Eucatastrophe Reader

"I am never so serious as when I am playful"

Robert Frost: A Life by Jay Parini REVIEW

Jay Parini’s exploration of the life of Robert Frost tells us so much about the poems that Frost wrote and, perhaps more importantly, allows the poems to tell us so much more about Robert Frost. One is struck by the gift that Frost had for word play. Over and over, I was brought back to the observation that Robert Frost was a man capable of maintaining the ability to play like a child might, long after the time in life when most of us have gotten locked into being serious. Robert Frost seems to have been able to be serious even as a young child playing ; and he seems to have been able to be playful as an adult being serious. The paradox is that he is never more serious than when he is being playful, and never more playful than when he is talking something serious. "I am never so serious as when I am playful," he once wrote.

"There are a lot of things I could say to you about the art of poetry if we were talking, and one of them is that it should be of major adventures only, outward and inward – important things that happened to you, or important things that occur to you. Mere poeticality won't suffice." – Robert Frost to Kimball Flaccus, 1928

And yet so many of his poems are about such seemingly simple things.

A number of his poems deal with the tension between the eternal child within us and the insistent adult (often imposed upon the child by a society unwilling to let children be children a day longer than is absolutely necessary). Thus he stops by woods lovely, dark and deep and wishes that he could remain looking into them; things beautiful; things wonderful; things mysterious – adventures of the inner world call to him but “he has promises to keep and miles to go before he sleeps.” Similarly in Birches, we find him swinging between heaven and earth, like a boy bred with a metronome ascending into imagination and back to earth in an endless transcendental tidal system of play and usefulness. Throughout his young adulthood he was forced to try and find that balance between his vocation and his avocation. He loved to do farm work but only the sort of work that allowed him reflective and creative time. “Farming was,” Frost later said, "a practical way to earn a living, although I've not yet showed a talent for practicality.”

“A poet,” he would also later say, "needed time when nothing was happening, or seemed to be happening." "The whole point of farming is shirking duties," Frosts recalled. "You can't put your mind on farming. It won't stay there."

That was his problem. He had a mind that did not feel like growing up no matter how much smarter and more widely read and skilled it got at thinking. It wanted to keep wondering. In many ways, this belief that we would do better to bring more childhood into our adult lives even as children do and allow more important questions to be wrestled with in school was at the heart of the way that he taught. "I believe in teaching,” he said of his own experiences as a high school and college teacher,

“but I don't believe in going to school. Every day I feel bound to save my consistency by advising my pupils to leave school. Then if they insist on coming to school, it's not my fault: I can teach them with a clear conscience."

"We go to college," he said, "to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven't learned in high school. Once we have learned to read, the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us." He himself dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, believing them to be impediments on his education and ability to create. It may simply well be that he did not need a college to make him into a mind with something to contribute. His came that way.

For him, his objection to formal education often came down to a disagreement over either ends or means. He believed that education should result in students who could contribute, not simply correct. "I came to live in the house of a professor who was off in Europe having what a professor would call a good time,” Frost explained,

“He had left all his books for me to have a good time with taking good care that I shouldn't have too little time with them, he had marked them all with a pencil wherever he found the mistake of any kind – just as if they were written exercises of pupils. He never praised anything (I should have loathed his praise), But he had never contributed an idea or interesting commentary."

For many years, Frost tended chickens to make a living rather than pursue a living that would require him to go back to school (ironic given how many honorary doctorates he would later accumulate). He found that doing so allowed him to make the observations that his poetry would require. I like farming he told a Boston reporter, "but I'm not much of a Farmer." He elaborated:

"I always go to farming when I can. I always make a failure of it, and then I have to go to teaching. I'm a good teacher, but it hasn't allowed me time to write. I must either teach or write: I can't do both together. I have to live. .... I've had a lazy, scrape-along-life, and enjoyed it. I used to hate to write themes in school. I hate academic ways. I fight everything academic. The time we wasted trying to learn academically – the talent we starve with academic teaching!"

"I was a poor farmer in those days, Frost later said, "but rich too. There was plenty of food, and time, too. Lots of time. I was time rich." Frost was a huge fan of keeping yourself independent so that you could think and create and retain that inner child. “Steal away and stay away” he says in one of his poems,

Don't join too many gangs. Join few if any.
Join the United States and join the family –
but not much in between unless a college.

Even as a teenager, he was jealous of the ownership of his own mind. Parini writes of his conflicts with his religious mother as a young man

“These ‘dangerous’ notions brought Frost into conflict with his mother, as might be expected. They apparently quarreled frequently about his seeming ‘atheism,’ although Frost consistently defended himself against this charge. He was not an atheist, he maintained, though he did subscribed to many of the views put forward by people who were. At one point he referred to himself, with a touch of self-flattery, as a ‘freethinker,’ and his mother objected; "Oh, please don't use that word. It has such a dreadful history."

“Frost determined to go his own way, or to seem to go his own way, as in The Road not Taken, his most famous poem, which ends with the wry self-critical note that he will be ‘telling people with a sigh that he took the road less traveled by.’ In fact, Frost was a rugged traditionalist, a man highly conscious of the forms, and one who found his freedom within the limits of those forms. Part of his great originality lay with his discovery of freedom within form, a way of extending a given tradition in a direction that seemed to redefine it."

When applying for jobs that usually required more traditional education than he had, he simply tried to make the case that this had not prevented him from getting more education that college might have given him. Parini writes:

“When questioned about his education, he replied: ‘if you mean what might be called the legitimate education I received when you speak of 'training' and 'line of study,' I hope that the quality of my poem would seem to account for far more of this than I have really had. I am only graduated of a public high school. Besides this, a while ago, I was at Dartmouth College for a few months until recalled by necessity. But this inflexible ambition trains us best, and to love poetry is to study it. Specifically speaking, the few rules I know in this art are my own afterthoughts, or else directly formulated from the masterpieces I reread.’"

“The gravity and expressive force of a major poet are already audible here, especially when he declares 'that inflexible ambition trains us best.’ That kind of all-consuming artistic ambition was, indeed, Frost's own, and part of his genius. He had his eyes firmly on the path of poetry, and nothing would distract him."

As Pres. John Sloan Dickey of Dartmouth later recalled,

 "I don't think Frost realized how out of the mainstream his approach was. He was highly eccentric, highly original, as a teacher. He encouraged a kind of rebellion against the standard approaches to life. He was almost aggressively self-determined, self-determining."

Frost believed that teachers needed to develop their own minds before they thought about developing the minds of their students. And he regularly refused to take jobs that did not give him the time he needed as a poet and as a person to “swing birches,” to take “roads less travelled,” to get lost in swamps, and peer into anything that occurred to him as unremarkable on the surface but full of important meaning if looked at long enough. His poetry focuses on the mundane details of nature and people because he believes that if we will but look with a poet’s eyes, we will see these things swarming with meaning. The short poem, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening for example, contained, said Frost, “all that I ever knew."

"You don't want to say directly what you can say indirectly" he once remarked echoing Emily Dickinson's injunction to 'tell the truth but tell it slant.'" In short, Robert Frost liked to play the part of the trickster archetype often found in mythologies all over the world. He liked to do magic tricks with words, talking to you, with a twinkle in his eye, about one thing, while knowing full well that he is getting you to think about another. "My poems," Frost wrote to a friend in 1927,

“are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks, carts, chairs, and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark.' He referred to this as his innate mischievousness."

Take for example, the poem, The Ax Helve.

In the margins of a friend’s book next to this poem, Frost wrote in pencil: this is as near as I like to come to talking about art, any work of art – such as it is."

The poem is, on the surface, about a man who is an expert at making ax helves (a helve is the handle of a weapon or tool). Clearly, a poem can be a weapon or a tool and the poem is really about how a good poet makes a poem. Naturally, he won’t say that outright in the poem but he is too much of a prankster to tell a good joke without giving you enough clues to get it. What would be the fun of that? Frost will write a poem about apple picking and even tell you in the title that it is about apple picking but in the first line, he will point the apple picking ladder towards heaven so that you know that you should “look up” so to speak, and not get bound up in excessive literalism. The poem is really about the way that we live life in the light of the knowledge that we will die.

Frost reminds me of those artists that make meaningless patterns on post cards that turn into 3-D pictures if you stare at them long enough. He is playing hide-and-seek with his readers.

 "Poetry begins in trivial metaphors," he says, "pretty metaphors, grace metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have.” “Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another,” Parini writes,

“Frost believed that the greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter. In formulating this, he consciously or not, is redeploying an aesthetic common to the German Romantics, especially Goethe, who famously wrote: 'Whoever has truly grasped the meaning of history will realize in thousands of examples that the materialization of the spirit or the spiritualization of matter never rests, but always breaks out, among prophets, believers, poets, orators, artists, and lovers of art.”

"I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking," Frost says. I confess that I myself feel deeply and profoundly influenced by Robert Frost’s use of metaphor in the place of argument. Indeed, what I think he has discovered is that a good metaphor will argue for you. "Rob never argued,” one of his acquaintances once observed, “He knew what he knew and never had any interest in arguing about it." And yet no one who has read one of his better poems could ever deny that the poetry itself makes its argument long after the poet is gone.

In one of his earliest poems, lines written in his attempt to woo his high school sweetheart and future wife, Elenor, he uses a memory of the first time he met her to convey something of his wishes and intents.

As I went down the hill along the wall
there was a gate I had to leave that for the view
and had just turned from when I first saw you
as you came up the hill. We met.
But all we did that day was mingle great and small
footprints in summer dust as if we drew
the figure of our being less than two
but more than one as yet.

One can picture the footprints in the dirt road, sometimes overlapping and sometimes distinct; one larger, one smaller. To Frost, the tracks they left that day made it seem as though some living thing “less than two but more than one as yet” was leaving them.

Is that not a powerful description of relationships that we have had with people we have been engaged to or married to or maybe just met? I will say it again, “The image itself is an argument.”  

An aside: Robert Frost’s relationship with Elenor was not entirely easy for either of them. They had many children and their children were difficult. They had many hardships and their hardships were challenging. “The whole point about marriage,” Frost remarked, "is learning how not to take offenses when none were intended. It took me a while to figure this out." Frost noted to a friend that Elenor “had some loss she can't accept from God." It may be that Frost’s poetry helped him to process his losses and God was someone that he allowed himself to live life without understanding perfectly. As Parini put it when discussing Robert Frost’s exposure to Satayana at Harvard.

"William James had been Satayana's teacher and the pupil had understood his teacher’s basic position on faith, that one can believe anything one wishes, as long as it remains useful and is "live enough to tempt.'"

There is so much in this biography that one has to eventually narrow their report or it will be as long as the book. There are three aspects of Robert Frost as a poet that I should like to highlight from the many things that Parini has had to say about the subject.

First, a word about Robert Frost and the Sound of poetry. Frost liked the idea of poetry being something deeper than words. Words were merely the surface of a poems meaning and he liked to write poems that expressed meaning subliminally. He mentions the experience of listening to two people converse or argue on the other side of a closed door. Even without hearing the actual words, you can tell if the exchange is an argument or a conversation or lovemaking. The same should be true of a good poem, read. Here are some excerpts from Parini’s biography that illustrate the point.

"As a young poet, he began by imitating voices of the past. The young poet is prone to echo all the pleasing sounds he has heard in his scattered reading. He is apt to look on the musical value of the lines, the metrical perfection, is all that matters. He is not listening to the voice within his mind, speaking the lines and giving them the value of sound."

"I didn't know until then what I was after," he recalled. "I was after poetry that talked. If my poems were talking poems – if to read one of them you heard a voice – that would be to my liking!"

"You listen for the sentence sounds. If you find some of those not bookish, caught fresh from the mouths of people, some of them striking, all of them definite and recognizable, so recognizable that with a little trouble you can place them and even name them, you know you have found a writer."

Some of the highlights, the most vivid imaginative passages in poetry are of the eye, but more perhaps are the ear. . . . The vocabulary may be what you please though I like it not too literary; but the tones of voice must be caught fresh and fresh from life. Poetry is a fresh look and a fresh listen. . . . The actor’s gift is to execute the vocal image at the mouth. The writer’s is to implicate the vocal image in a sentence and fasten it printed to the page.”

Frost thought that poets needed to be primarily listeners. If they were good listeners, they would capture the sound of people speaking in their poetry. Here is how Frost expressed this conviction in a lecture to the Browne and Nichols School in May 1915.

“Mr. Browne has alluded to the seeing eye. I want to call your attention to the function of the imagining ear. Your attention is too often called to the poet with extraordinarily vivid sight, and with the faculty of choosing exceptionally telling words for the sight. But equally valuable, even for schoolboy themes, is the use of the ear for material for compositions. When you listen to a speaker, you hear words, to be sure,— but you also hear tones. The problem is to note them, to imagine them again, and to get them down in writing. But few of you probably ever thought of the possibility or of the necessity of doing this. You are generally told to distinguish simple, compound, and complex sentences,—long and short, —periodic and loose, to varying sentence structure, etc. ‚Not all sentences are short, like those of Emerson, the writer of the best American prose. You must vary your sentences, like Stevenson, etc.‛ All this is missing the vital element. I always had a dream of getting away from it, when I was teaching school,—and, in my own writing and teaching, of bringing in the living sounds of speech.

So, my advice to you boys in all your composition work is: ‚Gather your sentences by ear, and reimagine them in your writing.‛ {. . .]

"What we do get in life and miss so often in literature is the sentence sounds that underlie the words. Words in themselves do not convey meaning, and to [ . . prove] this, which may seem entirely unreasonable to any one who does not understand the psychology of sound, let us take the example of two people who are talking on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard but whose words cannot be distinguished. Even though the words do not carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the conversation. This is because every meaning has a particular sound-posture; or, to put it in another way, the sense of every meaning has a particular sound which each individual is instinctively familiar with and without at all being conscious of the exact words that are being used is able to understand the thought, idea, or emotion that is being conveyed.”

"What I am most interested in emphasizing in the application of this belief to art is the sentence of sound, because to me a sentence is not interesting merely in conveying a meaning of words. It must do something more; it must convey a meaning by sound.‛

"No matter what I think it means," he said of one poem, "I'm infatuated with the way the rhymes come off here."

Secondly, because the language that the poet captures in his poetry has structure, Frost thought that the language used in the poems had to as well. He was not a fan of modern poetry or poetry that mistook the violation of all forms as creativity. "Poets had vainly attempted to seem original by omitting punctuation, capital letters, metrics, images, and so forth,” Parini notes,

“They have eliminated phrase, epigram, coherence, logic, and consistency. But to what end? Where was the real originality in all of this?"

Frost insisted that one could remain within the boundaries of any convention so long as one was given freedom to think creatively within it. In some ways, having to deal with form forced creativity. "I am both ‘a wall builder’ and ‘wall  destroyer,’ he argued (in other words, he was both himself and his neighbor in the poem Mending Wall). As Seamus Heaney has noted, 'his appetite for his own independence was fierce and expressed itself in a reiterated belief in his right to limits: his defenses, fences, and his freedom were all interdependent.'"

A third feature of the way that Frost approached poetry has to do with the way that he incubated, fertilized, and harvested his poems. He constantly kept files of poems he had begun but not finished. He ages them. He lets them percolate into his own psyche, often for years, before bringing them back “up” to the surface for reworking. A poem might take years to make and many of those years it will simply sit in some recess of his mind developing. Parini asays that "Frost did not, like most poets, grow and shift; rather, like a tree, he added rings." Frost actually took his own advice, his biographer says,

“spending many years, even decades, 'plowing it under' and building soil – in Derry, for example, the years when so much was sown and very little reaped or sent to markets. He let ideas come, but felt no compulsion to rush to print with them; he let them play in his head, play on his tongue in endless conversations; he put them into letters,  into prose, which formed a kind of halfway stage between speech and poetry. What reached print was an idea of an idea of an idea. When it finally emerged, it was fully formed and richly developed."

He was not really trying to create poems so much as to create a poet. If he became the poems he started to write, they would, in time, finish themselves and thus, when he taught, he taught more about being a poet than about writing poetry. “Frost was not teaching a subject. He taught himself.” This is why he liked his New England life. He needed to be somewhere that allowed him to become something. As he told Ernest Silver, he wanted to find "a farm in New England where I could live cheap and get Yankier and Yankier."

Like Emerson, Robert Frost was one of those rare individuals who could collect waters from many mountain streams and distribute them into a delta of many forms. He was a synthesizer of thought and feeling. He was one of those people who have a talent for photosynthesizing light available to us all and converting it to something we can all use. He admired other people that could do that for him. He believed that this is what he had come into the world to do: To write great poems – poems “that it would be hard to get rid of.”

“It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts,” he wrote of . The right reader of a good poem can tell  the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound, that he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly. It has not to wait the test of time. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but that we knew at site that we never could forget it. There was a barb and a toxin that we owned to at once.”

To return to the theme that I began with, I think this is the source of that dilemma I started this essay with. Robert Frost wants to develop his inner child in a serious way. But he wants to do it in a playful way. He does not want to take short cuts. He is willing to “come to be” before be “comes to write.” He is willing to let his poems play with him before he lets them out to play with the world. But there had to come a time when he had to decide if he was going to be a farmer and high school teacher who happened to have written poems or a poet who had happened to have farmed and taught high school. Parini describes the moment of truth in the following way.

“His feelings of mortality were by now intense; after all, his father had lived only to the age of 34. Given the fluctuations of his health, Frost imagined there was little time left. He must withdraw from the daily demands of teaching, become selfish, and find the time to devote himself wholly to the task at hand: the completion of a book of poems.”

“He always said that the turning point came in 1912, at Plymouth. He had to make a decision: to be a poet or teacher, primarily. There was no way to reconcile both careers at this time. The poems had to get his full attention, which is why he left teaching. He had written just enough poetry of the highest quality to make that apparent to him. He understood what had to be done."

Thanks to some inheritance money, he was able to go to England for two years and focus on writing. The result was his first book of poetry, A Boy’s Will. Followed soon after with North of Boston, the book would make Robert Frost the household name that he is today. Somewhere, the decision to give himself permission to play seriously with the words he found in his head – to let them play with each other “has made all the difference.”

Question for Comment: “I never take my own side in an argument,” Frost once said. Somehow, he manages to both take himself seriously and laugh at himself a lot. This in spite of what can only be described as an unusually difficult family life (his children were often either mentally ill or physically ill and Frost himself seems to have struggled with a great deal of depression). In many of his poems, you may see him make a point and its counterpoint, as if to say “I am just here to make you think. Not to make you right.”

Can you think of one of his poems that is particularly effective at getting you to think? To “fall forward into the dark” as it were?

"They decide to accept what he calls the confrontation between their souls."

Waking Life REIEW

All I am going to say about this film is that it appears to be what happens when you develop movie film in LSD. If this movie had a “gist” I would tell you what it is but … I can’t really. HERE are the pieces if you think you can figure it out.

Question for Comment: In one of the scenes from the film, a complete stranger stops the main character and tells him that she wants her interactions with people in life to be “human moments.” Here is the dialog.

Soap Opera Woman: Excuse me.

Wiley: Excuse me.

Soap Opera Woman: Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant. You know? I mean, it's like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continuously on ant autopilot, with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient, polite manner. "Here's your change." "Paper or plastic?' "Credit or debit?" "You want ketchup with that?" I don't want a straw. I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don't want to give that up. I don't want to be ant, you know?

Wiley responds by talking about the poet, D.H. Larwence:

“It's kinda like D.H. Lawrence had this idea of two people meeting on a road, and instead of just passing and glancing away, they decide to accept what he calls the confrontation between their souls. It's like freeing the brave, reckless gods within us all.”

If nothing else, this movie gives just about everyone who wants to sound intelligent a chance to articulate whatever perspective on life they have. Wiley walks through his inescapable dream state listening to philosophers address or ignore his central question: How do I wake up?

What do you think? If you went through your whole day giving every stranger you met a chance to tell you their most profound thought, would you do it again tomorrow or would one day be quite enough?

"And one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.”

Job REVIEW

“In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.”

 - Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

What we know about Job is that he believed himself to be honest, compassionate, and faithful. In his final speech to his friends, he outlines just what his definition of righteousness was and how he had held himself to a high bar throughout his life.

In chapter 31 of the book, he argues that he has not been guilty of lust, greed, dishonesty, adultery, injustice, stinginess, bribery, pride, idolatry, vindictiveness, duplicity, or exploitation. And yet, he has been made to suffer. “Pain is inevitable,” they say, “but suffering is optional.”

What happens to Job in the course of the week that his friends sit with him in his ashes is the transition from pain to suffering - the destruction of his world view. This is really where the suffering moves into the place that pain opened up in his life. Before catastrophe descends upon Job, his narrative of the world centers on a belief in a just and fair God. Even when he is smitten with loss and pain, his narrative remains intact at first. One gathers that his belief in God’s compassion and fairness is capable of absorbing the reality of pain and loss. But it is not capable of assimilating that pain unaccompanied by explanation or relief. If God would slay him and put him out of his misery, it would still fit within his Weltanschauung. He waits seven days to be euthanized and when that doesn’t happen, the edifice of his long held perspective on God begins to disintegrate. In the first hours of calamity, he is able to say “Yet though He slay me, still I will trust Him.” It is in the experience of NOT being slain, not being taken out of his pain, that Job begins to lose his trust. Even a compassionate dog owner knows when it is time to put a suffering dog down. Why doesn’t it seem that God does?

I think many of us can relate to this. We can recover from loss and from pain if eventually the pain is removed or at least explained as purposeful. When it remains, intensifies, and demonstrates itself to be utterly without purpose, our faith can undergo a phase transition. What is happening to Job is that the evidence for a just God in a fair system is evaporating in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. If God would just kill him, that would allow Job to keep thinking of Him as he always has. But leaving him to suffer? That is an attack on the premise at the core of Job’s faith. And thus, Job is forced to change his mind. He is forced to abandon a construct of the world that had given him comfort. Job is forced to accept a construct of the world that makes him miserable. And that is where the pain turns to suffering like water to ice or bacon to grease.

Meanwhile, his friends feel compelled to use Job’s catastrophe to shore up their own comforting construct of the world. No one wants to believe in a world of random abuse – a world where the individual has no power to reverse the course of the powers that destroy them. What is interesting to me is that Job’s friends are really articulating a rather orthodox position on suffering. What they are saying is pretty much exactly what a reading of the Pentateuch would lead one to say. Just as one might say that 2 plus 3 equals 5 means that 5 minus 3 equals 2, one should be able to backward engineer from the Mosaic covenant promise that righteousness leads to blessings that revoked blessings imply unrighteousness. Jobs friends are being, in my opinion, perfectly consistent with the message we get from Moses.

The young Eliphaz (the only of Job’s friends who refuses to judge Job for any sin that he might or must have committed BEFORE the calamity) does not try to condemn Job for sins that he imagines must have been committed. Eliphaz judges Job only for the sins that he sees him commit subsequently – the errors that he commits in his response to those calamities. Eliphaz does not feel the need to force Job’s life into a formula. For him, God cannot be unjust. End of story. He insists that this assertion must be maintained even if the evidence cannot explain it. Eliphaz makes no attempt to explain to Job why the original damage was inflicted. He just poses a theory as to why it may have been extended.

Is this possible? Is it possible to continue believing in the face of contrary evidence?

I get the sense from the book of Job that it isn’t. Whoever authored it does not simply leave us with Eliphaz’ argument. He gives us promise of explanation and compensation. The introduction and conclusion of the book give us a narrative that leaves us with the ability to continue believing in God’s justice without denying the existence of undeserved suffering. We are given a story that satisfies both the evidence (good people suffer) and the need for comfort (it was not God inflicting it and you will be paid for it someday). The entire argument between Job and his friends is sandwiched into a narrative they knew nothing about.  It is a story that informs us that the suffering Job experienced was not God’s idea, nor was God the author of it. It is a story that tells us that all the pain was eventually compensated. Is that story true?

We are given no evidence really.

We are simply given the story.

All of Job’s losses are returned to him. All of his daughters are beautiful. All of his years are restored. He lives to be 140. It sounds pretty ideal. Convenient even. His biography is wrapped up in a bow for us.

“There was a reason Job suffered,” the story tells us. “There was an end to it,” it tells us. We are meant to make the application to our own sufferings.

And many have been the people who have.

Perhaps one of the differences between Job and his friends can be found in the fact that they all talk to Job about God. And when Job responds, he spends most of his time talking to God. Maybe that is why, in the end, they have to apologize?

Question for Comment: Do you think all your pain has purpose? Why? Should evidence be necessary?

"Read like a wolf eats"

The Reading/Writing Connection: Strategies for Teaching and Learning in the Secondary Classroom REVIEW

"Read like a wolf eats" says writer Gary Paulson. Fourteen chapters full of ideas for teaching high school reading and writing. Trying to summarize it would be like putting the New York zoo into a hamster cage. Nevertheless, each chapter offers ideas worth remembering and implementing.

Ask students what they know, what they want to know and after learning, what they learned.

Approach reading and writing as an integrated activity. A typical classroom experience might involve each of the following steps.

1. Giving an overview of the reading to be done: For example, if the day’s reading is Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway, start the class by setting the context in which Hemingway wrote the story.
2. Providing some sort of objective: Ask students to look for ways that Hemingway might be using the tale of a fisherman to talk about one’s response to past failure.
3. Pre-Reading: Give students something to read that helps them to better understand the story they are about to read. For example, Hemingway’s Nobel acceptance speech.
4. During Reading: Stop periodically to analyze the text, giving students the chance to ask deeper questions and make more connections.
5. Post Reading: When finished with the text for the day, return to the goals set up at the beginning of class. Solicit feedback on what students saw when exploring the question you set them to answer.
6. Pre-Writing. Help students to take the discussions from the day’s class to set out a thesis they want to argue. Give them opportunity to discuss and find appropriate structures.
7. Prompt: Give a specific writing task if the students do not have one they have thought of themselves.
8. Plan: Help students create a plan for writing. What will they do first, second, third, etc.
9. Writing: Give students time to write
10. Sharing: Allow students to share the results of their first draft with each other. What ideas can they solicit from one another?
11.   Revising: Give students time to revise their ideas based on the feedback that they receive.
12. Editing: Give students guidelines for editing their work. Remind them that the aim of editing is to bring the written work into conformity with the meaning intended.
13. Evaluation: Allow students to evaluate their work and each other’s work to see if it meets the criteria laid out for good writing.
14. Reflection: Give students time to reflect on the process of writing. What can they learn from their experience? How might they save time or get a better quality product next time? What have they learned about themselves as writing?

Consider beginning class by asking students to describe an ideal teacher and an ideal student. Rather than handing out a set of rules, let the class determine what character qualities they will expect of an excellent teacher and what that teacher can then expect of them. Perhaps this would make a good first writing assignment.

Consider giving name cards to put on the tables or desks and then have them write a few things about themselves on it. Or put a good quote on the back of each name card with a good question for them to respond to the first day of class.

The book has a chapter on multiple intelligences that it would be good to keep in the back of my mind: Linguistic, Musical, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily Kinesthetic, and Personal Intelligences should all be recognized even though the class is dedicated to the improvement of verbal skills. Students need to be reminded that language courses are not the soul determinant of intelligence. Unfortunately schools can be adept at convincing children that they are not intelligent. DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOUR STUDENTS. Page 80 has a brief intelligence survey for soliciting information from students.

Consider the importance of DECLARATIVE KNOWLEDGE, PROCEEDURAL KNOWLEDGE, and CONDITIONAL KNOWLEDGE. Remember that we are teaching knowledge, but also skills and the ability to apply the former two. Students must know things but they must know how to use that knowledge and when to use it. Students will need to learn strategies for acquiring each of these cognitive assets.

Consider having students keep journals. These may deal with feelings, questions, images, favorite words and phrases, echoes of other books or films or experiences the reading evokes, reactions to characters or events in the reading, memories, and connections to other people, books, authors, ideas, etc. Call them “connection journals and make it clear that they are to be dense with connections.

Allow students to approach reading as a communal and social activity rather than something pursued in solitary confinement. Reading together should involve some element of social bonding and intimacy with the intimacy thermostat set by the level of safety created.

Help students to write by showing, not telling whenever possible. They need to get used to present evidences that readers can use to draw conclusions. This is almost always better than simply offering conclusions.

In a section about “dialoging with the text, teachers are encouraged to focus on some of the following strategies for increasing writing comprehension:

First Reaction: What was your first response to the text or portions of it?

Feelings: How did the story make you feel?

Perceptions: How do you perceive the characters or events? What elements of your perception are supplied by the author and what elements are you bringing to the text because of your own experience?

Visual Images: Can you imagine the scenery? The characters? How successful is the author at representing sensory experiences?

Associations: What personal memories does this reading evoke in you as a reader?

Thoughts and Ideas: How is the work making you think or changing your mind about things you thought you were sure of? What ideas is the author trying to convey?

Selection of Textual Elements: What particular sentences and paragraphs strike you as important? Are there words or phrases that need to be discussed more with others?

Judgments of what is Important: What is important in the story? What could the author have left out? What portion of the text simply cannot be missed if the story is to be understood?

 Identification of Problems: What are you having trouble understanding. Are their words? Or concepts? Or plot elements that you don’t get? Do the characters act logically?

Author: What can you learn about the author that helps to understand the story?

Evolution of your Reading: How are you as a reader being affected as the story progresses? Are you getting bored? Mad? Confused? Curious? How are you being changed by it?

Evaluations: Do you think that this is a good piece of writing? Why?

Literary Associations: What other books or poems or essays have you read that may connect in some way to this one?

Writing: If asked to write about this text, what you want to write about? What argument would you make about it?

Other Readers: How are other readers in your group responding to the same text you are reading? What are their views of it? Can you explain why you see things differently?

Consider teaching students about the various schools of critical response to literature. (See HERE)

Consider giving “budget tours” of some books. Students may not need to read entire works to be given exposure to them. One might, for example, read a few chapters of Moby Dick instead of the whole thing. They could read excerpts or even book reviews. It might be possible for example to expose students to portions of Thomas Hardy novels without reading them all. They might read one novel and use reviews of the others to get a better picture of what themes Hardy is known for.

Consider creating a newspaper and having students write articles about the events in a story or play (Romeo and Juliet).

Consider having a student take on a role and answer questions that the other students ask them.

The Writer: By Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten.
I wish What I wished you before, but harder. -

 “Put simply, American children do not write frequently enough and the reading and writing tasks they are given do not require them to think deeply enough.”

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” E.M. Forster

“Vgotsky claims that can exceed their actual mental age and work at the edges of their “proximal development” if they are provided with critical modeling and with opportunities to practice.”

 “Reading and writing are complementary acts that remain unfinished until completed by their reciprocals. The last thing I do when I write a text is to read it, and the act that completes my response to a text I am reading is my written response to it. Moreover, my writing is unfinished until it is read by others as well, whose responses may become known to me, engendering new textualities. We have an endless web here, of growth, and change, and interaction, learning and forgetting, dialogue and dialectic. Our task as teachers is to introduce students to this web, to make it real and visible for them, insofar as we can, and to encourage them to cast their own strands of thought and text into this network so that they will feel its power and understand both how to use it and how to protect themselves from its abuses.”

From Robert Scholes, Textual Power, Yale University Press, 1985

The author notes that there are a variety of writing forms that students need to be exposed to and practice.

Sensory/Descriptive: Describing things with detail.

Imaginative/Narrative: Telling stories

Practical/Informative: Explaining how to do something.

Analytical/Expository: Persuading, interpreting, influencing.

Page 193 has an excellent chart outlining different assignments that could be used to teach and evaluate these different kinds of writing. The following page expands on the possibilities for writing assignments:

Autobiographical, Informational Report, Observation, Interpretation, Controversial Issue Argument, Speculation about Cause and Effect, Reflective Essay, or Evaluation.

Consider looking at the writing tasks that you have to do in life (apply for scholarships, write evaluations, write syllabi and course descriptions, solicit information, make proposals, etc.)

Page 216 discusses the “saturation report.” This involves having students immerse themselves in a subject before they write about it.

See HERE for The Stolen Party by Liliana Hecker

Chapter Nine is about alternatives to the standard research paper. The authors suggest that some papers should involve more than researching what others have researched.

In a safe classroom, students will see the tasks they are given as important and they will feel that they have all the support they need to achieve a successful conclusion of it. Make an honest agreement with your students: Promise them to give them tasks that matter in exchange for sincere effort. And provide opportunity to speak and say so when one side of that agreement is violated.

 In the excellent chapter on feedback, the authors argue that students need to be supported as they try and achieve the expectations that you have laid out. There should be multiple avenues for getting help provided to them so that the absence of one source does not give them permission to stop working. What mechanisms will you have in place for pre-grade-evaluation feedback? Helpful feedback in “mid-task” is crucial. Consider oral FEEDBACK SESSIONS WHERE THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ARE ASKED:

What did you learn from this piece of writing?
What do you intend to do in the next draft?
What surprised you in the draft?
What are you going to do to improve it?
What questions do you have of me?

Chapter 11 deals with approaches to the teaching of grammar, punctuation, and the editorial process. The authors suggest that high school students will need to have the need for good writing outlined for them. They need to see how they will be judged by their writing whether they like it or not. Teachers cannot avoid the need to teach

1. Teaching concepts of subject, verb, sentence, clause, and phrase for example.
2. Teaching style through sentence combining and generating.
3. Teaching the manipulation of syntactical elements.
4. Teaching the dialects of power and the power of dialects.
5. Teaching punctuation, mechanics of convention, clarity, and style.

The texts you read should be the “mental velcro” to which concepts of grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure are attached. Grammar cannot be taught well in isolation from actual reading and writing.

"Cats sleep." Start with simple sentences and then work your way to more complex sentences. How many cats were sleeping? What color were the cats? Where were they sleeping? How soundly? Were they large or small? Consider disassembling complex sentences and putting them back together. This is how someone would learn how a car engine worked.

At the mall
the boys
checked out
and
hanging out
the girls
trying to look cool
made comments
about them
admiringly

See editing checklist on p. 319.

“Coaches want you to do well. Judges don’t care.” Teaching should be mostly the former. A coach is going to do anything they can to improve a gymnasts chances of getting a good score in competition. Consider which of these paradigms students are likely to use when determining what role you are going to play in their educational life.

Consider just how grades will be perceived in your classrooms. What messages will be sent through them? What messages will not be intended? How can grades be seen as a reasonable way to communicate specific meaning? Are grades in your class indicative of effort? Ability? Growth? Behavior? Achievement?

See Criteria for Effective Assessment chart on p. 329.

On page 334, there is an outline of different ways to score a piece of writing:

Primary Trait Scoring: This sort of evaluation just looks at ONE trait of the writing (i.e. Is it organized into a structure?)

Rhetorical Effectiveness Scoring: This is more comprehensive and looks at how well the writing accomplishes the task it is supposed to accomplish.

Rubric Scoring: Rubrics can be used to tell students just what will be evaluated and how important the various element s of good writing will be.

Standards Based Dimensional Scoring: In this model, students can be told what the standards they must meet are and then they can supply the writing pieces of their choice that they feel give best evidence of their achievements of those standards. This is essentially a portfolio approach.

In one class, the teacher tells students that they must do the following to get a B in class.

Attend class regularly and come prepared.
Maintain an informal writing journal.
Complete five formal essays.
Develop a final portfolio.

To get an A, they must also propose and pursue and independent project. All student work must be creditable or it will not be considered. Clear standards must be agreed upon.

Most researchers agree that

Teachers should begin with end products and quality in mind and then devise learning activities that will make success possible or inevitable.

Teachers should look to school, State, and National standards as they determine the end-products and quality that they will expect.

Teachers should provide clear rubrics that outline what must be achieved is success is desired.

Teachers should be focused on teaching the processes that students will need to accomplish quality product.

Teachers should involve students in self-evaluation and frequent check-ins.

Nancie Atwell says,

“There's nothing better for you – not broccoli, not an apple a day, not aerobic exercise. In terms of the whole rest of your life, in terms of making you smart in all ways, there's nothing better. Top-ranking scientists and mathematicians are people who read a lot. Top-ranking historians and researchers are people who read a lot. It's like money in the bank in terms of the rest of your life, but it also helps you escape from the rest of your life and live experiences you can only dream of. Most importantly, along with writing, it's the best way I know to find out who you are, what you care about, and what kind of person you want to become.”

Question for Comment: Who helped you learn to read and write? How?

“When you teach your son, you teach your son's son.”

Footnote REIEW

“When you teach your son, you teach your son's son.” - Talmud

In this Israeli film about a father, a son, and a grandson and their disparate generational values, we see a family’s love for one another tested by their inability to accept one another’s ideas about what a life worth living should look like. Ironically, having watched it late last night, I brought the movie over to my folks’ tonight so that I could watch it with my dad and my son . . . but neither of them found it particularly worth watching.

The basic plot line goes something like this. Eliazer and Uriel Shkolnik are professors of Talmudic Studies at Hebrew University. Eliazer regards himself as a “philologist.” He studies words and manuscripts in an attempt to scientifically establish an absolutely accurate rendering of the Talmud. His son, Uriel, also brilliant, has dedicated himself to teaching the Talmud and making it relevant and interesting. Eliezer cares far less for relevance than accuracy and as a consequence, only one student a year generally signs up for his class on Talmudic research. Uriel cares much less for accuracy than he does for contemporary interest and his classes are, as a consequence full and fascinating. Father and son could not be further from one another in their fundamental beliefs about what scholars should be doing and they engage in an ongoing intellectual war (fought mostly passive aggressively) over their viewpoints. “Academic arguments are so passionate,” they say, “because the stakes are so small.” Ironically, Uriel’s teenage son could care less about any sort of scholarship at all.

As the story unfolds, we see that the times are much in favor of the sort of approach that Uriel takes. He is lavished with many publications, awards, radio shows, popularity, and acclaim. His father, conversely maintains his diligent efforts in Talmudic study, decade after decade, all but forgotten. His only achievement in life has to do with getting his name mentioned in a footnote by one of the world’s great Talmudic scholars of the last generation. For this reason, his sense of vindication over his son is complete when he receives a phone call telling him that he has received Israeli’s most prestigious award for his life’s work. This recognition, however, we soon learn was an accident. The phone call he received was supposed to have been made to his son (they are both professors with the same last name and initial at the same university).

At this point, the ironies of the story begin to mount as Uriel (the intended award winner) argues in front of a secret meeting of the committee that his father should receive the award as promised and Eliazer, using his award for a bully pulpit, simultaneously tells a newspaper reporter just how unscholarly and frivolous his son’s work has always been. Meanwhile Uriel finds himself both furious with his father for having no respect for his values and at the same time, being furious with his son for not having any respect for his values.

If you have ever felt yourself in a conflict of values with one of your parents or one of your children, I would highly recommend this film to you. I explained the plot to my son on the ride home tonight and asked him what a father should do when a son adopts values expressly different or even contrary to those held dear by his father. According the Analects of Confucius, a son cannot be considered filial unless, three years after the father’s death, the son is still doing things exactly as his father taught him to. My son – not someone who could be mistaken for a Confucian, though quite respectful –  thought a moment and said, “He should let him go his way and pray.” Mind you, he was wearing a T-Shirt tonight that said “Sarcasm is just one of the services I offer” (he and I have a running discussion about his various T-shirts that I would never wear. Grin.)

Footnote, has a delightful humor to it and rises to Shakespearian levels of irony at times. Soon after winning his award (or thinking he has won), the family goes to see the play Fiddler on the Roof and we see Eliazer smiling contentedly as Tevya sings the song “Tradition!” What Footnote does quite brilliantly amounts to putting the various lead characters in positions where the values that they publically hold and are in conflict with one another about, are sorely tested.

Question for Comment: How were your parents’ values different than your grandparents? How are yours different than your parents. How are your children’s different than yours? Do you think that families should simply expect that values will rarely be passed on down with genes? Or is failure to successfully socialize kids with values similar to one’s own a failure to parent well?

“Would you have me false to my nature?"

Coriolanus REVIEW

 “The crowd that follows me with admiration would run with the same eagerness if I were marching to the guillotine.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus tells the story of a Roman general who earns the respect of the Roman people through his force of will and military service to the State but who, by his experiences of leading them, never comes to respect the people back. Coriolanus sees himself as superior to the common class of people in Rome (and in most respects he is) and refuses to pander to their demand for humility in their chosen consuls.

At the beginning of the play, the plebian crowds of Rome are demanding bread from the State-owned storehouses controlled by the patricians. Menenius tries to reason with them that it is the gods and not the aristocrats that are the cause of food shortages but when the crowds are confronted by Coriolanus, he is incapable of matching Menenius’ diplomacy. “What's the matter, you dissentious rogues,” he says,

“That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,
Make yourselves scabs?”

Commoners are hopelessly fickle and manipulated and he will have no part in coddling them.

“He that trusts to you, where he should find you lions, finds you hares,” he tells them,

"Where foxes, geese: you are no surer, no,

Than is the coal of fire upon the ice,
Or hailstone in the sun.

He that depends
Upon your favours swims with fins of lead
And hews down oaks with rushes. Hang ye! Trust Ye?
With every minute you do change a mind,
And call him noble that was now your hate,
Him vile that was your garland.

Go, get you home, you fragments!”

Coriolanus, in contrast, sees himself as a warrior and a man. He does not hide from bullets or even dodge them. He stares them down in battle and, unflinching, personifies courage, fortitude, and valor. He would be consul but he has no use for winning such a position by democratic pandering. Coriolanus could well be Hitler’s patron saint who, in Mein Kamf, ridicules the fickleness of masses and the weaklings who catered to them. Hitler devalued the collective and exalted the individual, favoring not the many but the few, or even the one, who could cow the many into subjection with his “will to power.” “By rejecting the authority of the individual and replacing it by the numbers of some momentary mob,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf,

“the parliamentary principle of majority rule [democracy] sins against the basic aristocratic principle of Nature. . . . Does anyone believe that the progress of this world springs from the mind of majorities and not from the brains of individuals? . . . For there is one thing which we must never forget: in this, too, the majority can never replace the man. It is not only a representative of stupidity, but of cowardice as well. And no more than a hundred empty heads make one wise man will a heroic decision arise from a hundred cowards. . . . Sooner will a camel pass through a needle's eye than a great man be ' discovered' by an election. The progress and culture of humanity are not a product of the majority, but rest exclusively on the genius and energy of the personality.   To cultivate the personality and establish it in its rights is one of the prerequisites for recovering the greatness and power of our nationality. Hence the movement [Nazism] is anti-parliamentarian [i.e. anti-democratic], and even its participation in a parliamentary institution can only imply activity for its destruction, for eliminating an institution in which we must see one of the gravest symptoms of mankind's decay.”

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus could not agree more. For him, the soldiers of the common class are practically useless. “You souls of geese that bear the shapes of men,” he sneers at them in battle,

“how have you run from slaves that apes would beat!”

“Some certain of your brethren roar'd and ran from the noise of our own drums,” he says to them later.

Coriolanus has far more respect for the enemies he fights against than he does many of the plebeians he fights for. And he is not squeamish about saying so. It is this trait of “soaring insolence” that his political enemies effectively exploit to thwart his political aims. His political enemies simply wait to pounce on and broadcast his aristocratic contempt for “the people.”

“For an end,
We must suggest the people in what hatred
He still hath held them; that to's power he would
Have made them mules, silenced their pleaders and
Dispropertied their freedoms, holding them,
In human action and capacity,
Of no more soul nor fitness for the world
Than camels in the war, who have their provand
Only for bearing burdens, and sore blows
For sinking under them.”

Clearly, Coriolanus’ aristocratic arrogance serves him well  in war (he knows no fear and cannot believe himself beatable) but serves him poorly in politics. He complains about having to go before the people and beg for the power that he believes he can and simply should take (or has already earned) with his own right arm.

“Most sweet voices!
Better it is to die, better to starve,
Than crave the hire which first we do deserve.
Why in this woolvish toga should I stand here,
To beg of Hob and Dick, that do appear,
Their needless vouches? Custom calls me to't:
What custom wills, in all things should we do't?”

Why should he suck up to the people just because his predecessors have subjected themselves to doing so? He cannot understand the fawning obsequiousness of the Senators who think somehow that it is appropriate to woo the worthless masses. “Break ope the locks o' the senate and bring in the crows to peck the eagles” is how he sees what they are doing by their shameless “campaigning.” All of Coriolanus’ political advisers tell him that he needs to simply go out and kiss the public’s butt from time to time but, he refuses.  “His nature is too noble for the world,” his political handler, Menenius, says of Coriolanus,

“He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,
Or Jove for's power to thunder. His heart's his mouth:
What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent;
And, being angry, does forget that ever
He heard the name of death.”

“Why did you wish me milder?” Coriolanus, rebuts his mother who advises him to be diplomatic in victory as well as fierce in war,

“Would you have me
False to my nature? Rather say I play
The man I am.”

. . . I had rather be their servant in my way,
Than sway with them in theirs.”

“I will not do't,
Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth
And by my body's action teach my mind
A most inherent baseness.”

When the populace denies him his position as a consequence of his stubbornness, he scorns them and their leaders alike. In response they banish him and he then banishes them.

“You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere.”

Coriolanus joins up with his own and Rome’s mortal enemy and attacks the city. “I think he'll be to Rome as is the osprey to the fish, who takes it by sovereignty of nature,” Corolanus’ former arch rival concedes. “Therefore, be gone, Coriolanus says to those ambassadors sent to him to plead for their city, “Mine ears against your suits are stronger than your gates against my force.” “There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger,” his old friend Melenius notes.

Shakespeare portrays the masses of Rome just as Coriolanus sees them. As soon as he returns and begins winning military victories against them, they stop fearing his superiority and start celebrating it.

“When I said, banish him, I said 'twas pity.” Says one citizen. “And so did I,” says another. “And so did I” parrots a third,

“and, to say the truth, so did very
many of us: that we did, we did for the best; and
though we willingly consented to his banishment, yet
it was against our will.”

In so saying, Shakespeare demonstrates them for the spineless jellyfish that they were accused by Coriolanus of being. “The crowd that follows me with admiration,” Napoleon (another modern Coriolanus) said, “would run with the same eagerness if I were marching to the guillotine.”

One is left being somewhat unsure of Shakespeare’s politics here because he seems to agree with both sides of what was, at the time he wrote, an ongoing debate between King James and Parliament. I suspect that he intentionally allowed the play to express ambivalence for there is in the message of its drama a dagger in the argument of both. Coriolanus, as a play, proves opposing points. It makes the case that aristocrats are contemptuous of the voice of the people and it also makes the case that often the people deserve the contempt. What the crowds want is someone powerful enough to defeat their enemies who will not use that power on them. By nature, most people are not fighters and for that reason, they want someone who will do their fighting for them but who will never lord that strength over them.

In some respects, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is a commentary on Machiavelli’s dictum that leaders must be both courageous and crafty (From chapter 18 of The Prince).

“A prince, therefore, being compelled knowingly to adopt the beast, ought to choose the fox and the lion; because the lion cannot defend himself against snares and the fox cannot defend himself against wolves. Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves. Those who rely simply on the lion do not understand what they are about.”

We do not have such a character in Coriolanus. Ironically, if you read the play, it is Coriolanus’ mother Volumnia, who shows herself better fit to rule, by Machiavellian rubrics, than any of the men in the story, all of whom over-lean to one trait or the other. She has, what Machiavelli would insist, are the essential traits of leadership, both the lion and the fox. Coriolanus’ fall comes in the end because he cannot take her advice or follow her example.  Truer words are never spoken in the play than those Volumnia uses to tell Coriolanus his problem: “You are too absolute.”

Question for Comment: Today’s question begins with a quote:

“… Kara Mustafa’s successor [to Sultan Ibrahim] as Grand Vezir [of the Ottoman Empire], was Sultanzade Pasha, a flatterer so obsequious as to prompt his master’s question: ‘How is it that you so approve my actions so, good or evil?’ To this he received and accepted the reassuring reply: ‘Thou art Caliph. Thou art God’s shadow upon earth. Every idea which your spirit entertains is a revelation from heaven. Your orders, even when they appear unreasonable, have an innate reasonableness which your slave always reveres though he may not always understand it.’” Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: the Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (p.314)

Ironically, people can be as guilty of flattering the powerful as the powerful can be at flattering the people. Coriolanus insists that people are unworthy of the respect that politicians pander to them. He refuses to compromise the integrity of his beliefs. In the end, it turns out that his beliefs about them are correct. And yet we are left with the question: Should he have flattered them?

What do you think?

“What a child can do in collaboration today, he can do alone tomorrow”

Writing for Understanding: Using Backwards Design to Help All Students Write Effectively by the Vermont Learning Collaborative

In this excellent guide to teaching effective writing, the authors combine their understanding of backwards design (desiding what you want your end product to look like and teaching the skills and knowledge needed to achieve that end) with a 130 combined years of teaching writing to forge a usable template for writing teachers everywhere. The book is full of writing samples and the strategic thinking that teachers did when they planned for them. Excellence has been studied and a plan has been laid out for emulating it.

In order to write effectively at any grade level, the Vermont Learning Collaborative insists, students need to have a solid knowledge base of the subject they are writing about. No amount of technique or editorial diligence will compensate for a superficial knowledge of something that must be understood deeply in order to write effectively.

Secondly, students need to have the ability to develop a focus when writing about that subject.  They have to be able to harness their deep understanding to a specific objective.

Thirdly, they need to know how to develop a structure for pursuing their thesis.

Lastly, they need to have grade-level control over writing conventions (where periods and commas belong; where capitalization is needed; where paragraph breaks are appropriate; how to construct transitions; how to cite sources, etc.)

The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) “defines proficient writing at any grade level as having a controlling idea, an organizing structure, adequate elaboration, an awareness of audience, appropriate word choice and variety of sentence structure, and as students mature in age, increasing sophistication of thought.” Because these things are essential to good writing, time must be devoted to them in class. Students must be immersed in a world where these things are required of them at a level that they can achieve when given help.

Writing is about the conveyance of meaning and if students cannot convey meaning in a way that the meaning will be received in the same way that it is intended, they will be, in some measure, handicapped by that inability in life. Throughout their lives they will need to convey feelings, thoughts, positions, arguments, instructions, summaries, proposals, and stories. Good writing allows them to do so efficiently and effectively. Among the strategies for improving the above skills, few are more important that giving students the chance to talk their way through each step. The primary difference between students who come to school ready to learn and those who do not comes down to how much time they have had listening to quality conversations. (See Hart and Risely). Planning in time to talk about the subject in depth, to talk about focusing thoughts, to talk about possible structures for conveying meaning, and to talk about the conventions of writing is vital to the outcome.

Conversations can be stimulated by the presentation of models, the use of graphic organizers, the use of collaborative writing experiences (“What a child can do in collaboration today, he can do alone tomorrow,” says VYgotsky in 1962). Conversations about structure can be stimulated by “painted essays” as well. These are essays written such that each part of the structural outline of the essay appears in a different color font so that it can be more easily seen.

According to the Vermont Learning Consortium’s approach, the revision process needs to be purposeful. It should be a process of detecting the differences between the intended meaning and the actual meaning of a written work. Students need to understand what their writing conveys and how that may differ from what they want it to convey. Editing involves bringing those two things into conformity.

Ultimately, no one learns anything without an example, motivation, and practice. Teachers would do well to show students how they transfer and make use of the skills being taught to their advantage in “the real world” so that students understand that the work is not merely “academic.”

Question for Comment: Who was most helpful to you in learning to write? In what way were they helpful?

"I went out too far."

The Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway REVIEW

In 1950, Earnest Hemingway published his novel Over the River and Through the Trees. If the title is not familiar to you, you would not be alone. The novel was highly anticipated but profoundly dissatisfying to readers who expected another great work like For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms. As one reviewer notes, Hemingway’s “popularity dwindled due to the quality of the work, not the quality of the writer.”

“Richard H. Rovere's review in Harper's Magazine, CCI (Sept. 1950), 104-106, was one of the commonly critical views of the book: "Ernest Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees is a disappointing novel. Though it has moments of strength and beauty, it also has moments of tawdriness. ... It is an incredibly talky book. It is almost garrulous, a strange thing for a Hemingway novel to be. The reason, I think, is that Hemingway is here using dialogue not as a tool of narrative but simply as a means for the author to unburden himself of opinions." (Pg. 425 -426)

“Lewis Gannett of the N.Y. Herald Tribune (Sept. 7, 1950), pg.23 has a similar, yet more subtle approach. "There are wonderful flashes of the old Hemingway in the book- the tacit understanding between the colonel and his American driver, for instance.... There is the old Hemingway passion for good shooting, and there is the dream-girl who is a dream of all fair women and never more than a dream, like almost all the Hemingway women. ... Some of the book is Hemingway at his worst, and the whole does not add up to Hemingway as his best." (Pg. 466)  

“The overlall consensus gives one the feeling that Across the River and Into the Trees is a bit below par for a Hemingway work.”

http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/courses/entc312/s05/search.cgi?title=Across+the+River+and+into+the+Trees

“Frankly,” we are told by another critic,

“Ernest Hemingway seems to have lost his focus. As a result, his work, Across the River and Into the Trees, suffered. Its best seller status seems to have come solely through anticipation of the book that was to follow For Whom the Bell Tolls. Unfortunately, the kindest critical reviews said nothing more than the book is ‘a little less than perfect.’"

It is in this context that Hemingway sets out to write The Old Man and the Sea a year later (1951). He is a hard living, risk-taking, fifty-one -year-old man who could be washed up and done. He is a man who, in his youth had great success with two or three novels but has gone for almost a decade without some new triumph. He has set out to write another great novel in Over the River and Through the Trees but it had failed miserably. As far as the critics are concerned anyway, it was not worth reading. Like the old man Santiago in Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway has gone for an insufferably long time without success (Santiago has not caught a fish in 84 days). Like Santiago, his latest Herculean attempt at greatness has been devoured by a feeding frenzy of sharks (critics). And like Santiago, he feels like he has been rewarded for his effort by being crucified.

“Hemingway purposefully likens Santiago to Christ, who, according to Christian theology, gave his life for the greater glory of humankind. Crucifixion imagery is the most noticeable way in which Hemingway creates the symbolic parallel between Santiago and Christ. When Santiago’s palms are first cut by his fishing line, the reader cannot help but think of Christ suffering his stigmata. Later, when the sharks arrive, Hemingway portrays the old man as a crucified martyr, saying that he makes a noise similar to that of a man having nails driven through his hands. Furthermore, the image of the old man struggling up the hill with his mast across his shoulders recalls Christ’s march toward Calvary. Even the position in which Santiago collapses on his bed—face down with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up—brings to mind the image of Christ suffering on the cross. Hemingway employs these images in the final pages of the novella in order to link Santiago to Christ, who exemplified transcendence by turning loss into gain, defeat into triumph, and even death into renewed life.” (Spark Notes)

It is interesting to peel away the onion of meaning in Old Man and the Sea in this context. Santiago the fisherman is like Hemingway and like Christ. All three of them struggled to achieve something and failed, not because they could not do what they set out to do so much as because there were too many forces arrayed against them. When Santiago analyzes his failure, he says only that “he went out too far.” i.e. He aimed too high. No doubt this is how Hemingway explains the failure of his previous novel and how he would explain Jesus’ failure to gain acceptance as Messiah (they aimed too high).

It is difficult not to see in Santiago’s fight with the sharks, a thinly veiled reference to Hemingway's battle to fend of critics of his writing. Indeed, it seems almost self-evident that there is a direct correspondence between Santiago’s fishing and Hemingway’s writing. Santiago asserts that he was “born to fish” – it is his calling. But throughout the story, he has to contend with cramps in his hand. His battle is with the great marlin but it is also, and more directly, a battle with his own disabled hand. Likewise, we can imagine Hemingway feeling “born to write” but suffering from a drought of success and a disabling “writers block.”

“When the first shark arrives, Santiago’s resolve is mentioned twice in the space of just a few paragraphs. First we are told that the old man “was full of resolution but he had little hope.” Then, sentences later, the narrator says, “He hit [the shark] without hope but with resolution.” The old man meets every challenge with the same unwavering determination: he is willing to die in order to bring in the marlin, and he is willing to die in order to battle the feeding sharks. It is this conscious decision to act, to fight, to never give up that enables Santiago to avoid defeat.” (Spark Notes)

The great irony is that Hemingway seems to have created a Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize winning masterpiece by simply describing, in metaphorical terms, the fight and failure of his previous attempt. In writing this novel, he is, I think, simply writing about what it was like to write his previous attempt to write a novel; What it was like to finally finish it and to watch it fail. He is writing about what it is like to try to do something truly great, by sheer force of will, in the face of adversity, while dealing with handicaps.

For Hemingway, success is not a requirement of greatness. Greatness is to be seen in the person who fights against odds, against great challenges, without necessary help, in spite of one’s deficiencies, regardless of the fatigue and weariness, no matter what the outcome.

I think this is why Santiago’s great hero is Joe Dimagio in the novel. In December 1951, Joe Dimagio retired from baseball having helped the Yankees to win ten pennants and nine World Series during his thirteen year career. “I feel like I have reached the stage where I can no longer produce for my club, my manager, and my teammates,” he said in his resignation at the end of that dismal year of statistical (for him) failure,

“I had a poor year, but even if I had hit .350, this would have been my last year. I was full of aches and pains and it had become a chore for me to play. When baseball is no longer fun, it's no longer a game, and so, I've played my last game.”

No doubt, Hemingway, writing this novel during Dimagio’s last season, was feeling somewhat like him. He was a man with great prior success having his worst year (Dimagio’s 1951 season was as dismal a failure as Hemingway’s previous novel). Hemingway, like Dimagio, could have retired (eventually, as we know, Hemingway will commit suicide). But instead, he rows out into the deep and uses his failure to write one of America’s great novels about failure and success.

And, in the process, wins a Pulitzer Prize for literature. And a year later, the Nobel.  

As with Santiago and Christ, failure is not necessarily defeat if there is still fight left in the old man. As Hemingway stated in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a writer (like the fisherman Santiago)

“does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. . . . For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. . . . It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.”

Question for Comment: What has been the relationship between defeat and success in your life? How have you dealt with great failure in ways that have made those failures work for you not against you?

"Do you wish to be noble and attractive to all true hearts?"

Mutual Criticism by John Humphrey Noyes REVIEW

Mutual Criticism by John Humphrey Noyes with an introduction by Murray Levine and Benedict Bunker deals with the system of mutual criticism that John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida commune practiced from the mid 1800’s to the demise of the commune in the 1870’s.

As America expanded into the vast open landscapes of the American West and as it opened itself up to the possibility of simultaneous or even individualistic visions of community, numerous utopian blueprints were proposed and experimented with. A number of these were the subject of previous book reviews last summer when I was studying Transcendentalism (Brook Farm, Fruitlands, etc.) Perhaps one of the most successful was one of the most radical; the commune established by Vermont-born John Humphrey Noyes (I will just note that he and I were born in the same place. All other likenesses are purely coincidental). “Vermont breeds radicals but refuses to harbor them,” I often say. Noyes was a case in point.

In the mid 1800’s, reform movements were going bananas. Abolition, women’s rights, prison reform, environmental reform, temperance, millennialism, socialism, and a host of other notions all reflected the cultural optimism that inspired a belief in the possibility of perfection. Noyes’ commune was a manifestation of that impulse. “We can be perfect,” he seems to assert. “Let me show you how.” (One should always prepare for something crazy to follow when someone insists that we humans can be perfect.) From Plato’s eugenics program to Stalin’s purges, human communities have been suffering from this notion. And yet, Noyes never forced anyone to join his commune and from all accounts, there were a lot of people who found in his plan, an answer to their life search for that inevitable Eudemonia (The Good Life).

John Humphrey Noyes studied at Andover Seminary in the 1830’s (the institution that produced the wave of missionaries that I studied in the course of my Masters research) and while there, managed to convert himself to the unique idea that human beings were perfectly capable of achieving perfection if they would but put their minds to it. In 1834, he had his license to preach revoked and in short order, Noyes had what seems to be a mental breakdown. The difference between him and most people who have psychotic breaks is that they do not try to implement their ideas afterwards. Noyes did. One of the ideas he was exploring involved the following logic; Heaven is perfect. There is no exclusive marriage in heaven. We are to bring heaven to earth. Ergo, there should be no exclusive marriage on earth.

The fact that Noyes’ wife had suffered through four stillborn miscarriages led Noyes to a rather startling (for the 19^th Century) conclusion that women should not have to have children if they did not want to. Out of these considerations, he developed his ideas about male continence and complex marriage. It is hard to know just when the idea of mutual criticism was introduced to the community, whether before or after the idea of complex marriage (everyone married to everyone), but quite clearly, a community with that level of shared intimacy would need some mechanism to deal with the potential problems, and the practice of regular mutual criticisms was the result. Noyes believed in perfection but he never believed that it could be achieved without work. If the community was to get along perfectly, the members of it would have to dedicate themselves to perfecting each other. And since they were selecting each other as paramours on a revolving basis, they might as well have a say in improving the people they had on the menu.

Noyes was convinced that no community could exist without some measure of conflict and that since conflict was unavoidable, it should be managed intentionally. Gossip, backbiting, avoidance, open enmity; These would all be the manifestations of community life if the impulses that motivated these things were not intelligently placed squarely on the table. Criticism would occur. Thus, a space and time had to be provided where it would occur according to commonly held principles. (There is only one case in the decades of the Oneida community’s life where a man was expelled for an inability to respond to mutual criticism - and he was thrown out a second story window into a snowbank, for being something of a lecher ironically enough).

Ultimately, the practice of mutual criticism did begin to fail at Oneida and for probably obvious reasons. There were generational differences between the old and young in time that were not going to be resolved by talking. There were realities of attraction and attachment that complex marriage was not going to eradicate with communal “therapy.” “Perfection” as Noyes and the early community members had defined it seemed more like “perfect for them” to many of the younger people.

Here are some of the things that Noyes has to say about the sort of criticism that he believed would bring his community closer to the ideal state of “heaven on earth.” I leave it to the reader to determine if they think it likely to achieve those ends.

“Mutual Criticism — systematized as a means of culture — is a new institution, and of such value, in the opinion of those who have most thoroughly tested it, that its origin, philosophy, manner of application and results, deserve to be more generally known."

“Finally, there should be some way to bring to the light the dissatisfaction which must exist where a number of people attempt to live together, either in a Commune or in the usual life, but which in a Commune needs to be wisely managed. For this purpose I know of no better means than that which the Perfectionists call 'criticism' — telling a member to his face, in regular and formal meeting, what is the opinion of his fellows about him — which he or she, of course, ought to receive in silence. Those who cannot bear this ordeal are unfit for Community life and ought not to attempt it. But, in fact, this criticism kindly and conscientiously used, would be an excellent means of discipline in most families, and would in almost all cases abolish scolding and grumbling."

Noyes recalls his first experience of mutual criticism went back to his days in seminary when some of his peers would assemble in secret meeting to critique each other’s piety. One of the members of that group described it this way:

“One of the weekly exercises of this society was a frank criticism of each other's character for the purpose of improvement. The mode of proceeding was this: At each meeting, the member whose turn it was to submit to criticism, according to the alphabetical order of his name, held his peace, while the other members, one by one, told him his faults in the plainest way possible. This exercise sometimes cruelly crucified self-complacency, but it was contrary to the regulations of the society for anyone to be provoked or complain, I found much benefit in submitting to this ordeal, both while I was at Andover and afterward."

Another member explained the Andover criticisms this way, says Noyes.

“All that winter we felt that we were in the day-of-judgment. Criticism had free course, and it was like fire in the stubble of our faults. Each in turn submitted to the operation above described. It was painful in its first application, but agreeable in its results. One brother, who has a vivid memory of his sensations, says that while he was undergoing the process he felt like death, as though he were dissected with a knife; but when it was over, he felt as if he had been washed. He said to himself, 'These things are all true, but they are gone, they are washed away.' Criticism was our interpretation of Christ's saying to his disciples, ‘If I then your lord and Master have washed your feet, ye also should wash one another's feet.'”

The method pursued in these primitive criticisms is more specifically described in the following paragraph:

"Any person wishing to be criticized offered himself for this purpose at a meeting of the Association. His character then became the subject of special scrutiny by all the members till the next meeting, when his trial took place. On the presentation of his case each member in turn was called on to specify, as far and as frankly as possible, everything objectionable in his character and conduct. In this way the person criticized had the advantage of a many-sided mirror in viewing himself, or perhaps it may be said was placed in the focus of a spiritual lens composed of all the judgments in the Association. It very rarely happened that any complaint of injustice was made by the subject of the operation, and generally he received his chastening with fortitude, submission, and even gratitude, declaring that he felt himself relieved and purified by the process. Among the various objectionable features of the character under criticism, some one or two of the most prominent would usually elicit censure from the whole circle, and the judgment on these points would thus have the force of a unanimous verdict. Any soreness which might result from the operation was removed at the succeeding meeting by giving the patient a round of commendations. This system of open and kindly criticism (a sort of reversed substitute for tea-party backbiting in the world) became so attractive by its manifest good results that every member of the Puttney Association submitted to it in the course of the winter of 1846-1847.”

“In general, all are trained to criticize freely,” writes Noyes,

“and to be criticized without offense. Evil in character or conduct is thus sure to meet with effectual rebuke from individuals, from platoons, or from the whole Community.”

"Our object being- self-improvement, we have found by much experience that free criticism — faithful, honest, sharp criticism — is one of the best exercises for the attainment of that object. We have tried it thoroughly ; and the entire body of the Community have both approved and honestly submitted themselves to it. Criticism is in fact the entrance fee by which all the members have sought admission.”

Noyes notes that there are many people who said to him that they did not think they could handle being the recipient of such treatment. He counters that there is no avoiding it.

“But we think that, instead of being martyrs, we have an easy time in comparison with others ; and this is the way we reason : — Criticism will be in proportion to the need of it ; where there is demand there will be supply ; faults will draw censure, and criticism will circulate and find its proper destination in society. This is a law of distribution as natural and inevitable as any that exists. People around us are subject to it as much as ourselves. The difference is that we cooperate with this law in a way to make its operation the most comfortable and satisfactory. We study the easiest way for supply and demand to meet.

“The necessity for judgment is universal, but it is for us to choose how we will meet it : and there is a best way. So far as we judge ourselves, and help one another to judgment, we shall escape present chastening by affliction and the condemnation of the final judgment. We do not get any more criticism than others, but instead of running up a long account for settlement hereafter we prefer to take it as we go along, and in the way of mutual admonition rather than by chastening from the Lord.”

"The time will come when the secrets of all hearts will be made manifest. Then those who now indulge this shrinking from the light, and sensibility to exposure will have- to suffer all that we suffer, and their criticism will be much more intolerable, because not graduated as it has been with us.”

 In the segment on how to give criticism, Noyes writes,

“As pure oxygen is destructive, but oxygen combined with nitrogen is the very breath of life, so criticism must be combined with love to be wholesome and healing. Or we may compare criticism to machinery which needs to be carefully oiled in order to be safe. Without the lubrication of love, criticism works more mischief and distress than it does good. Society should be knit together in love before the strain of criticism is put on. As individuals, we must love before we criticize.

“The nerves of egotism are wonderfully delicate, and cringe at the slightest touch,” he warns.

“Criticism should carry no savor of condemnation. There should be discrimination between the spirit that is on a person, or his superficial character, and his heart, where Chiist is. The object of criticism is only to destroy the husk, which conceals his inward goodness.

“A third qualification is sincerity, or simplicity which comes right to the point without too much "going round." The plainest course gives most satisfaction to all parties.”

“Our hearts should be in a soft, genial state toward those we criticize, and at the same time we should be sincere and tell the plain truth without fear of offending. Sometimes persons criticize in a superficial way, carefully mixing so much praise and extenuation with their blame as not to seriously disturb self-complacency. This is ineffective, and is done with an eye to favor and not to pleasing the Truth. An overbearing spirit in criticism is equally ineffective.”

“… Let it always be remembered that the object of criticism is not that the critics may unload themselves of grudges, but to help the person criticized — to tell him the truth in a good spirit — to improve his religions experience — to bring him nearer to God — to give him a new enjoyment of life.”

“It is one sign that we have given criticism in a right spirit, if we feel good-natured toward the person afterwards, and it does not disturb the social flow between us.”

In the subsequent section on receiving criticism, Noyes offers the following advice:

“In receiving criticism we may stand and take it as the fire of an enemy, and so feel wounded and sore; or we may go over and join the party that fires at us, in which case we shall feel unhurt. Let a person have the self-possession to take sides with the truth and help on any just criticism of himself and he will find he can endure the severest exposure of his faults without losing any of his self-respect or buoyancy of spirit. What self-respect he might lose by the discovery of his faults, is more than made up by the consciousness of being truthful; and by the justification which fellowship with the Spirit of Truth always brings. There is nothing more exhilarating than that electric union between our spirits and the Spirit of Truth, which is brought about by a courageous sacrifice of self to the truth.”

Noyes concludes Mutual Criticism with an invitation to the wider community to adopt the practice that his community had.

“And to all — whether religious or not, Communistic or not — we say: Do you wish to be made pure? The truth alone can purify you; seek Criticism. Do you wish to be noble and attractive to all true hearts? The truth alone can ennoble you and fill you with heavenly magnetism: seek Criticism. Do you wish so to live that you will be prepared for the long future, whatever it may be? The truth can alone enable you to do this: seek Criticism,. To offer one's self to his associates and friends to be sincerely told his faults of spirit and of outward action, and to freely accept the truth thus spoken, is one of the sublimest acts man can do. And it mil bring to him unspeakable good — peace and harmony, unity and brotherhood.

“… We believe that it is only necessary for Free Criticism to be generally known in order to be every- where appreciated, and to have a shout go up from all true hearts in its favor. For ourselves we shall do all we can to make it popular.”

In June 1879, Noyes was alerted that he was about to be arrested. He fled, in the middle of the night to Canada where he lived out his life, writing back to the commune that it could no longer pursue his original idea of complex marriage.

Question for Comment: What system of mutual criticism keeps the communities of your life from falling apart? Or do they?

“I do not believe that ideas move history; People do."

Faces of Revolution by Bernard Bailyn REIEW

As with other reviews that will be arriving in the next few months, the demands of my teaching will probably shorten the length of my reviews. Faces of Revolution attempts to offer new insights into the American Revolution in two primary ways. First and foremost, it poses that the historical event we know as the Revolution was a consequence of certain people being who they were. “I do not believe that ideas move history,” writes Bailyn, “People do. And people are products of their time and place.”

Thus, the first half of the book is dedicated to giving us new insights from new sources of primary material into key personalities (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Hutchinson, Thomas Paine, Harbottle Dorr, and the three ministers, Andrew Elliot, Jonathan Mayhew, and Stephen Johnson). Of these, I think I could see myself assigning the chapter on Thomas Paine in particular. The chapter on Harbottle Dorr is interesting because it shows you the Revolutionary era from the perspective of a man collecting newspaper articles and responding to them in the columns.

The second half of the book focuses on themes of the Revolution. I think I could see myself assigning the section on the debate over ratification. Bailyn does a good job of documenting the arguments for and against. This would be fairly demanding for a high school student but some may wish to challenge their brains. We shall see.

Question for Comment: Has the history of your life been more deeply affected by certain people? Or certain ideas?