A girl, ploughing through the classics with a sword

CZ was never, as a child, a huge fan of ancient history. And in our case, Sonlight and Veritas Press didn't help. By the time she was eleven, she announced, "If I have to read one more book about a twelve-year-old orphaned boy lost in the midst of historical events, I'm going to scream."

Nonetheless, we're studying ancient history this year, at CZ's request. I think she thought it was going to be more about Nordic sagas and less about Babylonians and Greeks, but she's holding up her end of the bargain. As a result, CZ recently concluded, "I now know way more than I ever wanted to about how to cleave someone in half with a sword."

She's also learned that the scariest place to be in the ancient world was inside a palace, especially if you were a royal first born son with an ambitious uncle. Christendom, flawed as it is, can't help but look a little better.

But every now and then I give CZ a break and allow her to insert another type of book into her schedule. During Christmas vacation, for instance, she chose Musicophilia. Most recently, she decided to tackle the earliest Icelandic saga. But the earliest sagas take place in the 900s A.D. and are pagan, so they feel like ancient history anyway.

So this week CZ has been curled up on her chair reading about a bunch of people who drink a lot and whose names start with Thor-. Needless to say, there has been bloodshed. But I'm surprised at how often CZ breaks out into a chuckle. On Thursday, there was a chuckle that was a little louder than most, so I asked what it was about. She read aloud:

"One night the king had gone to bed, and so had Thorir and Thorolf, and Thorfinn and Thorvald were still up. Eyvind and Alf came and sat down with them and made merry, drinking from the same horn at first, then in pairs. Eyvind and Thorvald drank together from one horn, and Alf and Thorfinn from the other. As the night wore on they started cheating over the drinking, and a quarrel broke out that ended in abuse. Eyvind leapt to his feet, drew his short-sword and stabbed Thorvald, delivering a wound that was more than enough to kill him. Then the king's men and Thorir's men both leapt to their feet, but none of them was armed because they were in a sacred temple, and people broke up the fighting among those who were the most furious.

Nothing else of note happened that night."

So she's developing a black sense of humor. Perhaps it's good that she waited until she was sixteen to read this sort of thing after all.

Another side benefit of CZ not having liked ancient history as a child is that she is still fairly innocent of many of the plots to the Greek stories (she mostly knows the myths), and she's now reading them for the first time with a fresh eye and in their original forms. One evening two weeks ago, for instance, she was ploughing through Grene's translation of Oedipus the King. She was very quiet for a long time, and then:

"He did what?!"

That was definitely worth the wait.

Lewis on Good Work and Good Works

I'm still reading C. S. Lewis! I have wondered many times in recent years what Lewis would have said on simplicity and social issues, not remembering that, in fact, he had written about them in an essay called "Good Work and Good Works."

In this essay, Lewis starts out with a description of consumerism, the emphasis on trade for its own sake that has replaced the fine workmanship of past ages (which he calls Good Work). But then he segues into a broader discussion of his age and its economy, which though earlier and somewhat different from ours, still has more in common than not.

These first three quotes don't really form a coherent argument. I've just included them because they're insightful:

At every stage of the process, work is being done whose sole value lies in the money it brings.

The more important trade is, the more people are condemned to--and worse still, learn to prefer--[jobs that require them to produce useless and ugly goods].

Within my lifetime in England money was (very properly) collected to buy shirts for some men who were out of work. The work they were out of was the manufacture of shirts.

But then he starts to discuss how one might make a principled reaction to this insanity:

The main practical task for most of us is not to give the Big Men advice about how to end our fatal economy--we have none to give and they wouldn't listen--but to consider how we can live within it as little hurt and degraded as possible...It is something even to recognize that it is fatal and insane...We may have to earn our living by taking part in the production of objects which are rotten in quality and which, even if they were good in quality, would not be worth producing--the demand or "market" for them having been simply engineered by advertisement. Beside the waters of Babylon--or the assembly belt--we shall still say inwardly, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning." (It will.)

And of course we shall keep our eyes skinned for any chance of escape. If we have any "choice of a career" (but has one man in a thousand any such thing?) we shall be after the sane jobs like greyhounds and stick there like limpets. We shall try, if we get the chance, to earn our living by doing well what would be worth doing even if we had not our living to earn. A considerable mortification of our avarice may be necessary. It is usually the insane jobs that lead to big money; they are often also the least laborious.

Great works (of art) and "good works" (of charity) had better also be Good Work. Let choirs sing well or not at all. Otherwise we merely confirm the majority in their conviction that the world of Business, which does with such efficiency so much that never really needed doing, is the real, the adult, and the practical world; and that all this "culture" and all this "religion" (horrid words both) are essentially marginal, amateurish, and rather effeminate activities.

I've copied a hodgepodge here, but it's heartening to hear Lewis say these things. I don't take offense either to his request that choirs sing well (knowing that he's not talking about people who are just learning), to his criticisms of abstract commerce (even though I am, like most of us, fed by it), or to his pejorative use of the word "effeminate."

I have often wondered how Lewis, a professor, would react to today's tenure system, at least in the form I'm familiar with here in the U.S. For much the same disease has infected academics that had infected industry in his day: Publish or perish often that means writing things no one really enjoys in language that no one can really read. Something tells me he would not approve.

But also, I wonder how Lewis would react to the sort of information business that has largely replaced manufacture in the Western world. I'm not sure that it really changes the equation that much, except that we are even farther removed from what we really need, and that the products of our labor seem to require even less that they be "sound structures; seasoned wood, accurately dovetailed, the stresses all calculated." (Including, no doubt, my own blogging.) On the contrary, they seem to make up for this lack old-fashioned quality by painting on a veneer of "pastoral narrative," or worse, one of hipness, irony and sarcasm.

What shall we then do? I suppose that the only answer I have is to, like Lewis, to keep human dignity in mind, to keep my eyes peeled for any chance of escape, and be willing to mortify my avarice. But I don't really have an answer. I was just heartened that Lewis saw the problem, too.

Screwtape on education

More C.S. Lewis from "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" in The World's Last Night and Other Essays. I promise I didn't copy this idea from Cindy, as I've been meaning to post it for two days, but it certainly is a striking coincidence, and if you read it, really does remind me of the current attitude towards education:

I hope, and believe, that each one of you has the same uneasiness tonight. Your career is before you. Hell expects and demands that it should be--as Mine was--one of unbroken success. If it is not, you know what awaits you.

I have no wish to reduce the wholesome and realistic element of terror, the unremitting anxiety, which must act as a lash and spur to your endeavors. How often you will envy the humans their faculty of sleep!

After that welcoming introduction, which reminds me of the way we treat our high school juniors, Screwtape gets down to details about the reason why souls in Hell these days are of such poor quality:

It would be vain to deny that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality...The difficulty lay in their very smallness and feebleness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible...They do not understand either the source or the real character of the prohibitions they are breaking. Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them. And of course we have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur...

Of course, Lewis eventually gets around to explaining how these muddled souls finally became capable of making a choice worth damnation, but that's a much more serious subject that makes me instead want to quote his book The Great Divorce. My point in posting these was merely to point out some parallels with education.

On Obstinacy in Belief

When the going gets tough, the tough...read C.S. Lewis. I know some people prefer more emotional/devotional fare, but as for me, I love to parse an argument when feeling assailed:

Our opponents...have every right to dispute with us about the grounds of our original assent. But they must not accuse us of sheer insanity if, after the assent has been given, our adherence to it is no longer proportioned to every fluctuation of the apparent evidence. They cannot of course be expected to know on what our assurance feeds, and how it revives and is always rising from its ashes. They cannot be expected to see how the quality of the object which we think we are beginning to know by acquaintance drives us to the view that if this were a delusion then we should have to say that the universe had produced no real thing of comparable value and that all explanations of the delusion seemed somehow less important than the thing explained. That is knowledge we cannot communicate. But they can see how the assent, of necessity, moves us from the logic of speculative though into what might be called the logic of personal relations.

--From "Obstinacy in Belief," from The World's Last Night and Other Essays

Because arguments often uncover a reason for hope, and put it on a firm foundation so your mouthy mind will stop its constant yammering.

Il stile italiano

Italian style tends to come in two main branches, the traditional and the modern. Sometimes they are combined, as in this hotel room in Milan. We only stayed one night at this hotel, because it was more expensive than an apartment, but it certainly was a nice place to rest. (Note dark-colored blob to the right of top photo, a.k.a, Bob sleeping off jet-lag under his pea coat.) It had a traditional beamed ceiling and white linens, but also some glowing plastic cubes that reminded me of a science fiction book I read as a child.

The last three photos are of the apartment we stayed in in Turin. When you get up close, the furniture is IKEA, but still, it's artful what the owner did on a low budget. And it helps, of course, that the building is 18th century.

In response to MMV, from the other side of the looking glass

In response to Mental Multivitamin: There are a few similarities between our living rooms. Note in particular the bookshelves, the blue chair next to the window with wooden trim, the position of the other chair, the adjustable lamp, the globe, the sofa in the middle of the living room, the tan wall color, the window in the left side (a la Vermeer), the general size and proportion of the room, the position of the hallway and other rooms. Only on our side of the parallel universe, things are a lot messier, since I'm doing taxes and receipts are everywhere.

I just couldn't help but notice! Happy reading this month, MMV.

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Addendum: I saw MMV's update with the other side of her living room, and I'm afraid I must report that on our side of the looking glass, there's just a small dining room table and a wall that we share with the apartment next door.

More books in the tiny study, though! And, amazingly, a piano...in CZ's 7' x 8' bedroom. She hauled it up from the basement, where someone had abandoned it. She has her books in her chest of drawers. Don't ask where the clothes are. If you have a teen, likely you already know.