The Pleasure of Reading

Fundamental questions: do I live a life which revolves around aesthetic and cleverly contrived intellectual pleasures, or does the work I do contribute significantly to something beyond itself? Does my engagement, my effort, my time contribute to something which is valuable  – regardless of what I think of it– or have I made my own appetite a law in itself?   This is a question for which an honest person desires an honest answer and for which a liar has only contempt.    At the heart of Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game, which traces the spiritual journey of a musical prodigy, lies the essential question:  where lies the path of meaningful self-actualization?  Whither does it lead and shall I expect that there are many forms this path will take?  Is meaning to be found through academia, intellectualism, the glorification of the mind?  Through worldly success, pragmatic achievement and the stabilization of material security?  Through isolation, asceticism and ancient traditions?  Through sensual pleasure, artistic beauty and the satisfaction of physical desires?  How many of these paths lead the traveler to dead ends, towards a life of superficial, temporary pleasure and apparent satisfaction which evaporate and must be continually replenished?  Where is the source of everlasting, abiding contentment?

Are we meant to perpetually traverse the highs and lows of temperment and mood, swinging between bliss and depression?    Why do some seem implacable, even unmoved by shifts in fortune and situation?  Have they come upon the secret of contentment, or does their apparent tranquility mask an internal struggle to maintain dignity and retain honor for themselves?    What motivates a man?

These questions, among others, have been on my mind more often than usual.  During the last month, my husband and I have been reading Magister Ludi together, over meals, during trips to the city, over cups of hot chocolate and coffee, before sleep, whenever we have a few moments to ourselves.  It doesn’t take more than a few paragraphs before one of us breaks in with an observation, a story, a question or a memory to share.  Often these tributary conversations weigh in heavier than the reading itself, take up more time and provoke livelier exchange and debate.    He, with a more philosophical turn of mind, can sustain lengthy, wayward explorations of an idea or theme, while I, with my training in languages, find myself wondering what some special word or phrase must have been in the original German or savoring a particular stylistic decision.   Sometimes we discover a shared pleasure in a precise word or bit of characterization, which gives rise to that gentle, familiar, happy laughter provoked by the recognition of a source of mutual joy.   These are  beautiful times.  Sometimes our conversations develop into extended, animated discourses, involving notes, drawings, whiteboard, easel, then raised voices, irritated silences and…. apologetic make-up sessions.  Those are also beautiful in their own way.  We are passionate, after all.    The argument is inevitable, but we are becoming gentler.   The nightly tête-à-tête is more informed, wiser, more empathetic, more patient.  Less academic, more flexible.

I take these conversations with me into my teaching, into my journal, on long walks and into those quiet moments before dreaming begins.  I take these questions into other books, into my classroom, into other conversation with other friends.  But no one explores them so well as he.   No one is such a companion of the mind and heart as he.  No one has asked me to be as honest as he.  And no one has ever loved me as fearlessly as he.

A Modern Christian Woman: Seeking Peace in my Many Roles

The question is always with me:  how will I thrive as a teacher, as a wife and as a mother?  I often ruminate over the small decisions I make every day to strengthen my marriage, nurture my children and find pleasure in my work.  Recently indulging in quiet reflection, I realized that for half of my marriage and half my oldest child’s life, I have been teaching.   Half!  Soon it will be more than half.   With that thought I wondered what kind of impression of myself I leave with my beloved family.  They know I love study and writing, that I love my profession.   However, my predilection for spending long hours with texts or my laptop (invariably in some cozy coffeeshop) takes its toll on my family and my marriage, and I desire to balance the requirements of my calling with the responsibilities and needs of my dear ones.

April is ending and with May comes the end of the school year.  The summer beckons.  Week by week, I plan family hiking trips in local state parks,  interspersed by workshops and institutes which will help me prepare for the upcoming school year.  I pencil in birthdays on the calendar, struggle to come up with great gift ideas and wonder where I will find the time to read all the books and materials I expect I’ll need to have read before August.  I contemplate camping trips with my toddler and two older girls–would it be hectic or delightful?  Probably a little of both.  How much can I afford not to work at my second job over the summer?   I suspect that I am already overbooked and seriously need to reconsider how much I can accomplish.  What about a week of nothing?  How would that feel?

My husband, my treasure, has wisely assured me that nothing will help my busy life more than slowing down, doing less and concentrating more on my spiritual life.  I thought about that this morning as I drove away from the house, realizing only later that I had left my Bible and copy of Knowing God back on the kitchen table.  Those small moments spent in meditation, prayer and reading are valuable and precious.  They are too few.  What gardener does not know the inevitable consequences of seed sowed too thinly over too much soil?

My mental war over how I spend my time is, largely, mental.  That is, the battle lies within more than without.   I am the one who makes the decision to stop rushing here and there, to find quietude, to redeem the time through spiritual enrichment.   I am thankful that the Lord has been gracious enough to put that desire in my heart.  I pray that he would enlarge it, make me hungry for more time with Him, that I would seek Him out amidst the daily buzz and rush and reflect on His great love for His children and the mercy he extends towards the children of this earth.  I am thankful for such a husband who encourages my spiritual growth and wants to see me find hope in the simple riches of our Lord’s peace.

Teaching Macbeth in Noble, Oklahoma

I’ve been teaching Macbeth to seniors for the last few weeks, using the Folger Institute’s Shakespeare Set Free materials, with mixed success.  However, my mediocre results have, I believe, more to do with my students’ general reticence, discomfort with Shakespearean language and fear of vulnerability than the quality of this text’s lessons.  I value the variety of focus and how the lessons get the students involved in both the text and the theatrical aspects of the plays, without requiring a great deal of either proficiency or performance.  Like most teenagers, my students have little experience with plays, let alone the Bard. Many of them, but not all, are reluctant readers as a rule.  Macbeth has been challenging, to say the least, but we have not been without our little victories.

The choice few who have rallied to the cause, volunteered to read parts and attempted emotional interpretation have greatly contributed to general morale boosting.  They have been indispensable to me.    

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I hope that my students gain some feeling for the elasticity and expressiveness of our English language, that they grow in confidence in their own intelligence and capacity to deal with difficulties, and that they gain some new insight into the human spirit through our Shakespeare studies.  They have each, in a unique way, shaped me into a more resilient, creative individual.  I hope I never forget them and the lessons they have taught me.

A Plea for a Book Recommendation: Fiction writing for amateurs

“No, not like that.  You’re writing a story.  You know, like in a book.”

“I don’t read books.”

“When was the last time you read a book?”

“I don’t know, I don’t read books.  I watch movies.”

Trying to get my sophomores to write short stories has been an interesting experiment.  They can come up with a decent plot outline, but when actually writing the body of the piece, what they end up with is a disjointed narrative which moves haphazardly from one event to another, abruptly stopping at the end of the major action event with nothing to tie together at the end.  No deeper meaning, no realization, no development, no clear resolution.  Just a list of events, one after another.  Until the last sentence.

“This is not a story.”  I tell Robert, who has just handed me a page and a half of typed text.  ”You’re doing what everybody else is doing.  You’re telling me about it as though I’m listening to you explain to me what happened, but you haven’t written a short story.”  I feel like I’ve said this fifteen times to fifteen other students.  There must be a better way to do this.  ”What you have to do is slow down, develop each moment, really put me there.”  Fumbling for advice to give my student, I remember what my husband, a fiction writer, recently told me.   It sounds right, so I try it out.

“Don’t tell me what’s happening.  Show me.”   Yeah, I think.  That’s it.  Show me.

Robert slumps in his chair and sighs.  ”I don’t know how I’m supposed to show you anything when I’m just writing words.  Why can’t I just tell you what happened?”

I fidgeted and clicked my mechanical pencil, frustrated.  I realized that my students are telling me stories just the way they are most comfortable telling stories, as they would in conversations with friends.  But good narrative writing doesn’t look like their stories.  How could I get them to see how to get from where they are to where I’m trying to take them?  I tried giving Robert some advice again.    ”You know, give me little clues so that I, as the reader, have to figure out the story rather than just listening to your narrator tell me everything.  When the narrator just tells me everything, it’s boring and I don’t want to read anymore.”  That sounded good, I thought  to myself.  That’s probably going to help him understand.

“What do you mean, give you clues?”  Robert sounds bored.  He didn’t understand.

Robert’s story was about a time when he and his friend spent a camping trip on the Illinois River.  After fishing and camping for a while, they tried pulling some rather risky stunts diving from trees whose branches extended over the river. He had a dangerous escapade but survived and got home okay.  As far as plot went, he had the makings of a great story.  But it died in the telling of it.

I decided to try something.  ”Here’s let me show you.”  I motioned to his chair, he stood up and I took a seat in front of the keyboard.  I flexed my fingers and popped the knuckles in readiness over the keys.  ”So where does the story start?  Where are you?  What does it look like?  What kind of weather do you remember that day?”

“It was sunny, I guess.”

“Where was the sun?”

“In the sky.”

“No, I mean where was it in the sky?  Was it  low, coming through the trees?  Was it directly overhead, shining on the water?  Where was it?”

“Overhead I guess.  It was around noon.”

I began typing.  The sunlight glinted on the surface of the waves.  ”Okay, so you were fishing.  Was it you and your friend together or were you alone?”

“My friend was fishing with me.”

“What kind of a  river was it?  Muddy?  Stony?  Big and wide or more like a stream?”

“Muddy, pretty big and wide.”

I began typing again. I twitched my toes in the soft mud and watched the ripples–  “Wait, how fast was the water flowing?  Fast or slowly?”

“Kind of slow” Robert replied.

“Were there grasses or cattails or plants at the edge?”

“Some short grasses, I think.”  He sounded more thoughtful.

–watched the ripples play around the edges of the short grasses lining the bank of the river. I looked at Robert.  ”What kind of fishing pole did you have?”

“Huh?  What do you mean?”

“Never mind. Did you have a bobber?”

“No.  I just had a worm.”  He thought for a minute.  ”A plastic worm.”

“What color was it?”

“Red.”

I typed.  I fixed my eyes on a quiet spot far out ahead of me, leaned back to cast, and gently swung my arm forward, listening for the soft plunk of the plastic worm as it hit the surface of the water and sank.

“Are you a good fisherman?” I asked Robert.

“What do you mean?“

“I mean, do you sit in one place for a long time before you catch anything or did you catch a lot of fish in a short time?“

“Well, we stayed in that spot for about half and hour.  I  mean, it’s just luck whether you catch anything or not.“

I nodded and typed.  Even though we had been there for thirty minutes, we hadn’t caught anything.   It was all about luck, really.

I pushed away from the keyboard and read the paragraph back to him.

The sunlight glinted on the surface of the waves.  I twitched my toes in the soft mud and watched the ripples play around the edges of the short grasses lining the bank of the river.  I fixed my eyes on a quiet spot far out ahead of me, leaned back to cast, and gently swung my arm forward, listening for the soft plunk of the plastic worm as it hit the surface of the water and sank.  Even though we had been there for thirty minutes, we hadn’t caught anything.   It was all about luck, really.

I looked at Robert and asked him, “Do you understand what I’m talking about now?  This is what I mean.  In this paragraph, I have the same information you started with, but now I know a little more about you, I can picture the place where you are, and I really feel like I’m there.  Do you think you can do that?”

Robert raised his eyebrows and let out his breath in a quick sigh.  ”Yeah, but not as good as you.”

“Give it a try.”  I told him, and then look around at the twenty-three other students who were all writing similar types of narratives, influenced by conversational style rather than a written, reflective, slowdevelopment.  I looked at the clock.  The hour was almost up.  I had spent most of my time with just one student.  I felt like he got it, but he would still need to experiment, run into brick walls and receive some guidance to get him started in the right direction again.

How was I going to get this across to them all?  Time, among other factors, was against me.  Somehow I had to figure out a lesson plan to help communicate this to all twenty-four of these sophomores, while keeping them all focused and engaged.

Any ideas?  Book recommendations?

Sherlock Holmes: An Unauthorized Biography

In a sweeping triumph of an unavoidably pretentious narrative, Mr. Rennison delivers as solid an attempt to transmogrify the fictional detective into a living hero of Victorian contrasts as any is likely to achieve. Does this mean that the work is flawless? My question is: what would that even mean in a work of this kind? Would it mean that the author agrees with all my interpretations of Holmes, the legend? If I believed that I am the standard of correctness in depicting Holmes, then I would be a little too arrogant for my own good, and certainly guilty of the one thing Holmes always denigrated: theorizing before I had all the facts. Rennison shows quite clearly the quality of “facts” that are available to us in Watson’s accounts of Holmes’ adventures and, as he demonstrates, many of the names and dates were changed to protect the innocent. So it isn’t easy to say just how perfectly “accurate” Mr. Rennison’s final product really is. One thing is certain, it was a thoroughly enjoyable read.

I would like to list what I considered the most positive aspects of the work:

1. Rennison’s exceptional research collected together a number of historical elements that would simply have been inaccessible to the general reader. These moments were woven into the period of Holmes’ youth, his public activity as the preeminent master of forensic detection, and his later years devoted to a “retiring” life among the bees. I received a valuable connection of historical traces, particularly the earlier history of crime detection in London and America.

2. Rennison took his subject seriously. He didn’t make Holmes appear, as so often happens, as a wooden logic machine. Nor did he come across as riddled with seedy little psychological problems and of dubious ability that was only later puffed up by legend. The portrayal is realistic and full of sympathetic feeling for what might have been Holmes’ real longings, had he been a living person. Rennison showed himself knowledgeable of various psychological and historical theories that have been put forward to explain this or that about Holmes’ relationships or his lifestyle and decisions. Thankfully, the author treats them each as they usually deserve.

3. Rennison also coaxes every suggestive remark from the pages of Watson’s stories. Having read all the stories myself (as well as a few outside works and interpretations), it was a delight to see these provocative clues pieced together in rather plausible ways, even if the verdict was not identical to my own in every way. So much material made its way into the book that I had to respect such careful attention to detail, which only made it all the more rewarding.

4. There was a quality of richness about the mixture of fact and fantasy so that, at times, one gets lost in the narrative and finds it difficult to tell one from the other. In my opinion, this preserves beautifully the vivid realism of Doyle’s characterization, so that you almost believe Holmes might have existed somewhere.

Now for a little criticism:

1. I think, on rare occasions, that Rennison did in fact get his subject wrong. I could just hear Holmes chiming in, “Of course, you have missed everything of importance.” The author’s work on the whole was a delight, but there were moments where I did wish he had portrayed Holmes with a little less interpretive color. Still, even in those moments, I was glad to consider an alternative point of view and thought Rennison’s ideas truly intelligent enough to merit serious consideration.

2. There were also rarer occasions where his portrayal of a historical situation was not quite correct, at least from my own background knowledge. The Crippen case is, to my mind, the foremost example of incorrect reporting. But, as I said, I noticed such slips only on a couple of occasions.

3. There were moments, perhaps for the sake of sufficient material or because of an overabundance of it, that Rennison portrays Holmes’ role in a case which I seriously doubt he would ever have involved himself in. Nevertheless, Rennison does show himself thoroughly acquainted with Holmes’ disinterest in certain kinds of trivial affairs, even where they are of immense importance to others.

A five star rating does not suggest that it was perfect. If it did, no book would merit five stars (and the rating would be useless). I gave it five stars because I seriously doubted, had I labored through as much background material and tried to resolve the many paradoxes of Watson’s account, that I would have done half as well. Should I, like Holmes, strike a more critical tone? I would, if I were him. But I am not. No one ever was. Nevertheless, Rennison comes as close as possible to making me believe there could have been.

His account is highly sustaining and a marked improvement on many of studies of this kind. I am of the opinion that it will stand the test of your perusals and that you will finish it, as I did, glad that you had stepped for a moment into an astounding life that almost was.

The Rough Guide to Shopping with a Conscience

Sometimes it seems that environmental responsibility and household frugality are two values which are perpetually at odds in my life.   While I want to participate in sustainable projects and choose products from eco-friendly companies, as a consumer on a tight budget, I often choose short-term affordability instead of long-term benefits for the environment.  Case in point:  Do I choose to buy groceries from Wal-Mart, which has a wide selection and low prices, or from Native Roots Market, which offers both local and organic produce and foods, but at a much higher price?  Although I want to contribute to my local economy and help support the small family farms and companies in our central Oklahoma area, there are other factors involved that complicate the idea of buying exclusively or even primarily from the smaller, family-owned groceries in our town.  Not only are the prices prohibitive, but I want to consider the preferences and favorite items of other people in my family, which are not available at these stores.   Come payday, I usually buy the bulk of my family’s groceries at Wal-Mart and go to Native Roots for just a few select items that, to me, are worth the cost.

But where I buy my groceries is only a part of my role as a consumer and a steward of the resources around me.  Any number of decisions I make with my money result in consequences which I have some small degree of control over.  I wanted to learn more about this aspect of my life and recently checked out The Rough Guide to Shopping with a Conscience at my local library.

Jules Verne: the Man who Invented Tomorrow

Summer nights, toasted marshmallows by the campfire and good books:  simple pleasures make the best memories, especially during childhood.  During the last few evenings, my girls and I, while sitting by a flickering fire and toasting scrumptious marshmallows, bread and cheese,have enjoyed reading a biography of Jules Verne, that great 19th century adventure novelist and the grandfather of science fiction.  This fireside reading has proved a rather addictive practice, actually and we’ve already scoured our garden of just about everything flammable.  We will have to scout out the neighborhood in search of dry sticks if we’re to have another book night outside.  But it’s worth a little extra effort and the girls would gladly round up firewood, despite the mosquitoes, when they have such a treat to look forward to.