imagination. Man is but a thought of God. (MacDonald, “The Imagination”)

Repose is not the end of education; its end is a noble unrest, an ever renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into fever, than retarded into lethargy. (George MacDonald, “The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture”)

There is no wisdom (and thus no holiness) without education; indeed, this is precisely what education is. Education is spiritual formation precisely because it is formation in wisdom. One of the urgent needs of our day is to recover an appreciation of the power of education and learning for the Christian life. Education is an inherently deeply Christian act, and few things are so empowering to life as learning; the church by its nature is a teaching-learning community. Learning opens the mind, frees the heart, encourages the disheartened. We are animated (ensouled) by learning. Though education surely includes classrooms and libraries, the wise are deeply attuned to the rhythms of God’s creation: they understand, from the inside out, what it means to see and live in the truth (thus work in the library is complemented by work in the garden). (Gordon T. Smith, Transforming Conversion: Rethinking the Language and Contours of Christian Initiation, p. 98)

Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends . . . to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life. (George Eliot, Silas Marner, chapter 2)

It’s been a long time since I finished a novel and felt as satisfied as I recently did after reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Among the things I liked about it are the one-liners that stop you in your tracks. For example:

“An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There’s a punishment for it, and it’s usually crucifixion.” (p. 262)

“No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.” (p. 266)

“The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt – and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. I am sure in myself there would not be many jails.” (p. 268)

“Consider what happens to people whose night skies are spangled with constellations like The Master of Hestviken, or Moby-Dick, or The Brothers Karamazov. These people are hard to fool. They are also hard to enlist in pursuit of the trivial and ephemeral. It is as if we had given them a powerful telescope atop a high mountain, and shown them how to use it, and directed their attention to the Orion nebula, and once they had learned to do so and to love the beauty they found there, expected them to look at light bulbs on a marquee. Or, if not a telescope, a magical device for seeing deep into the human heart; and then expected them to watch American Idol, or to be impressed by the maunderings of the latest political hack.” (Esolen, Ten Ways, p. 100)

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

(John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” October 1816)

“Few parents grasp the danger of children playing outside. The most enlightened educators do grasp it, and have taken steps to ensure that children will be left to their own devices, outdoors, as little as possible. They have shortened the summer vacation, parceling out free days here and there through the school year. The effect is to keep children from developing the habit of learning things outside of school . . . . After all, it takes children a week or so just to get used to the summer, and a week or two at the end of August to prepare for the new school year. Then, too, schools have heaped books upon the children to tote around during the summer, much as you would heave sacks of grain and skins of wine atop a camel before crossing a desert. The idea is not to instill a love of reading excellent literature. Recall that so-called great works of art are dangerous, as they rouse the imagination. No, summer reading ensures that no mental break occurs between June and September, no respite from the sedative.” (Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, p. 31)

I am loving this book.

An emerging new year’s conviction: I have not read nearly enough of Oliver O’Donovan. Witness this:

“When we think quite specifically about Christian action we have to single out the resurrection moment which vindicates the creation into which our actions can be ventured with intelligibility. In action the integrity of the world order is supposed, and that integrity is answered for by the empty tomb, where God has stood by the life he made and has not allowed it to be brought to nothing.” (O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, prologue to the second edition)