From Anthony Lawton's site, Rosemary Sutcliff, is this article by Sutcliff on Kipling. Well worth a read.

Sutcliff has these interesting observation's to share on the nature of the challenge when trying to parse an author's works between adult and child.

But before going further with this somewhat random 'piece' on Kipling for Children, it might be as well to try to decide which of his books are in fact for children, and the moment one begins, it becomes perfectly obvious that the thing can't be done. There is no clear demarcation line. All one can do is to make a personal choice and give personal reasons and opinions, and apologise in advance to anyone who disagrees.

The Jungle Books, The Just So Stories, Stalky and Co., Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies immediately leap to mind. But of the Puck books, Kipling himself says in his Autobiography, "I worked the material in three or four overlaid tints and textures, which might or might not reveal themselves according to the shifting light of sex, youth and experience. The tales had to be read by children before people realised that they were meant for grown-ups". On the other hand, two of his full length novels, Kim and Captains Courageous originally intended for grown-ups, have always been read and loved by children, for, at least so far as these two books are concerned, Kipling belongs to the select company of writers - R. L. Stevenson, Rider Haggard and John Buchan are three more - whose books, written for adults, have been taken over by the young. How and why this happens to some writers is a mystery. I have seen it attributed in a recent T.L.S. article, to "A pocket of unlived childhood" somewhere in the innermost recesses of the author's being, and if, as seems quite possible, this is the answer, odd to think how much we who loved Kipling's adult books when we were children, and love his children's books still, may owe to the six miserable years of unlived childhood he survived under the shadow of The Woman, in the House of Desolation at Southsea.

She comments on the nature of the attraction of Kiplings' tales to a young child.

I was something under six when my mother first read The Jungle Books to me. They were my first introduction to Kipling, and perhaps for that reason, they have an especial potency for me. From the first, I had an extraordinary sense of familiarity in the jungle; I was not discovering a new world but returning to a world I knew; and the closest contact I ever made with a "Story book Character", I made with Bagheera, the black panther with the voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree and the little bald spot that told of a collar, under his chin.

The Just So Stories, Kim, and Puck of Pook's Hill, must all have followed soon after; at all events I have no clear memory of first meeting them, nor of a time before they were there, a time without the crowding delights and many-coloured over-spilling riches of Kim, on which one can get drunk as a bee among horse chestnut blossom; without the strong magic of The Just So Stories (no one understands better than Kipling did, the importance of incantation, the exact repetition of the word pattern until it becomes ritual "You must not forget the suspenders, Best Beloved" to all primitive peoples, including children); without Sir Richard Dalyngridge, that Very Perfect Gentle Knight, and the three magnificent "Roman Wall" stories of Puck of Pook's Hill which first, as it were, planted Roman Britain in my bloodstream.

Finally, she also comments on the challenge of that increasingly large number of children whom today we call third-culture kids, having to navigate, as did Kipling's characters between multiple loved cultures.

I did not in the early days, of course, see what any of these books were really about. I did not see that under the superb tale of adventure, Kim told basically the same story as The Jungle Books - of a boy belonging to one world, thrown into and accepted by another, and faced in the end by the same unbearable choice to be made between world and world, nor how much the story had to tell about the nature of love and the soul of Man.

Peter Jones, Ancient & Modern, in The Spectator, August 8th, 2009.

Ancients would have been incredulous that a law could exist that threatened the lives of citizens; and if it did, they would have changed it. In 369 BC, the Theban general Epaminondas illegally extended his and his fellow-generals' term of office in order to complete a successful attack on Thebes' enemy Sparta. So when he returned home, it was to find himself on a capital charge, brought by political enemies. He demanded that, if executed, the following notice should be posted: 'Epaminondas was executed by the Thebans because he forced them to defeat the Spartans whom they had never even dared to look in the face before, rescued Thebes and liberated all Greece' (and much else). The jury fell about laughing and all charges were dropped.

Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940), a British poet, shows with this little epigram that the current disappointment with journalists is progeny of a long line of disappointments.

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
thank God! the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there's no occasion to.

by Humbert Wolfe

The British zoologist, science writer, and winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize for Medicine, Peter Medawar, describing scientists who focus too narrowly on simple data gathering at the expense of constructive speculation:

cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge

The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island by Oliver Sacks. What a romantically mystical phrase:

. . . O'Connell had another side, as a curious and careful observer. He was the first European to call Pohnpei, Ponape, by its native name (in his orthography, "Bonabee"); the first o give accurate descriptions of many Pohnpeian customs and rites; the first to provide a glossary of the Pohnpeian language; and the first to see the ruins of Nan Madol, the remnant of a monumental culture going back more than a thousand years, to the mythological keilahn aio, "the other side of yesterday."

It reminds me of the Russian term for their former frontier soviets, "the near abroad".

Numinous, from a footnote in Oliver Sacks' The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island.

Perhaps it is not to be wondered at that octopuses, with their remarkable intelligence, their huge eyes, and their ever-changing forms should excite a sense of awe, of the numinous. I have recently heard from a correspondent in Tasmania, Graeme Thompson, that in the Murray Islands off New Guinea there is also a creator-god, Malo, who is represented as an octopus, his eight tentacles representing eight tribes of the Merriam peoples on the three islands.

From Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: nu·mi·nous
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin numin-, numen numen
Date: 1647
1 : supernatural, mysterious
2 : filled with a sense of the presence of divinity : holy
3 : appealing to the higher emotions or to the aesthetic sense : spiritual

- nu·mi·nous·ness \-nəs\ noun

I must have first encountered P.G. Wodehouse when I was around twelve or thirteen. It was my father's guffaws and chortles that first drew me to this author. Blanding's Castle, Bertram Wooster and Jeeves, Psmith; I was soon a firm fan. What a life companion. After that first flush of reading as many of his books as I could (he wrote some hundred books or so), I have been rereading him off and on ever since. When things are stressful or tense, his is a world into which it is always refreshing to escape. As Evelyn Waugh put it, "Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in."

After an uncharacteristically long patch without any Wodehouse reading, I just finished Jeeves in the Morning. Excellent restorative. But in rereading I realize just how rich and allusive Wodehouse is. He is highly recommended for adults but I suspect that fourteen or fifteen year olds that are good readers, interested in Britain, like a consistently positive view of life or just enjoy light but intelligent humor will all take to him.

In doing a little research to check my facts, I came across this appreciation of Wodehouse by the actor Hugh Laurie (who played Bertram Wooster in a Granada series of Jeeves stories), indicating that he took to Wodehouse at thirteen, so perhaps he is accessible to slightly younger readers than I indicated. From the Daily Telegraph, May 27th, 1999, Wodehouse Saved My Life.

To be able to write about PG Wodehouse is the sort of honour that comes rarely in any man's life, let alone mine. This is rarity of a rare order. Halley's comet seems like a blasted nuisance in comparison. If you'd knocked on my head 20 years ago and told me that a time would come when I, Hugh Laurie - scraper-through of O-levels, mover of lips (own) while reading, loafer, scrounger, pettifogger and general berk of this parish - would be able to carve my initials in the broad bark of the Master's oak, I'm pretty certain that I would have said "garn", or something like it.

I was, in truth, a horrible child. Not much given to things of a bookey nature, I spent a large part of my youth smoking Number Six and cheating in French vocabulary tests. I wore platform boots with a brass skull and crossbones over the ankle, my hair was disgraceful, and I somehow contrived to pull off the gruesome trick of being both fat and thin at the same time. If you had passed me in the street during those pimply years, I am confident that you would, at the very least, have quickened your pace.

You think I exaggerate? I do not. Glancing over my school reports from the year 1972, I observe that the words "ghastly" and "desperate" feature strongly, while "no", "not", "never" and "again" also crop up more often than one would expect in a random sample. My history teacher's report actually took the form of a postcard from Vancouver.

But this, you will be nauseated to learn, is a tale of redemption. In about my 13th year, it so happened that a copy of Galahad at Blandings by PG Wodehouse entered my squalid universe, and things quickly began to change. From the very first sentence of my very first Wodehouse story, life appeared to grow somehow larger. There had always been height, depth, width and time, and in these prosaic dimensions I had hitherto snarled, cursed, and not washed my hair. But now, suddenly, there was Wodehouse, and the discovery seemed to make me gentler every day. By the middle of the fifth chapter I was able to use a knife and fork, and I like to think that I have made reasonable strides since.

From Marcus Chown's review of The Cosmic Connection: How Astronomical Events Impact Life on Earth, in the December 6th, 2008 edition of New Scientist.

ON 30 November 1954, 34-year-old Ann Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama, was taking an afternoon nap on her living-room sofa when a 4-kilogram meteorite smashed through her ceiling, bounced off her radio and struck her on the left hip. The grapefruit-sized swelling it left eventually healed, but Hodges was left traumatised. Ironically, her home was opposite the Comet Drive-in Theater, decorated with a neon sign showing a piece of cosmic rubble streaking through space.

Sir Walter Scott's biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, described him as:

a gentleman even to his dogs.

Lockhart's works can be found at Gutenberg.

An article in The Guardian, February 20th, 2010 about a Swedish mystery writer whom I have enjoyed, Henning Mankell; A Life in Writing: Henning Mankell

His Kurt Wallander series of mysteries are complex portraits of crime set in Sweden. Some of them are on the edge in terms of appropriateness (violence) but are reasonably accessible to older high school students.

From the October 18, 2008 edition of The Spectator magazine.

Tell me this wasn't a guy project gone bad.

On 7 January 1785 the Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, and the American, John Jeffries, set out from Dover cliff to make the first successful hot-air balloon crossing of the English Channel. Early on each one accidentally managed to drop the other's national flag over the side, after which the entire contents of the balloon was gradually jettisoned, as it threatened to sink into the sea, including instruments, clothing and lastly a bottle of brandy. Blanchard and Jeffries eventually landed in their underclothes among the trees of the forest of Guines, 12 miles inland from Calais. Their perilous two-hour flight is described by Jeffries in Narrative of Two Aerial Voyages with M. Blanchard.

Paul Johnson, in the October 18, 2008 edition of the Spectator, Michelangelo, old boy, do you think you might . . . He is speaking of financial responsibility in general but focuses on the many instances of productive authors who were also compulsively financially improvident or just plain unlucky, including, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, etc. He does not mention any Americans but certainly Melville and Poe could be added to the list. He also tips his hat to their opposites, those authors who managed their affairs well and in turn provided assistance to their unfortunate peers. Men such as Johnson, Carlyle, and Eliot.

There were strong reasons for helping the needy in those days, for men might be arrested for paltry debts and be flung into the Marshalsea gaol, as Dickens's father was. Some never re-emerged. At least two of Lamb's friends died in debtors' prison. If you turned down a request for a 'loan', you might precipitate a chain of events which would haunt you later. It was not just the borrower himself you had to think about. There was a wan, lined, defeated wife and strings of pale children, doomed to lives of want and scrimping. Carlyle, a generous man despite all his bellowing, gave away his silver, like Dr Johnson before him. When Leigh Hunt called, obviously to 'make a touch', Carlyle would simply leave a sovereign or two on the mantelpiece, and leave the room ('He prefers it that way'). Lamb tried to avoid lending to people he knew, remembering Polonius's warning to Laertes ('Loan oft loses both itself and friend'). He gave it outright.

I can never be near this harp without plucking at it just a little bit. I am inclined to believe that our adages, fables, folk-tales, myths, phrases, nursery rhymes, etc. are far more important to the sustenance of our culture and civilization than we give them credit for. I don't think it is too much to characterize them as lines of code that carry meaning from age to age. This is brought to mind reflecting on yesterday's post, The mystery of what sinks in in infancy and what flows by is profound quoting at length from Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner. We know that humans are one of the first species to begin to extend ourselves beyond the constraints of our biological and genetic selves. We are no longer hostage to that which we can memorize; we record and store and retrieve information in ever more sophisticated ways, an exo-genetic path of evolution.

Are adages, phrases, fables, etc. part of this exo-genetic development, a way of passing along useful traits without waiting for them to become imprinted in our genome? I suspect so. Let's look at the sampling of phrases that Napier offers up as a recollection from her own childhood. These phrases are from a hundred years ago; four generations. How many of them are still in common circulation or are accessible? Here is a run down.

She cites 42 phrases of one sort or another that have stuck with her.

28 common parental injunctions such as "Say your prayers". Interestingly, Hart & Risley studies which examined the volume of words children hear pre-school as well as the structure of the language, indicated that children with strong early reading skills heard a ratio of 6.4 positive injunctions to negative injunctions versus children with less developed reading capabilities who heard only 0.5 positive injunctions to every negative. Priscilla Napier's sample comes in at 4.6 positive injunctions to each negative; close to Hart & Risley's findings.

5 lines from rare or uncommon poems.

3 common adages

3 familiar lines from the Bible, hymns, or prayers.

2 lines from common poems or nursery rhymes.

1 quote from a familiar and enduring children's classic book.

The net is that of the 42 randomly recollected phrases, virtually all have been around for several centuries or more, and 37 of the 42 are likely to still be heard in households today. Here are the details.

Wipe your mouth - Common parental admonition still in circulation. Probably been around for a few hundred years.

Say your grace - Common parental admonition still in circulation. Probably been around for a few hundred years.

Tell the truth - Common parental admonition still in circulation. Variants of this in circulation by language or religion for some thousands of years, three or four at least.

Keep your elbows off the table - Common parental admonition still in circulation. Very much a function of extant norms of behavior but probably been around for a couple of hundred years.

Don't care was made to care, Don't care was hanged - I wasn't familiar with this one. Apparently it is a traditional London children's rhyme; offered by parents to children when they declare, "I don't care.'

Don't care didn't care,
Don't care was wild:
Don't care stole plum and pear
Like any beggar's child.

Don't care was made to care,
Don't care was hung,
Don't care was put in a pot
And boiled till he was done.

Certainly something for a child to mull on. I don't know either how old the rhyme is nor how far it has spread outside of London/England. It is quoted by the Opie's in an anthology they published in 1959. I'd grant that this one might be of limited circulation.

Take off your hat, William, to Mr and Mrs Dallin - A parental admonition but really pertinent only to the norms of behavior. While this injunction might still be hypothetically true, the general absence of hat wearing today makes it unlikely to have much current circulation.

Spare your breath to cool your porridge - Goes back to Plutarch, (circa 600 BC), relating that Periander said "Hesiod might as well have kept his breath to cool his porridge." General meaning is that you might as well save your breath, no one is interested or is listening. Versions have been in circulation in Spanish, French and English at least since the fifteen hundreds. Not sure that it is used all that much anywhere today though I understand it might be in current usage in Ireland.

And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat - From the Bible, Luke 15.16. Basically, so hungry he would eat anything. So, at least a couple of thousand years old and possibly older. Recognizable in most Christian circles.

This little pig went to market, this little pig stayed at home - Common children's nursery rhyme first appearing in its traditional form in the mid-seventeen hundreds. Still in widespread use today, often as part of finger play between parents and infants.

Blow bugles, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying - The refrain from a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Beautiful, but not a common children's poem and I doubt would have much recognition outside of a convention of English majors. Certainly the cadence of the words are probably catching to a child's ear and given that Napier's family was thoroughly steeped in the military, it perhaps had greater currency within her family than might have been common.

Blow, Bugle, blow
by Alfred Lord Tennyson

The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

Say please - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Say yes - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Say thank you - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Say sorry - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Say how do you do - Common parental admonition still in circulation though more in the current colloquial of Say hello!

For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory - The Lord's prayer and therefore both a couple of thousand years old and in broad circulation.

Once upon a time there were four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter - The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter was first published in 1902 so for Priscilla Napier, these were near contemporary stories (she was born in 1908). As much of an impact as they made on her, they have likewise continued to capture the imagination and love of children ever since. I would say a reasonable duration and common circulation among reading families.

Fold your vest - Common parental admonition still in circulation though more in the current colloquial of Fold your clothes!

Clean your teeth - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Say your prayers - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Nobly, nobly, Cape St. Vincent to the North West died away; sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay - The opening lines of Robert Browning's poem Home-thoughts. Not lines most people today would recognize but Browning has a surprisingly robust, enduring and committed base of partisans.

Home-thoughts, from the Sea
by Robert Browning

Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away;
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
In the dimmest North-east distance dawn'd Gibraltar grand and gray;
'Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?' - say,
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

Love me, kiss me, Hug me tight - Common children's requests to parents and vice versa. Still in circulation.

Never kiss a lady with your hat on, William! - Similar to above. A parental admonition for adherence to the norms of behavior but with the circumstances surrounding the behavior having changed. While this injunction might still be hypothetically true, the general absence of hat wearing today makes it unlikely to have much current circulation.

It's no use grumbling - Common parental admonition still in circulation though with no particular heritage or provenance of which I am aware.

It's no use fussing - Common parental admonition still in circulation though with no particular heritage or provenance of which I am aware.

It's no use crying over spilled milk - Common parental admonition still in circulation everywhere that English is spoken. The thought is expressed in more or less similar phrases in most world languages (German, French, Arabic, etc.); don't waste time and effort on something that is past and can't be undone. Goes back to at least the 1600's.

Humpty-Dumpty sat on the wall, Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall - Mother Goose nursery rhyme from at least 1800 with the most common version being:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again

That's no way to hold your spoon - Common parental admonition still in circulation (spoon, fork, knife).

Oxus forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle of Pamere - Well this allusion is exceptionally idiosyncratic. It references the river Oxus in Central Asia in a couple of lines from a nearly 900 line poem Sohrab and Rustum by Matthew Arnold. The relevant section of this massive poem is:

But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there mov'd,
Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste,
Under the solitary moon; - he flow'd
Right for the polar star, past Orgunje,
Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles -
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,
A foil'd circuitous wanderer - till at last
The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters open, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bath'd stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.

I am amazed it is a phrase that stuck with her. I think it would be fairly safe to say that this is one line of cultural code that has probably had virtually no circulation in recent decades, anywhere.

For what we have received the Lord make us truly thankful - Common blessing at a meal and still widely circulated both in numbers and geographically.

Say, no thank you - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Say, Yes please - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Don't cough over the table - Not necessarily frequently used but still usually used when circumstances dictate.

Say, I beg your pardon - Common parental admonition still in circulation though more in the current colloquial of Say I'm sorry!

It was no season then for her To wanton with the sun her lusty paramour - The last line of the first verse of a lengthy John Milton poem, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity composed in 1629. The poem in it's entirety is about 30 verses. Again, kind of hard to imagine the circumstances for this to have washed past those young Napier ears unless it is also a church hymn. I think it is safe to assume an extremely limited circulation today.

On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
by John Milton

It was the winter wild,
While the heaven-born Child
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;
Nature in awe to Him
Had doffed her gaudy trim,
With her great Master so to sympathize:
It was no season then for her
To wanton with the sun, her lusty paramour.

Finish your mouthful before you speak - Common parental admonition still in wide and frequent circulation.

Mind the step - Common parental admonition still in circulation as circumstances dictate.

Shame the devil - An English phrase from at least the 1500's. Say the truth and shame the devil is it's full form and means to tell the truth no matter how difficult it might be to do so. Not sure that it has all that much circulation today.

Shut the door behind you - Common parental admonition still in circulation and probably been around ever since doors were invented.

Never ask a man his income - Common parental admonition still in circulation particularly in certain classes.

Never ask a woman her age - Common parental admonition still in circulation particularly in certain classes.

I saw three ships come sailing by, sailing by, sailing by - A common Christmas carol in circulation in one form or another since the 1600s.

I Saw Three Ships

I saw three ships come sailing in,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
I saw three ships come sailing in,
On Christmas day in the morning.

And what1 was in those ships all three?
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
And what was in those ships all three?
On Christmas day in the morning.

Our Saviour Christ and his lady
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
Our Saviour Christ and his lady,
On Christmas day in the morning.

Pray whither sailed those ships all three?
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
Pray whither sailed those ships all three?
On Christmas day in the morning.

Oh, they sailed into Bethlehem,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
Oh, they sailed into Bethlehem,
On Christmas day in the morning.

And all the bells on earth shall ring,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
And all the bells on earth shall ring,
On Christmas day in the morning.

And all the Angels in Heaven shall sing,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
And all the Angels in Heaven shall sing,
On Christmas day in the morning.

And all the souls on earth shall sing,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
And all the souls on earth shall sing,
On Christmas day in the morning.

Then let us all rejoice, amain,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
Then let us all rejoice, amain,
On Christmas day in the morning.

I saw eternity the other night Like a great ring of pure and endless night - The opening lines to a Henry Vaughan poem. Vaughan was a Welsh poet from the 1600s. The line seems to have captured the imagination of many others including Madeleine L'Engle who seems to have used it as the inspiration for the title of one of her books, A Ring of Endless Light.

The World
by Henry Vaughan

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov'd; in which the world
And all her train were hurl'd.
The doting lover in his quaintest strain
Did there complain;
Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,
Wit's sour delights,
With gloves, and knots, the silly snares of pleasure,
Yet his dear treasure
All scatter'd lay, while he his eyes did pour
Upon a flow'r.

The darksome statesman hung with weights and woe,
Like a thick midnight-fog mov'd there so slow,
He did not stay, nor go;
Condemning thoughts (like sad eclipses) scowl
Upon his soul,
And clouds of crying witnesses without
Pursued him with one shout.
Yet digg'd the mole, and lest his ways be found,
Work'd under ground,
Where he did clutch his prey; but one did see
That policy;
Churches and altars fed him; perjuries
Were gnats and flies;
It rain'd about him blood and tears, but he
Drank them as free.

The fearful miser on a heap of rust
Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust
His own hands with the dust,
Yet would not place one piece above, but lives
In fear of thieves;
Thousands there were as frantic as himself,
And hugg'd each one his pelf;
The downright epicure plac'd heav'n in sense,
And scorn'd pretence,
While others, slipp'd into a wide excess,
Said little less;
The weaker sort slight, trivial wares enslave,
Who think them brave;
And poor despised Truth sate counting by
Their victory.

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,
And sing, and weep, soar'd up into the ring;
But most would use no wing.
O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way, which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
More bright than he.
But as I did their madness so discuss
One whisper'd thus,
"This ring the Bridegroom did for none provide,
But for his bride."

Megan O'Rourke has an interesting article in the February 1, 2010 edition of the New Yorker, Good Grief: Is there a better way to be bereaved. Interesting because it highlights how tentative and theoretical scientific information becomes incorporated uncritically and sometimes dogmatically into popular discourse from which it then becomes difficult to correct.

The "stage theory," as it came to be known, quickly created a paradigm for how Americans die. It eventually created a paradigm, too, for how Americans grieve: Kubler-Ross suggested that families went through the same stages as the patients. Decades later, she produced a follow-up to "On Death and Dying" called "On Grief and Grieving" (2005), explaining in detail how the stages apply to mourning. Today, Kubler-Ross's theory is taken as the definitive account of how we grieve. It pervades pop culture - the opening episodes of this season's "Grey's Anatomy" were structured around the five stages - and it shapes our interactions with the bereaved. After my mother died, on Christmas of 2008, near-strangers urged me to learn about "the stages" I would be moving through.

Perhaps the stage theory of grief caught on so quickly because it made loss sound controllable. The trouble is that it turns out largely to be a fiction, based more on anecdotal observation than empirical evidence. Though Kubler-Ross captured the range of emotions that mourners experience, new research suggests that grief and mourning don't follow a checklist; they're complicated and untidy processes, less like a progression of stages and more like an ongoing process - sometimes one that never fully ends. Perhaps the most enduring psychiatric idea about grief, for instance, is the idea that people need to "let go" in order to move on; yet studies have shown that some mourners hold on to a relationship with the deceased with no notable ill effects. (In China, mourners regularly speak to dead ancestors, and one study has shown that the bereaved there suffer less long-term distress than bereaved Americans do.) At the end of her life, Kubler-Ross herself recognized how far astray our understanding of grief had gone. In "On Grief and Grieving," she insisted that the stages were "never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages." If her injunction went unheeded, perhaps it is because the messiness of grief is what makes us uncomfortable.

This is really neat. One of those iconic stories of youth, similar to that of George Washington and his father's cherry tree, is that of Issac Netwon and the falling apple. But Newton's story actually has an historical basis. Newton related the story to William Stukeley who later recounted it in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life. The Royal Society in Britain, celebrating 350 years of scientific inquiry, has a collection of manuscripts that can be viewed, including William Stukeley's. Visit their site to access the original manuscript.

Here is a picture of the page from the manuscript in which Stukeley tells the story.

"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees...he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself..."

Back Issues, an interesting article by Jill Lepore in the January 26th, 2009 issue of The New Yorker. She covers the history of the newspaper with particular emphasis on its role during the early decades of our country.

Because early newspapers tended to take aim at people in power, they were sometimes called "paper bullets." Newspapers have long done battle with the church and the state while courting the market. This game can get dangerous. The first newspaper in the British American colonies, Publick Occurrences, printed in Boston in 1690, was shut down after just one issue for reporting, among other things, that the king of France had cuckolded his own son. Propping up power is, generally, a less dodgy proposition than defying it. The Boston News-Letter, "published by authority" - endorsed by ecclesiastics - lasted from 1704 till 1776. In 1719, two more Colonial papers began printing: the Boston Gazette and, out of Philadelphia, the American Weekly Mercury. (Nearly every early American newspaper was issued weekly; it took sixteen hours to set the type for a standard four-page paper.) But James Franklin’s New-England Courant, launched in 1721, in Boston, marks the real birth of the American newspaper. It was the first unlicensed paper in the colonies - published without authority - and, while it lasted, it was also, by far, the best. The Courant contained political essays, opinion, satire, and some word of goings on. Franklin was the first newspaperman in the world to report the results of a legislative vote count. The Boston News-Letter contained, besides the shipping news, tiresome government pronouncements, letters from Europe, and whatever smattering of local news was bland enough to pass the censor. Franklin had a different editorial policy: "I hereby invite all Men, who have Leisure, Inclination and Ability, to speak their Minds with Freedom, Sense and Moderation, and their Pieces shall be welcome to a Place in my Paper."

From Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

By the eighteenth century, the idea that history itself was moving inexorably toward a more peaceful, intelligent and commodious life for mankind was widely held. Both David Hume and Adam Smith argued that there existed a self-generating impulse of rising expectations that must lead to a society of continuous improvement. Bernard Mandeville argued that the "private vices" of envy and pride are, in fact, "public virtues" in that they stimulate industry and invention, and Hume wrote that the "pleasures of luxury and the profit of commerce roused men from their indolence," leading them to advances in their various enterprises. If any of this sounds something like what has been called, in our own time, "Reaganism," it is because it was chiefly the eighteenth century that provided Reagan with his ideas, especially those arguments which give to ambition and even greed a moral dimension. The most extreme case for the virtues inherent in self-interest economics was made by Thomas Robert Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798. Malthus argued against ameliorating the lot of the poor, on the grounds that an easier life led the poor to have more children, which led to fewer material resources to go around, which led to everybody being worse off. Of course, by this logic the best policy was to allow the poor among us to starve - a position which, happily, has not been pursued rigorously in the West.

But the point here is not that reason is unerring (although when it errs, reason itself, it is alleged, can detect its own errors). The point is that in every field - economics, politics, religion, law, and of course, science - reason was to be employed as the best means of assisting history's inevitable movement toward progress. Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws, attempted to describe the process by which law improves. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, showed how we advance economically. Thomas Paine showed how the rights of man will and must expand. Vico, Pope, Bentham, Jefferson, and others were engaged in similar efforts toward revealing the felicitous movement of history. (For all of the current discussion about Jefferson's ambiguous attitudes about slavery, he had no doubt that the future would be free of it.) And, of course, no one doubted that the future of science would reveal greater and still greater truths about nature. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a letter by Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestley (who, with Karl Wilhelm Steel, discovered oxygen, although Lavoisier coined the word). The letter was sent in February 1780, and conveys the sense of optimism about the future that was characteristic of the age.

. . .I always rejoice to hear of your being still employed in experimental researches into nature, and the success you meet with. The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter.

From Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, available directly from Slightly Foxed. "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

In this passage, Napier muses on children and language; a long meditation but an interesting one.

Lying in bed on those long summer evenings, looking at the square of bright blue sky beyond the window, one sometimes felt locked in eternity, as if the light could never dim, and sleep could never come. Thoughts splashed in one's brain; the waterfall words of the day flowed over one. The mystery of what sinks in in infancy and what flows by is profound; a child a baffling mixture of receptivity and inattention. Waves of words, breaking continually over the impressionable sand, leave weed and stick and broken glass and echoing shell, and sweep as much away. Another tide takes some, brings more; how much unaccountably sinks down to become part of the permanent structure of the shore? Nanny words, reading aloud words, caressing mother words, half-hearted snatches of conversation, of poetry, praise, blame, exhortation; why does some float by and some sink in? Wipe your mouth, say your grace, tell the truth, keep your elbows off the table. There are words so immediate and poignant that they could have been said yesterday, and are said for ever. Sir, come down e'er my child die. One swings abruptly from world to world. Don't care was made to care, Don't care was hanged. Take off your hat, William, to Mr and Mrs Dallin. Spare your breath to cool your porridge. And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat. This little pig went to market, this little pig stayed at home. Blow bugles, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying. Say please, say yes, say thank you, say sorry, say how do you do? For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. Once upon a time there were four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter. Fold your vest, and clean your teeth, and say your prayers. Nobly, nobly, Cape St. Vincent to the North West died away; sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay; Love me, kiss me, Hug me tight. Never kiss a lady with your hat on, William! It's no use grumbling, it's no use fussing, it's no use crying over spilled milk.

A mingling of folk-lore, impatience, platitude, affection; a jumble of eternal verity and country precept and temporary slang pours out daily over minds half-hearing, half-differentiating, alternately open as a sieve or retentive as clay. Subtly, day by day, words mould our prejudice, our apprehensions, joys, desires, the unconscious ethic by which we live.

Humpty-Dumpty sat on the wall, Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall. That's no way to hold your spoon. Paxus forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle of Pamere. For what we have received the Lord make us truly thankful. Say, no thank you, say, Yes please. Don't cough over the table. Say, I beg your pardon. Reiterated words, falling with the persistence of steadily dropping water and channelling their permanent grooves in the sand: shadowy words, scarce heard and less understood, dappling the landscape of the mind with the mysterious charm and rhythm of their sounds. It was no season then for her To wanton with the sun her lusty paramour. Finish your mouthful before you speak. Mind the step, and shame the devil, and shut the door behind you. Never ask a man his income, never ask a woman her age. I saw three ships come sailing by, sailing by, sailing by, I saw eternity the other night Like a great ring of pure and endless night.

A beguilement of words, a tumbling cataract of sounds, and how much of all is absorbed, and why, penetrating the steady self-enchanted dream of life?

From Roy Sutherland's Wiki Man column in the February 28th, 2009 edition of the Spectator. His article is in the context of a recent change on the part of the British health authorities in which they reversed their guidance of many years standing to the public to restrict the number of eggs eaten per week.

It is an example of the 'hair-shirt fallacy' - the unwritten rule which states that, when in doubt, you should recommend whatever course of action involves the most self-denial. Hair-shirtism is a safe bet: people are instinctively Manichaean and easily persuaded that physical pleasures are bad. Also, while experts are routinely sued for negligence, no one gets punished for excessive caution. The Millennium Bug computer scare is widely believed by many commentators to have been a glitch inflated by scaremongers to apocalyptic status; yet who was sued for failing to downplay the problem?

Adam Smith spotted this bias when he remarked that 'Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.'

I never really satisfactorily decoded Smith's comment in the past but with Sutherland's context it finally comes into focus.

From Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, available directly from Slightly Foxed. "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

In this passage she describes the world through her eyes as a three year old.

People were too often, in the kindest manner, scaling one down to size, and laughter was the biggest shot in their locker. The sound of it dented, very slightly, the ruthlessly egocentric world in which, as a two- and three-year old, one lives. I was, of course, the most important thing that had ever happened. My dignity and independence, my whole separate being, and essence, could hardly have mattered more enormously. Other people were shadows, were laps for my sitting on, were arms to pick me up when I was tired, were shoulders for me to rub my bumped head upon. But when they laughed, one had a disconcerting impression that people had moments of not sharing this view. I wanted with all my heart to be taken seriously indeed, and there were times when there seemed to be no takers. Kindly, but in a head-throwing-back fashion, my father laughed and my mother laughed. Nanny and May laughed in a particularly belittling sort of way. Ahmed laughed without restraint, getting every ounce out of it, holding his sides, and Ismain laughed derisively, showing the gaps, in his teeth, or, more accurately, the rare teeth in his gaps, shaking his head from side to side, as he stopped up a leak in the hose with his extremely dexterous bare feet. Mohammed was a stand-by; dignified, silent and grave. But even his benign chocolate-coloured countenance divided sometimes in amusement around the brilliant whiteness of his teeth.

I am reading Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, (available directly from Slightly Foxed). "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

What a marvelous memoir, not only of an interesting period but written beautifully as well. Napier was born in 1908 and grew up between Britain and Egypt in the fashion of the day. Her family were of that ilk that formed the backbone of the the British Empire: engineers, soldiers, sailors, lawyers, etc. The people that went to the four corners of the world to make things work and inadvertently to kick-start the slow and fitful integration of the world.

As I read along, I keep coming across passages that bear quoting, either because they are so originally expressed, so beautiful or because they shed light on understanding a different age, a land where things are done differently for reasons we have forgotten.

Not having finished the book, I hesitate to recommend it yet but I will be posting a number of excerpts along the way: there are few better leading indicators of a book's quality and impact than the degree to which you think it is worth quoting.

Three articles touching on education, all coincidentally read within a couple of days of each other (despite their publication dates), highlighting just how challenging the burden is that we place upon schools in multicultural, modern societies. All three articles are at least thought-provoking. It reinforces my perspective that so much is contingent upon the underlying culture of the home from which children emerge to attend school. See Growing a Reading Culture.

First is an article from the August 1st, 2009 edition of The Economist, The Quality of Teachers. Unfortunately the article is behind their commercial firewall so to the library for a hardcopy; I did find this pdf version though. In Britain, most schools are managed from the center, strongly subject to the guidelines and funding of the national government. The experiment described in the article has, therefore a somewhat greater chance of success in that environment than it might in the highly decentralized system in the US. Regardless, the last paragraph argues a willful blindness to the core issue that still makes their gamble a long shot.

Almost all education-policy documents and research papers these days start with a reminder that a child's family background is by far the strongest influence on his educational achievement. This evident truth could spur teachers to greater efforts to lean against that wind; instead, it is generally used to explain away poor children's weaker performance. Teach First challenges such defeatism. "We believe educational inequity is a solvable problem," says Mr Wigdortz, "and that the way to solve it is to get the best people teaching in the most challenging schools."

Great teachers might mitigate the impact of the home environment but they cannot substantially displace it.

Next is this report from the September 19th, 2009 edition of The Economist (again), In Knots Over Headscarves. Again the content is behind their firewall; here is an external link to the article. The final two paragraphs say it all. What do you do when your tolerance of multiple cultures encourages intolerant cultures? And of course, teachers are caught in the middle trying to address on the ground what has not been considered at a policy level.

In short, the story of the Atheneum is complicated. Unintended consequences abound. There are people of goodwill on both sides, and actors with murkier motives. The row will probably lead to the establishment of Muslim state schools in Antwerp: the city already has Catholic and Jewish schools. Patrick Janssens, the city's mayor, regrets this, saying he is "not particularly in favour" of single-faith schools. He puts his trust in long-term development: as more Muslims go to university, or feel that society offers them equal opportunities, they will be "liberated" and "realise that religion is not dominant over all other values."

The story of the Antwerp Atheneum is the latest example of a paradox: how should liberal, tolerant Europeans protect their values, even as they protect the rights of less liberal minorities in their midst? Blanket laws banning headscarves are hardly a liberal solution. But Belgium's piecemeal approach left Karin Heremans running something approaching a ghetto-school. Distrust anyone with a simple answer.

Finally, there is Malcolm Gladwell's article in the December 15th, 2008 New Yorker, Most Likely to Succeed. Here he focuses on the challenge of how do you a priori identify who will be successful and effective as a teacher? An interesting question with significant policy implications which present enormous political challenges. Nothing worth doing is ever easy though.

What's more - and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world - the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material. That difference amounts to a year's worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You'd have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you'd get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there's a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.

The golden mean in Latin is aurea mediocritas from Horace Odes 2. 10. 5.

Odes, Book II, X. Rectius Vives
Horace

Licinius, trust a seaman's lore:
Steer not too boldly to the deep,
Nor, fearing storms, by treacherous shore
Too closely creep.
Who makes the golden mean his guide,
Shuns miser's cabin, foul and dark,
Shuns gilded roofs, where pomp and pride
Are envy's mark.
With fiercer blasts the pine's dim height
Is rock'd; proud towers with heavier fall
Crash to the ground; and thunders smite
The mountains tall.
In sadness hope, in gladness fear
'Gainst coming change will fortify
Your breast. The storms that Jupiter
Sweeps o'er the sky
He chases. Why should rain to-day
Bring rain to-morrow? Python's foe
Is pleased sometimes his lyre to play,
Nor bends his bow.
Be brave in trouble; meet distress
With dauntless front; but when the gale
Too prosperous blows, be wise no less,
And shorten sail.

From Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century . Postman continues his almost apocalyptic view of what is happening to our children in the Information Age. Unfortunately his hypothesis has a lot of supporting evidence and I am afraid he is on to something.

Let us proceed as if childhood is reclaimable, in some form. How can we give it a voice? There are three institutions that have a serious interest in the question: the family, the school, and government.

As for the first, it is as obvious as it is depressing that the structure and authority of the family have been severely weakened as parents have lost control over the information environment of the young. Margaret Mead once referred to television, for example, as the second parent, by which she meant that our children literally spend more time with television than with their fathers. In such terms, fathers may be the fifth or sixth parent, trailing behind television, the Internet, CDs, radio, and movies. . . . In any case, it is quite clear that the media have diminished the role of the family in shaping the values and sensibilities of the young.

Moreover, and possibly as a result of the enlarged sovereignty of the media, many parents have lost confidence in their ability to raise children because they believe that the information and instincts they have about child rearing are unreliable. As a consequence, they not only do not resist media influence, they turn to experts who are presumed to know what is best for children. Thus, psychologists, social workers, guidance counselors, teachers, and others representing an institutional point of view invade large areas of parental authority, mostly by invitation. What this means is that there is a loss in the intimacy, dependence, and loyalty that traditionally characterize the parent-child relationship. Indeed, it is now believed by some that the parent-child relationship is essentially neurotic, and that children are better served by institutions than by families.

An effective response to all of this poses difficulties and is not without a price to pay. If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture. This is especially the case in America. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of the throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also almost un-American to remain in close proximity t one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in their sexuality, self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control e media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly, in the short run, the children who grew up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will be able to keep alive a humane tradition, It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it has children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service for themselves and their children.

Louis Menand has an article, The Horror, in the March 31, 2008 edition of The New Yorker, covering the 1954 Senate Judiciary Committee's investigation of the Comic Book industry. Quite interesting. As a Mad Magazine aficionado of the seventies, I had not realized that it's editor, William Gaines, had had such a significant role in these cultural First Amendment battles. Poorly argued as it was, you've got to love the humor of this exchange at the subcommittee hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee, conducting a public assault on the first amendment over Gaines' admittedly graphic horror comics.

"Let me get the limits as far as what you put into your magazine," the committee's junior counsel, Herbert Beaser, asked him. "Is the sole test of what you would put into your magazine whether it sells? Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?"

GAINES: No, I wouldn't say that there is any limit for the reason you outlined. My only limits are bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.
BEASER: Then you think a child cannot in any way, in any way, shape, or manner, be hurt by anything that a child reads or sees?
GAINES: I don't believe so.
BEASER: There would be no limit actually to what you put in the magazines?
GAINES: Only within the bounds of good taste.
BEASER: Your own good taste and saleability?
GAINES: Yes.

Kefauver spoke up. He pointed to one of the covers, from an issue of "Crime SuspenStories," on display in the hearing room.

KEFAUVER: Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman's head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?
GAINES: Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it, and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.
KEFAUVER: You have blood coming out of her mouth.
GAINES: A little.

There is a very telling observation in the article for "liberals" as Minand puts it or for fans of the First Amendment as I would characterize it.

Gaines was not a stupid man, but, as Hajdu points out, he was in the position many liberals find themselves in when they set out to defend the freedom of artistic expression: he claimed that comic books that treated social issues in a progressive spirit were good for children, and that comic books that were filled with pictures of torture and murder had no effect on them. If art can be seriously good for you, though, it follows that it can be seriously bad for you, and that is the point at which censorship enters the picture.

Too right and the argument has to be answered. I believe children's books to be a wonderful and potentially enormously positive influence on children. How then to address the potentially very legitimate concerns of parents wanting to shield their children from "bad" books? A subject for a separate post, but I do think there is an answer that squares the circle.

Daniel Mendelsohn has an interesting article about memoirs, But Enough About Me, in the January 25, 2010, New Yorker. I bring it to your attention because it touches on veracity in story-telling which is an issue that seems to raise its head as frequently in children's stories as in the more adult memoirs that Mendelsohn cites. He has some intriguing speculation which I think over-reaches but remains intriguing none-the-less.

As part of the background on memoirs, he tells the story of Augustine of Hippo's Confessions. Though not regarded in the same fashion, I suspect that there are a fair number of YA readers who can access and enjoy the Confessions in a way not dissimilar to Catcher in the Rye. The language gets in the way of most readings but the issues are not all that different to those with which every teenager wrestles. As Mendelsohn describes the story:

It all started late one night in 371 A.D., in a dusty North African town miles from anywhere worth going, when a rowdy sixteen-year-old - the offspring of an interfaith marriage, with a history of bad behavior - stole some pears off a neighbor's tree. To all appearances, it was a pointless misdemeanor. The thief, as he ruefully recalled some thirty years later, was neither poor nor hungry, and the pears weren't all that appealing, anyway. He stole them, he realized, simply to be bad. "It was foul, and I loved it," he wrote. "I loved my own undoing."

However trivial the crime and perverse its motivations, this bit of petty larceny had enormous consequences: for the teen-ager's future, for the history of Christianity and Western philosophy, and for the layout of your local Barnes & Noble superstore. For although the boy eventually straightened himself out, converted to Christianity, and even became a bishop, the man he became was tortured by the thought of this youthful peccadillo. His desire to seek a larger meaning in his troubled past ultimately moved him to write a starkly honest account of his dissolute early years (he is disarmingly frank about his prolific sex life) and his stumbling progress toward spiritual transcendence - to the climactic moment when, by looking inward with what he calls his "soul's eye," he "saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind." The man's name was Aurelius Augustinus; we know him as St. Augustine. His book was called "Confessions."

As Augustine, a teacher of rhetoric, well knew, there had long been a tradition of biographies of accomplished men - Plutarch's Lives, say, written at the end of the first century A.D. - and of autobiographical accounts of daring military escapades and the like. (Xenophon's Anabasis, for instance, written in the early third century B.C., recounts how he and his troops managed to make their way back to safety after getting trapped behind enemy lines deep in what is now Iraq.) But Augustine was the first Western author to make the accomplishment an invisible, internal one, and the journey to salvation a spiritual one. The arc from utter abjection to improbable redemption, at once deeply personal and appealingly universal, is one that writers have returned to - and readers have been insatiable for - ever since. Augustine of Hippo bequeathed to Augusten Burroughs more than just a name.

Swing Along Again, an article in the January 28th, 2010 The Economist. And I never even knew there had been a golden age of Ethiopian jazz.

AFICIONADOS are hoping for a revival of the golden age of Ethiopian jazz, as players who emigrated westward a generation ago, especially to America, come home amid the global recession.

Courtesy of The New Yorker.

Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels) is always rewarding to read. Here is his A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, an analysis of the faults of the England tongue, how it came about and what to do about it. Gloriously, English has remained one of the most free-range tar-baby languages, always adding and shedding words and phrases in a most unconstrained manner.

Among the culprits fingered by Swift:

Several young Men at the Universities, terribly possed with the fear of Pedantry, run into a worse Extream, and think all Politeness to consist in reading the daily Trash sent down to them from hence: This they call knowing the World, and reading Men and Manners. Thus furnished they come up to Town, reckon all their Errors for Accomplishments, borrow the newest Sett of Phrases, and if they take a Pen into their Hands, all the odd Words they have picked up in a Coffee-House, or a Gaming Ordinary, are produced as Flowers of Style; and the Orthography refined to the utmost. To this we owe those monstrous Productions, which under the Names of Trips, Spies, Amusements, and other conceited Appellations, have over-run us for some Years past. To this we owe that strange Race of Wits, who tell us, they Write to the Humour of the Age: And I wish I could say, these quaint Fopperies were wholly absent from graver Subjects. In short, I would undertake to shew Your Lordship several Pieces, where the Beauties of this kind are so prominent, that with all your Skill in Languages, you could never be able either to read or understand them.

From Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century.

I do not mean to imply that prior to the written word, analytic thought was not possible. I am referring here not to the potentialities of the individual mind but to the predispositions of a cultural mind-set. In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The public for whom it is intended is generally competent to manage such discourse. In a print culture, writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don't notice, or even worse, don't care.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with the growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.

We must come back, then, to the first question and ask ourselves, not Jefferson, Does any decline in the significance of the printed word make democracy less rational? Can a representative democracy, even a participatory democracy, function well if its citizens' minds are not disciplined by the printed word? Those who are cheerleaders for digital processes are not concerned with this question. They look straight ahead with a giddy and aggressive optimism to a world of easy and fast access to information. And that is enough for them. The slower, linear, reflective forms characteristic of print are not taken by them to represent a philosophy of thought, a mind-set, a way of ordering knowledge. For the most part, they do not think that intelligence, rationality, and critical judgment have mush to do with forms of communication. In this belief they may be colossally mistaken. Shall we remind them that the people who invented the digital age - indeed, invented the communications revolution - were themselves educated by the printed word? Does this tell us something important? Is there anything to be learned by recalling what the "guru of the Electronic Age," Marshall McLuhan, said about the book as it increasingly ceases to be, as he put it, the ordinary and pervasive environment? He remarked in a letter to a publisher that we must "approach the book as a cultural therapy, an indispensable ingredient in communal diet, necessary for the maintenance of civilized values as opposed to tribal values." Is it possible that as print loses its dominance, the underpinnings of a democratic polity crumble? As we cross the bridge to the new century, shouldn't we at least chat about this? Or are we too enchanted by the information superhighway to notice that there might be a problem at the other end?

From Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

Rousseau, in other words, was a child of the Rationalism - and yet, clearly, its most disobedient and disruptive child.

From Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century . Postman has a very interesting chapter on the development of the concept of childhood (roughly seven to seventeen) in the the eighteenth century as an intermediary period between the older view that there were simply two stages: infancy ending around age seven and adulthood thereafter.

He lays out what he see as the challenge to this relatively recent development in stark terms but which I suspect are warranted.

Childhood was invented in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth, it began to assume the form with which we are familiar. In the twentieth century, childhood began to unravel, and by the twenty-first, may be lost altogether - unless there is some serious interest in retaining it.

He elaborates.

Freud and Dewey crystallized the basic paradigm of childhood that had been forming since the printing press: the child as schoolboy or schoolgirl whose self and individuality must be preserved by nurturing, whose capacity for self-control, deferred gratification, and logical thought must be extended, whose knowledge of life must be under the control of adults. Yet at the same time, children are understood as having their own rules for development, and a charm, curiosity, and exuberance that must not be strangled - indeed, are strangled only at the risk of losing mature adulthood.

Freud and Dewey were writing at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Dewey died in 1952, Freud in 1939, and neither anticipated - who did? - the later twentieth-century conditions that would render eighteenth-century conceptions of childhood problematic. I refer, of course, to the "information revolution" which has made it impossible to keep secrets from the young - sexual secrets, political secrets, social secrets, historical secrets, medical secrets; that is to say, the full content of adult life, which must be kept at least partially hidden from the young if there is to be a category of life known as childhood.

There was no theory of childhood, at least after the invention of the printing press with movable type, that did not assume that the information environment of adults is different from the information environment of children, and that the former is fuller, richer, broader, and, to pay respects to Rousseau and life itself, more depressing and scary. The word "socialization" implies this. It means a process whereby the young are inducted gradually and in psychologically assimilable ways into the world of adulthood. But if the technology of a culture makes it impossible to conceal anything from the young, in what sense can we say childhood exists? Yes, as always, we have young, small people among us. But if, by seven or eight, or even eleven and twelve, they have access to the same information as do adults, how do adults guide their future? What does a forty-year-old have to teach a twelve-year-old if both of them have been seeing the same TV programs, the same movies, the same advertisements, the same news shows, listening to the same CDs and calling forth the same information on the Internet?

From Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America published in 1835. Interesting to see that as early as the 1830's in our republic, there was this inclination to spread literacy and knowledge by giving away books.

Those associations only which are formed in civil life, without reference to political objects, are here adverted to. The political associations which exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds--religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society.

The Onset
by Robert Frost

Always the same, when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods, and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,
I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who overtaken by the end
Gives up his errand, and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won,
More than if life had never been begun.

Yet all the precedent is on my side:
I know that winter death has never tried
The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured again maple, birch, and oak,
It cannot check the peeper's silver croak;
And I shall see the snow all go down hill
In water of a slender April rill
That flashes tail through last year's withered brake
And dead weeds, like a disappearing snake.
Nothing will be left white but here a birch,
And there a clump of houses with a church.

Winston Churchill:

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

From a review by Christopher Hart, Slave to Fortune, in Literary Review, January 2010.

Hence the Romans agonised constantly, from the very earliest days, about how the past was better than the present, and now was all decadence. In fact, all high and noble civilisations are beset with anxiety about their own decadence, convinced that their forefathers were better than them. Out current civilisation, on the other hand, is quite convinced it is superior to the racist, sexist, classist, imperialist beastliness of our immediate forefathers. Go figure, as they say.

From Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

Where can we find such a narrative as Havel seeks? The answer, I think, is where we have always found new tales: in the older ones we have already been telling. We do not need to invent a story for our times out of nothing. Humans never do. Since consciousness began, we have been weaving our experience of ourselves and of our material world into accounts of it; and every generation has passed its ways of accounting on. And as new generations have encountered more and more of the world and its complexities, each generation has had to reread the stories of the past - not rejecting them but revising and expanding their meaning to accommodate the new. The great revolutions and revelations of the human past, and I include the Christian revelation, have all been great retellings, new ways of narrating ancient truths to encompass a larger world.

We in the West are inheritors of two great and different tales. The more ancient, of course, is the one that starts by saying, "In the beginning, God." And the newer is the account of the world as science and reason give it. One is the tale of Genesis and Job, of Mark and Paul. The other is Euclid's tale, and Galileo's, Newton's, Darwin's. Both are great and stirring accounts of the universe and the human struggle within it. Both speak of human frailty and error, and of limits. Both may be told in such a way as to invoke our sense of stewardship, to sing of responsibility. Both contain the seeds of a narrative that is both hopeful and coherent. My two favorite statements on this matter were made 375 years apart. The first is by Galileo. He said, "The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes." The second is by Pope John Paul II. He said, "Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes."

I take these men to mean what I would like to say. Science and religion will be hopeful, useful, and life-giving only if we learn to read them with new humility - as tales, as limited human renderings of the Truth. If we continue to read them, either science or scripture, as giving us Truth direct and final, then all their hope and promise turn to dust.

I rarely think of Anne Frank's Diary simply because it is so affecting that these many years later it still brings a catch to my throat. As does this obituary of Miep Gies (from The Economist January 28th, 2010), the remarkable Dutch woman who sheltered Anne Frank and seven others at daily risk to her own life and the lives of those dear to her.

BY HER own account, Miep Gies did nothing extraordinary. All she did was bring food, and books, and news - and, on one fabulous day, red high-heeled shoes - to friends who needed them. It was nothing dramatic. But she also bought eight people time, and in that time one of her charges - a teenage girl called Anne Frank, the recipient of the shoes - wrote a diary of life in the "Annexe". In these four rooms, above the office of Anne's father, Otto, where Mrs Gies worked as a secretary, eight Jews hid for 25 months in Amsterdam in 1942-44.

That bringing of books always gets me. These poor isolated people connected to the world only by the shelterers and the written word.

What goes almost unsaid is that towards the end of the war, Holland was a country in full national starvation. Beyond the daily dangers of exposure, the simple act of finding food for eight in a country reduced to eating bulbs must have been a herculean task.

It is thanks to Mies Giep, not only that one member of the eight survived, but that Anne Frank's Dairy survived as well. She it was that collected the scattered pages after the Nazi's raided the hidden loft.
See also the Wikipedia article on this remarkable woman.

Writing of, or from, yourself by Allan Massie in the January 30th, 2010 Spectator. An essay on literary autobiographies.

'All literature is, finally, autobiographical', said Borges. 'Every autobiography becomes an absorbing work of fiction', responded H. L. Mencken, though not, you understand, directly. Certainly the fictional element in autobiography is evident; Trollope thought that nobody could ever tell the full truth about himself, and A. S. Byatt has said that 'autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction'. An exaggeration, perhaps, but one with a kernel of truth.

snip

Experience is itself of two sorts. There is the experience we have lived in what we call 'real life', though this will usually be altered or amended in memory. Then there is the alternative experience, the route which we did not take, but might have taken, the fork in the road we turned aside from. We can imagine that journey and make fiction of it. The novel that emerges may be considered a piece of counter-factual autobiography. We explore the past we turned away from.

Borges may have meant something simpler. If you want to know a novelist - or poet or playwright - read his novels or poems or plays, not a biography. This makes very obvious sense. Even the best biographies track the man or woman revealed in their social life, a being very different, as Proust argued in his reproof of the critic Sainte-Beuve, from the one who wrote. In discussing Stendhal, Sainte-Beuve made much of the memories of those who had known him. Proust found this absurd. 'For those friends, the self which produced the novels was eclipsed by the other, which may have been very inferior to the outer selves of many other people.' What the writer gives to the world is, Proust thought, 'the secretion of one's innermost life, written in solitude'.

And it is this secretion of the writer's innermost life which makes literature autobiographical. You come to know, say, Graham Greene much more fully, and truly, from reading Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter or The Honorary Consul than from the fat volumes of Norman Sherry's biography, which offer the fruit of years of assiduous research. Equally, Dickens is brought to life in Great Expectations much more vividly than any biographer has ever managed to do. It couldn't, really, be otherwise.

Cyber Warriors, an article by James Fallows in the March 2010 Atlantic Magazine. I have enjoyed Fallows' writing for many years, agreeing sometimes and sometimes not. He has written many books, my favorite being More Like Us, his debunking in the 1980's of the growing hysteria about Japan's rise to economic prominence. He is that old fashioned kind of journalist, virtually extinct today, the kind who goes out, gathers his data, presents it to his reader along with his interpretation: a courteous and productive style.

In the article, which is about China-American relations, military scenarios and cyber risks, there is this observation from one of his interviewees.

Another former U.S. official put it this way: "We tend to think of everything about China as being multiplied by 1.3 billion. The Chinese leadership has to think of everything as being divided by 1.3 billion" - jobs, houses, land.

I think it is an excellent insight anyway and also a useful reminder of the importance of perspective when analysing a problem. It also reminded me of an old Norwegian folk tale that I read as a child, the punch line of which was similar to this observation by the Greek philosopher Solon:

If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence every one must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart. - Solon

We look at China from a distance and see their progress and their potential. They look at the same landscape and see the tensions and issues of making all this happen. One phenomenon and many interpretations.

As I look out at snow falling in the woods, dusk settling down and closing off the world outside, I warm my bones looking at this Van Gogh and can almost smell the dry summer smells of the countryside.

The Spectator has over the past year or two revived its occasional offerings of poetry. Certainly in the past year their selections seem to be getting more and more engaging in a way that most forums of contemporary poetry are not. Unfortunately their quirky site does not contain the poems which are in the hardcopy magazine.

I especially like Home by Colin Falck in the January 30, 2010 edition. The first stanza:

'Why aren't you in school then?' they'd ask - as we ran to play,
or went roller-skating, or collected caterpillars - or got started in
on the summer's work of dams, or of blowing up wasps' nests
(some carbide, some water - throw a match, get out of the way)
or of building Messerschmidts. Our exams were done. It was June.
There were things we needed to do, and it was time to begin.