Thing-Finder

The love-hate relationship between the English and the animal world was never more passionately displayed than in Edwardian houses. One could hardly cross a drawing-room floor without falling over the snarling head of a lion's skin, or a polar bearskin stretched out upon it. The hideous archaic profiles of rhinoceroses leant out of walls, over the Zanzibar chests in the outer halls. Hollowed-out feet of elephants containing potted palms were dotted about halls where the garishness of Turkey carpets alternated with the smoother surfaces of Persian rugs. Inkstands were made from the hooves of favorite hunters or chargers, doors were kept open by the stuffed feet of eland. Behind the shut doors of smokingrooms, whence the smell of cigar smoke drifted richly out, would be stags' heads, wild buffalo horns jutting out of hollow skulls, the heads of black panthers with gleaming yellow glass eyes. Tiger skins hung on landings; their huge teeth menaced one on one's way to bed. No billiard room was innocent of stuffed white owls, stuffed badgers, plaster salmon; even sometimes a stuffed albatross, enormous and yellowing, regarded one malignly out of its beady eye. Horrendous recreated pike lurked in the pantry passages; in the dusk they seemed as big as sharks. In the hall of my grandmother's house near Barnstaple there was a stuffed bear, upright, holding in his paws a brass tray for the reception of visiting cards. By daytime he was friendly, almost cosy, could be nearly thought of as a pet. At twilight he became menacing, in the dark he threatened terrifyingly. To cross a hall on one's way to bed was to encounter, close to, all the perils of a jungle at night.

Looked back upon from a more humane and less rigorous age, the well-to-do Victorians leave an impression of a strange acquiescence in the miseries about them. John Henry took in the works of Charles Dickens in monthly parts, as they came out, and delighted in them; he cannot therefore have been ignorant of the appalling conditions in which most of his countrymen lived. Although country people were never so neglected, underfed, or ill-treated as in the towns, there must have been plenty of misery and poverty around him. There was in fact a widow in Abbotsworthy who brought up a family of nine children entirely upon vegetables and snail soup. That he denied himself to help poor people was as true of him as of many another sincere country parson. But rich and poor had existed throughout recorded time; and to believe that things which seemed as much a part of the natural order as night and day could ever be radically altered, required a leap of the imagination for which very few people who were not themselves poor had the necessary spiritual agility. He did what he could for his immediate neighbors and prayed for the rest; living as most people do, within the ethic of his day, which was sterner and more self-disciplined than ours but less awakened and less imaginative.

Arthur, the next eldest, was grey-eyed and rather more dashing; a magnificently well-made man, with a long-jawed throwaway charm; though certainly brave he was not conspicuously affectionate and only intermittently mild. He had just come back with his regiment from the West Indies, where, beset by yellow fever, they had died in great numbers. He himself was so desperately ill that his companions, not knowing about the Slessor constitution, had made his coffin and engraved his name on it and marched some miles in the hot sun to dig his grave. He brought the coffin home to substantiate this tale, and because it is one of those few things that cannot fail to come in useful. In fact he had no need of it for another sixty years. It hung about in the stables, getting underfoot, until someone hit on the notion of making it into a toboggan.

Like every other creative activity, thinking requires raw material. I don't know about you, but I find I can never get enough raw material of my own. I take most of what I need from other people. On my own I am just not enough - in experience or knowledge or imaginative capacity or language. To put it another way round: thinking isn't really a self-contained, individual activity at all. It is a shared process. We are all members of the human think-tank.

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions - there we have none.

Spare us our liberties; give us peace; give us a chance to live; give us an honest chance in the race of life; place no obstruction in our way; oppress us not; give us an equal chance; and we ask no more of the American people.

Sir, the gentleman states that in the State of North Carolina the colored people enjoy all their rights as far as the highways are concerned; that in the hotels, and in the railroad cars, and in the various public places of resort, they have all the rights and all the immunities accorded to any other class of citizens of the United States. Now, it may not have come under his observation, but it has under mine, that such really is not the case; and the reason why I know and feel it more than he does is because my face is painted black and his is painted white. We who have the color--I may say the objectionable color--know and feel all this. A few days ago, in passing from South Carolina to this city, I entered a place of public resort where hungry men are fed, but I did no dare--I could not without trouble--sit down to the table. I could not sit down at Wilmington or at Weldon without entering into a contest, which I did not desire to do. My colleague, the gentleman who so eloquently spoke on this subject the other day, [Mr. ELLIOTT,] a few months ago entered a restaurant at Wilmington and sat down to be served, and while there a gentleman stepped up to him and said, "You cannot eat here." All the other gentlemen upon the railroad as passengers were eating there; he had only twenty minutes, and was compelled to leave the restaurant or have a fight for it. He showed fight, however, and got his dinner; but he has never been back there since. Coming here last week I felt we did not desire to draw revolvers and present the bold front of warriors, and therefore we ordered our dinners to be brought into the cars, but even there we found the existence of this feeling; for, although we had paid a dollar a piece for our meals, to be brought by the servants into the cars, still there was objection on the part of the railroad people to our eating our meals in the cars, because they said we were putting on airs. They refused us in the restaurant, and then did not desire that we should eat our meals in the cars, although we paid for them. Yet this was in the noble State of North Carolina.

Arthur, the next eldest, was grey-eyed and rather more dashing; a magnificently well-made man, with a long-jawed throwaway charm; though certainly brave he was not conspicuously affectionate and only intermittently mild. He had just come back with his regiment from the West Indies, where, beset by yellow fever, they had died in great numbers. He himself was so desperately ill that his companions, not knowing about the Slessor constitution, had made his coffin and engraved his name on it and marched some miles in the hot sun to dig his grave. He brought the coffin home to substantiate this tale, and because it is one of those few things that cannot fail to come in useful. In fact he had no need of it for another sixty years. It hung about in the stables, getting underfoot, until someone hit on the notion of making it into a toboggan.

"Odd's boddikins, Jeeves," I said, "I am in rare fettle this a.m. Talk about exulting in youth! I feel up and doing, with a heart for any fate, as Tennyson says."

"Longfellow, sir."

"Or, if you prefer it, Longfellow. I am in no mood to split hairs. . . ."

A Psalm of Life
by H.W. Longfellow

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
"Life is but an empty dream!"
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
"Dust thou art, to dust returnest,"
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us further than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting;
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,--act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time; -

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

Modern books for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petrenius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators.

It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in our library the one who 'went out' the best was - Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel - the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel - seems to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific.

"Studies show that practice and perseverance contribute more to accomplishment than being smart does."

"The researchers determined that scholarly success was more than twice as dependent on assessments of self-discipline as on IQ. What is more, they reported in 2005, students with more discipline - a willingness to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term gain - were more likely than those lacking the skill to improve their grades during the school year. A high IQ, on the other hand, did not predict a climb in grades."

COCK-CROW
Mother Goose

Cocks crow in the morn
To tell us to rise,
And he who lies late
Will never be wise;
For early to bed
And early to rise,
Is the way to be healthy
And wealthy and wise.

"Precisely, sir. Rem acu tetigisti."

"Rem ------?"

"Acu tetigisti, sir. A Latin expression. Literally it means 'You have touched the matter with a needle,' but a more idiomatic rendering would be - "

"Put my finger on the nub?"

"Exactly, sir."

"Yes, I get it now. You have clarified the situation. Getting right down to it, these two old buzzards have got to foregather in secret and require a hideout."

A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitation which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, "I know what I like," he is really saying "I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu," because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.

If any speak to you at your coming, look straight at them with a steady eye, and give good ear to their words while they be speaking ; and see to it with all your might that ye jangle not, nor let your eyes wander about the house, but pay heed to what is said, with blithe visage and diligent spirit. When ye answer, ye shall be ready with what ye shall say, and speak "things fructuous," and give your reasons smoothly, in words that are gentle but compendious, for many words are right tedious to the wise man who listens ; therefore eschew them with diligence.

Take no seat, but be ready to stand until you are bidden to sit down. Keep your hands and feet at rest ; do not claw your flesh or lean against a post, in the presence of your lord, or handle anything belonging to the house.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

Back in 1959, anthropologist Edward T. Hall labeled these expressive human attributes "the Silent Language." Hall passed away last month in Santa Fe at age 95, but his writings on nonverbal communication deserve continued attention. He argued that body language, facial expressions and stock mannerisms function "in juxtaposition to words," imparting feelings, attitudes, reactions and judgments in a different register.

This is why, Hall explained, U.S. diplomats could enter a foreign country fully competent in the native language and yet still flounder from one miscommunication to another, having failed to decode the manners, gestures and subtle protocols that go along with words. And how could they, for the "silent language" is acquired through acculturation, not schooling. Not only is it unspoken; it is largely unconscious. The meanings that pass through it remain implicit, more felt than understood.

The Negro's Complaint
by William Cowper

Forced from home and all its pleasures,
Afric's coast I left forlorn;
To increase a stranger's treasures,
O'er the raging billows borne.
Men from England bought and sold me,
Paid my price in paltry gold;
But though slave they have enrolled me,
Minds are never to be sold.
Still in thought as free as ever,
What are England's rights, I ask,
Me from my delights to sever,
Me to torture, me to task?
Fleecy locks and black complexion
Cannot forfeit Nature's claim;
Skins may differ, but affection
Dwells in white and black the same.

Why did all-creating Nature
Make the plant for which we toil?
Sighs must fan it, tears must water,
Sweat of ours must dress the soil.
Think, ye masters, iron-hearted,
Lolling at your jovial boards;
Think how many backs have smarted
For the sweets your cane affords.

Is there, as ye sometimes tell us,
Is there One who reigns on high?
Has He bid you buy and sell us,
Speaking from His throne, the sky?
Ask Him, if your knotted scourges,
Matches, blood-extorting screws,
Are the means that duty urges
Agents of His will to use?

Hark! He answers,--wild tornadoes,
Strewing yonder sea with wrecks,
Wasting towns, plantations, meadows,
Are the voice with which He speaks.
He, foreseeing what vexations
Afric's sons should undergo,
Fixed their tyrants' habitation
Where his whirlwinds answer--No.

By our blood in Afric wasted,
Ere our necks received the chain;
By the miseries that we tasted,
Crossing in your barks the main;
By our suffering since ye brought us
To the man-degrading mart;
All, sustained by patience, taught us
Only by a broken heart.

Deem our nation brutes no longer,
Till some reason ye shall find
Worthier of regard, and stronger
Than the color of our kind.
Slaves of gold! whose sordid dealings
Tarnish all your boasted powers,
Prove that you have human feelings,
Ere you proudly question ours.

There is constant squabble about whether particular books are children's books or not. Indeed, some people argue that there is no such thing as books for children but only books which children happen to read. And unless one wants to be partisan and dogmatic - which I do not, having had my fill of both - one has to agree that there is some truth on both sides and the whole truth in neither.

The fact is that some books are clearly written for children in a specific sense - they were written by their authors deliberately for children - and some books, never specifically intended for children, have qualities which attract children to them.

When his flag-draped coffin moved slowly across the old capital, drawn by naval ratings, and bare-headed Londoners stood trembling in the cold, they mourned, not only him and all he had meant, but all they had been and no longer were, and would never be again.

. . . Like many novelists I have spun my books out of my experiences when I could, but in attempting work far outside my own relatively jog-trot existence I have had to pick other men's brains. My World War II service, three years on destroyer-minesweepers in the Pacific, gave me the substance of The Caine Mutiny, but taught me nothing at all about the world storm that swept me from Manhattan to the south Pacific like a driven leaf. When the bomb fell on Hiroshima my ship was a bobbing speck on picket duty in the rough waters off Okinawa, and we had just survived a kamikaze attack unscathed; so I joined heartily in the merriment aboard ship, very glad that I had survived the war and would soon go back to my free civilian life and marry my sweetheart. As to the larger issues of dropping a whacking new bomb made of uranium on a Japanese city, I was innocent and indifferent. The radio said that our scientists had "harnessed the power of the sun", and that was quite enough for me and for all of us aboard that old four-piper, halfway around the world from home.

As a Columbia undergraduate, imbibing the Greek philosophy, comparative religion and general humanism of the noted core curriculum, I rode the subway to the Bronx once a week to study the Talmud with my grandfather. The Talmud is a hard grind in Aramaic, and to lighten up things I would now and then venture an agnostic prod at some tender point of our faith - say, Joshua's stopping the sun and moon. Grandpa would respond with good-natured scorn, stroking his full beard, "Where are you creeping with your lame paws?" It was more pungent in Yiddish, but you get the idea.

The failure of our schools to create a literate society is sometimes excused on the grounds that the schools have been asked to do too much. They are asked, for example, to pay due regard to the demands of both local and national acculturation. They are asked to teach not only American history but also state and city history, driving, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, consumerism, carpentry, cooking, and other special subjects. They are given the task of teaching information that is sometimes too rudimentary and sometimes too specialized. If the schools did not undertake this instruction, much of the information so provided would no doubt go unlearned. In some of our national moods we would like the schools to teach everything, but they cannot. There is a pressing need for clarity about our educational priorities.

But babies' intelligence, the research shows, is very different from that of adults and from the kind of intelligence we usually cultivate in school. Schoolwork revolves around focus and planning. We set objectives and goals for children, with an emphasis on skills they should acquire or information they should know. Children take tests to prove that they have absorbed a specific set of skills and facts and have not been distracted by other possibilities.

This approach may work for children over the age of 5 or so. But babies and very young children are terrible at planning and aiming for precise goals. When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can't not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. But the new research tells us that babies can be rational without being goal-oriented.

Adults focus on objects that will be most useful to them. But as the lever study demonstrated, children play with the objects that will teach them the most. In our study, 4-year-olds imagined new possibilities based on just a little data. Adults rely more on what they already know. Babies aren’t trying to learn one particular skill or set of facts; instead, they are drawn to anything new, unexpected or informative.

Part of the explanation for these differing approaches can be found in the brain. The young brain is remarkably plastic and flexible. Brains work because neurons are connected to one another, allowing them to communicate. Baby brains have many more neural connections than adult brains. But they are much less efficient. Over time, we prune away the connections we don't use, and the remaining ones become faster and more automatic. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls the directed, planned, focused kind of intelligence, is exceptionally late to mature, and may not take its final shape until our early 20s.

In fact, our mature brain seems to be programmed by our childhood experiences - we plan based on what we've learned as children. Very young children imagine and explore a vast array of possibilities. As they grow older and absorb more evidence, certain possibilities become much more likely and more useful. They then make decisions based on this selective information and become increasingly reluctant to give those ideas up and try something new. Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting - a system will learn more if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effective if it simply acts on the most likely one. Babies explore; adults exploit.

The Sword
by Miss Landon

'T was on the battle-field; and the cold pale moon
Looked down on the dead and dying;
And the wind passed o'er with a dirge and a wail,
Where the young and brave were lying.

With his father's sword in his red right hand,
And the hostile dead around him,
Lay a youthful chief; but his bed was the ground,
And the grave's icy sleep had bound him.

A reckless rover, 'mid death and doom,
Passed a soldier, his plunder seeking;
Careless he stepped where friend and foe
Lay alike in their life-blood reeking.

Drawn by the shine of the warrior's sword,
The soldier paused beside it;
He wrenched the hand with a giant's strength,
But the grasp of the dead defied it.

He loosed his hold, and his noble heart
Took part with the dead before him;
And he honored the brave who died sword in hand,
As with softened brow he leaned o'er him.

"A soldier's death thou hast boldly died,
A soldier's grave won by it:
Before I would take that sword from thine hand,
My own life's blood should dye it.

"Thou shalt not be left for the carrion crow,
Or the wolf to batten o'er thee;
Or the coward insult the gallant dead,
Who in life had trembled before thee."

Then dug he a grave in the crimson earth,
Where his warrior foe was sleeping;
And he laid him there, in honor and rest,
With his sword in his own brave keeping.

And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

Wasn't accidie, that lethargy of the spirit, one of the deadly sins?

Main Entry: ac·cid·ie
Function: noun
Date: 13th century
: acedia


Main Entry: ace·dia
Function: noun
Etymology: Late Latin, from Greek akedeia, from a- + kedos care, grief - more at hate
Date: 1607
: apathy, boredom

It has been well said of Bertram Wooster by those who enjoy his close acquaintance that if there is one quality more than another that distinguishes him, it is his ability to keep the lip stiff and upper and make the best of things. Though crushed to earth, as the expression is, he rises again - not absolutely in mid-season form, perhaps, but perkier than you would expect and with an eye alert for silver linings.

Waking next morning to another day and thumbing the bell for the cup of tea, I found myself, though still viewing the future with concern, considerably less down among the wines and spirits than I had been yestreen.

"It's a risky business," Dr. Stipek, said before the meeting. "We rolled up our sleeves and opened a school in a financially and socially-challenged environment so that we could prepare teachers and leaders for the real challenges they will face."

Ms. Darling-Hammond - who told the board that the school "takes all kids" and changes their "trajectory" - was angered by the state's categorization of the charter as a persistently worst-performing school. "It is not the most accurate measure of student achievement," she said, "particularly if you have new English language learners."

"Maybe this demonstrates that schools alone cannot solve the very deep problems kids bring to school," said Diane Ravitch, the education scholar and historian. "You cannot assume that schools alone can raise achievement scores without addressing the issues of poverty, of homelessness and shattered families."

High school students have one teacher/adviser who checks that homework is done, and when it is not, the teacher calls home. Teachers know students' families and help with issues as varied as buying a bagel before an exam to helping an evicted family find a home.

1) Good intentions alone are insufficient.
2) Money and resources alone are insufficient.
3) Numbers can deceive but they do not lie. If you are making incremental improvements but after nine years are still in the bottom 5%, something is not working.
4) Focusing on objective results that are at least marginally predictive of later success is better than focusing on subjective results that have no correlation to success.

Honest myrth in measure, is a pleasaunt thyng,
To wryte and to rede well, be gyftes of learnyng:
Remember this well, all you that be young,
Exercise vertue, and rule well your toung.

For her the museum after five became mysterious and unfamiliar, as public places often do when everyone human has departed and silence, like an ominous and alien spirit, steals in to take possession of the night hours.

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

There is no guarantee of being engaged with life, but ennui has to do with laziness rather than the availability of too much time.

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

Of Roman history, great Niebuhr's shown
'Tis nine-tenths lying. Faith, I wish 'twere known,
Ere we accept great Niebuhr as a guide,
Wherein he blundered and how much he lied.

Salder Bupp

Crusaders who withhold the whole truth, mislead, lead exaggerate often unwittingly strengthen their opposition and weaken their own cause, especially when they're claiming the moral high ground. No one seems more prone to this than environmentalists, and it's on the biggest and most contentious issues that the problem is most pronounced. The worst-case scenarios for global warming and overpopulation, for instance, foretell changes so catastrophic that most other concerns would be rendered virtually moot. Some people, looking at those high stakes, throw caution to the wind and use everything in their arsenal, no matter how loosely tethered to scientific data, to get people's attention and force action.

On a 99-degree day in June 1988, as the nation sweltered through the latest hot, dry summer in a decade of record high-temperature years, climatologist James Hansen appeared before Congress and proclaimed that he was 99 percent certain the earth was in the midst of man-induced global warming. "It's time to stop waffling so much and say that the greenhouse effect is here and is affecting our climate now," Hansen told reporters that day. Newspapers had a field day, and Hansen's colleagues had conniptions. After all, concern over global warming was barely a decade in the making, and 10 years of high temperatures do not a climate change make. "The variability of climate from decade to decade is monstrous," oceanographer Tim Barnett told Science in 1989. "To say that we've seen the greenhouse signal is ridiculous "

Most climatologists believed there just wasn't enough data to make a conclusive judgment. Only a decade earlier, after 30 years of relatively cool temperatures, climatologists feared we might be entering a new ice age. Though there was certainly reason to believe in 1988 that global warming was a real possibility, even a probability - atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, had increased 25 percent since the 19th century - there was no way of knowing yet whether the higher temperatures of the '80s were a trend or a statistical blip.

Even Stephen Schneider, a Stanford climatologist who has been at the forefront of the push for action against global warming, thought Hansen made a mistake by overstating the case. While Hansen's assertions got the attention of the public and Congress, "there was a risk of severe credibility loss for climatology if nature rolled a cold, wet summer or two soon, and this was quite possible," Schneider wrote in his 1990 book, Global Warming. Meanwhile, the '90s have seen some record-hot years (notably 1990,1991 and 1995), but it's also had some cooler ones. 1992 and 1993 were cooled by sunlight-reflecting particles from the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, and 1996 is looking to go down as a relatively cool year too. None of this is inconsistent with global warming models, but in bringing scrutiny to individual years instead of a longer-term pattern, Hansen risked confusing the public over the issue; he also "gave ammunition to his detractors," as Schneider wrote, a take that is shared by many, including MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel.

Every fall People for the American Way releases a report called "Attacks on the Freedom to Learn," which purports to highlight the growing problem of censorship in America's public schools. In tandem with the American Library Association's "Banned Books Week," PFAW is the source of scores of news stories on how closed-minded parents and religious zealots are targeting our best literature - Of Mice and Men, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Catcher in the Rye - for elimination from public school libraries and reading lists. PFAW's press release this fall exclaimed that "Public education weathered a recordbreaking 475 attacks on curricula, library and textbooks, student expression, and other components of public education in the 1995-96 school year."

But what PFAW classifies as an incident of "attempted censorship" is a single complaint, usually from a parent, who in many cases thinks a certain book is inappropriate for his or her child's age group. Most of the books PFAW describes as threatened have had no more than a half-dozen complaints nationwide, and it's not necessarily the classics that are drawing the most ire.

In the 1994-1995 school year, according to PFAW's 1995 report, the two most frequently challenged books in US. schools were Alvin Schwam's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Scary and More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which include tales like "Wonderful Sausage," about a butcher who gets such culinary raves for his ground-up wife that he embarks on a town-wide sausage-making rampage, collecting children and, for good measure, "their kittens and puppies." But the report's 30-page introduction, which winds up being the main source for news stories, makes no mention of Schwartzs books. Meanwhile, Of Mice and Men and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings get four mentions each. It's a classic bait-and-switch. When you think of censorship, you don't imagine a university professor complaining that his first-grader is too young to read stories about murder and dismemberment. Distorting the debate over what is or isn't suitable reading material for children certainly has its repercussions repercussions, but the most tangible consequence is probably extra checks from direct mail solicitations (PFAW's annual "censorship" report is a fundraising centerpiece). When social science research uses the same tactics, however, the consequences can be much more serious.

Mother Goose
Odyssey by Homer
Iliad by Homer
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Beowulf
Night Before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore
Garfield by Jim Davis
Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Aesop's Fables by Aesop
Arabian Nights
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"

"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, "This is now."

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

Mrs. Faraday's house was the eighth in a mid-nineteenth century terrace on the south side of an Islington square. The houses, no doubt built originally for the superior working class, must have gone through the usual transmogrification of rising rents, neglect, war damage and multi-occupancy, but had long been taken over by those of the middle class who valued proximity to the City, the nearness of good restaurants and the Almeida Theatre, and the satisfaction of proclaiming that they lived in an interesting, socially and ethnically diverse community. From the number of window grilles and burglar alarm systems, it was apparent that the occupants had protected themselves against any unwelcome manifestation of this rich diversity.

"Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books." p. xi

"...education in the West has been steadily deteriorating; the rising generation has been deprived of its birthright; the mess of pottage it has received in exchange [for the great books] has not been nutritious; adults have come to lead lives comparatively rich in material comforts and very poor in moral, intellectual, and spiritual tone." p. xiii

"The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean either that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves." p. xiii

"...the idea that liberal education is the education that everybody ought to have, and that the best way to a liberal education in the West is through the greatest works the West has produced, is still, in our view, the best educational idea there is." p. xiv

"...we believe that the obligation rests on all of us, uneducated, miseducated, and educated alike, to [go on educating ourselves all our lives]." p. xv

Quoting Sir Richard Livingstone: "We are tied down, all our days and for the greater part of our days, to the commonplace. That is where contact with great thinkers, great literature helps. In their company we are still in the ordinary world, but it is the ordinary world transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius. And some of their vision becomes our own." p. 2-3

"...the task of the future is the creation of a community. Community seems to depend on communication.... The effectiveness of modern communication in promoting a community depends on whether there is something intelligible and human to communicate. This, in turn, depends on a common language, a common stock of ideas, and common human standards. These the Great Conversation affords." p. 30

"[the great books] afford us the best examples of man's efforts to seek the truth, both about the nature of things and about human conduct, by methods other than those of experimental science; and because these examples are presented in the context of equally striking examples of man's efforts to learn by experiment or the method of empirical science, the great books provide us with the best materials for judging whether the experimental method is or is not the only acceptable method of inquiry into all things." p. 37-38

"What is here proposed is interminable liberal education. Even if the individual has the best possible liberal education in youth, interminable education through great books and the liberal arts remains his obligation; he cannot expect to store up an education in childhood that will last all his life. What he can do in youth is to acquire the disciplines and habits that will make it possible for him to continue to educate himself all his life. One must agree with John Dewey in this: that continued growth is essential to intellectual life.

"The twin aims that have animated mankind since the dawn of history are the conquest of nature and the conquest of drudgery. Now they seem in a fair way to be achieved. And the achievement seems destined, at the same time, to end in the trivialization of life. It is impossible to believe that men can long be satisfied with the kind of recreations that now occupy the bulk of their free time. After all, they are men. Man, though an animal, is not all animal. He is rational, and he cannot live by animal gratifications alone; still less by amusements that animals have too much sense to indulge in. A man must use his mind; he must feel that he is doing something that will develop his highest powers and contribute to the development of his fellow men, or he will cease to be a man.

"The trials of the citizen now surpass anything that previous generations ever knew. Private and public propaganda beats upon him from morning till night all his life long. If independent judgment is the sine qua non of effective citizenship in a democracy, then it must be admitted that such judgment is harder to maintain now than it ever has been before. It is too much to hope that a strong dose of education in childhood and youth can inoculate a man to withstand the onslaughts of his independent judgment that society conducts, or allows to be conducted, against him every day. For this, constant mental alertness and mental growth are required." p. 52-53

"The only civilization in which a free man would be willing to live is one that conceives of history as one long conversation leading to clarification and understanding." p. 58

"Yet there will not be much argument against the proposition that, on the whole, reasonable and intelligent people, even if they confront aggressively unreasonable or stupid people, have a better chance of attaining their end, which in this case is peace, than if they are themselves unreasonable and stupid. They may even be able by their example to help their opponents to become more reasonable and less stupid." p. 59

"The Great Conversation symbolizes that Civilization of the Dialogue which is the only civilization in which a free man would care to live. It promotes the realization of that civilization here and now. This set of books is organized on the principle of attaining clarification and understanding of the most important issues, as stated by the greatest writers of the West, through continuous discussion. Its object is to project the Great Conversation into the future and to have everybody participate in it. The community toward which it is hoped that these books may contribute is the community of free minds." p. 60

"The question for you is only whether you can ever understand these books well enough to participate in the Great Conversation, not whether you can understand them well enough to end it. And the answer is that you can never know until you try. We have built up around the 'classics' such an atmosphere of pedantry, we have left them so long to the scholarly dissectors, that we think of them as incomprehensible to the ordinary man to whom they were originally addressed. At the same time our education has undergone so drastic a process of dilution that we are ill-equipped, even after graduation from a respectable college, to tackle anything much above the level of the comic book.

"The decay of education in the West, which is felt most profoundly in America, undoubtedly makes the task of understanding these books more difficult than it was for earlier generations. In fact my observation leads me to the horrid suspicion that these books are easier for people who have had no formal education than they are for those who have acquired that combination of misinformation, unphilosophy, and slipshod habits that is the usual result of the most elaborate and expensive institutional education in America." p. 77

"Do you need a liberal education? We say that it is unpatriotic not to read these books. You may reply that you are patriotic enough without them. We say that you are gravely cramping your human possibilities if you do not read these books. You may answer that you have troubles enough already.

"This answer is the one that Ortega attacks in The Revolt of the Masses. It assumes that we can leave all intellectual activity, and all political responsibility, to somebody else and live our lives as vegetable beneficiaries of the moral and intellectual virtue of other men. The trouble with this assumption is that, whereas it was once possible, and even compulsory, for the bulk of mankind, such indulgence now, on the part of anybody, endangers the whole community. It is now necessary for everybody to try to live, as Ortega says, 'at the height of his times.' The democratic enterprise is imperiled if any one of us says, 'I do not have to try to think for myself, or make the most of myself, or become a citizen of the world republic of learning.' The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." p. 80

Quoting Thomas Jefferson: "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." p. 81-82

Here, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter as it now stands: The Rules of Civility were composed originally, or compiled, and published in France, by the Jesuits, about 1595; they were translated into English by Francis Hawkins about 1640, and passed through no fewer than eleven editions down to 1672. From the Hawkins book the one hundred and ten Rules written by Washington were selected, simplified and arranged by some person at present unknown. One copy came into the hands of George Washington, who from it wrote out the manuscript that is among the Washington Papers purchased: from the family by Congress in 1834 and 1849, and held in the Department of State until 1903, when they were transferred to the Library of Congress.