Teach me to care and not to care.
“The progressive Christian’s error lies in believing that Christianity’s perennial polemic against the rich is an implicit defense of socialist programs. What concerns the Christ of the Gospels is not the economic situation of the poor man, but the moral condition of the rich man.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Student: What exactly is a strong reading of a book?
Teacher: A clearly articulated understanding of the spirit of a book. It’s a reader’s ability to delve below appearances and describe how all the disparate elements of a book coalesce into a singular moral vision. A strong reading is an interpretation of all the characters, arguments, images, and themes that brings the moral and spiritual weight of a book to bear on the audience. It is an act of deference to reality. It translates the substance of a text into the light by which we can view our own lives clearly.
Student: In other words, a strong reading explains the author’s purpose.
Teacher: No. A strong reading may reference the biography of the author, the historical era in which the author lived, and numerous facts or data points about the tradition in which the author worked—but the strong reading of a text sits well beyond all that. A strong reading isn’t fundamentally grounded in science, but in wisdom, charity, and gratitude for life itself. Weak writing cannot produce strong reading. A strong reading only emerges as a response to strong writing, but this is because a strong reader co-creates the meaning of a strong writer’s work. Very few of the books you’ve read can support a strong reading, which is why a strong reading seems strange to you.
Student: What do you mean “co-creates”?
Teacher: I mean that a book which goes uninterpreted isn’t really a book. It’s just an object, a doorstop. A reader plays a role in making a book a book. Likewise, a good reader is part of what makes a good book a good book.
Student: Prove it.
Teacher: Nah. Look, a little while ago, you suggested that anyone who had lived in the modern world “for more than ten minutes” would understand that a store which represented itself with a pink ice cream cone might sell many things that weren’t pink ice cream cones. In other words, understanding the range of meanings suggested by a pink ice cream cone doesn’t come through linear rational proofs. It comes from living in the world that respects such a sign and learning “how they do things here.” Of course, some of the reasons a people “do things that way” can be reasonably explained, but some can’t. Your world—the world that primarily informs the way you think, feel, assign meaning; the world that dictates what you want, what you fear—is the modern world. The modern world isn’t the only world there is, though. There is another world and it is at play right now—it’s a world behind the modern world, beneath it, beyond it—and you might need to walk around in this world “for more than ten minutes” in order to understand how things work there. Frankenstein is an artifact from this other world, and the way I’m interpreting it for you is a skill born of this other world. Every day during class, I do my best to present this world to you—to create entrances into it, so you can spend a little time there and see “how they do things there.” But, it’s difficult.
Student: Why?
Teacher: Because it’s not a physical place and I can’t force you to go there. It’s an intellectual place, a spiritual place, and the only way to enter this place is to genuinely want to be there—and you have to want to be there before you fully understand what it is.
Student: I’ve never heard anyone say anything like this before.
-my latest for The Classical Teaching Institute blog can be read in full here
I’ve lately seen that a conversation has already quietly begun about dropping the word “classical” from the term “classical education.”
Two Christmas Playlists from my “A Matter of Taste” series.
Dark chocolates from Debauve & Gallais
Giuseppe Giusti’s Banda Rossa 20-year vinegar
D.S. & Durga car air fresheners
Esteban’s Amber Japanese style incense (a perennial favorite)
Lobby boy cap from The Society of Crossed Keys
A continental wallet, perhaps this one or this one
Rougie Foie Gras
A bottle of Green Irish Tweed from Creed
“Teachers want administrators who are around. Administrators need to be present. They need to put in lots of face time every week. Headmasters at big schools may disappear for days at a time, but not weeks at a time. On the other hand, principals and deans need to be in the middle of things every day so they can hear the gossip, griping, and horseplay of students between classes. Principals and deans need to run into teachers six, seven, eight times a day in the hallway, on the quad, at lunch, and while getting coffee in the break room. Teachers need a regular supply of evidence that administrators are genuine co-laborers and co-sufferers. Administrators should know what’s going on in the student body and the faculty because they’ve seen it, not merely because they’ve heard about it. Administrators who aren’t physically in the middle of things eventually turn into deaf, distant bureaucrats.”
-from my latest for CiRCE
If you’re in town, please come.
Conservatives are obsessed with pilling. Everybody is getting this-pilled and that-pilled. The pills aren’t even colors anymore. There are noun-pills and idea-pills. Even modest changes of mind constitute a pilling of some sort.
“I wanted to go to Wendy’s for lunch but Tony Whopper-pilled me and we went to Burger King, instead.”
“We were going to walk but Cheryl car-pilled me and so we drove.”
“So I’m sick, and I was going to take DayQuil in its liquid form, but Mark pill-pilled me and I took gel caps instead.”
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.