So Quiet . . . .

I'm not used to the house being this quiet. Where are the boys? I don't hear them playing. Are they building with Legos in their room? No. Swinging wooden swords in the basement? Running around outside? No, too windy. Where are they??

There they are, in the family room, all three of them, one on the couch reading The Black Arrow, one in the rocker reading Sense and Sensibility and the other on the floor reading Paddington Bear. What a picture!

It's really unusual for the house to be this quiet, and for all of them to be reading for so long in one day. And we haven't even started our school year yet!

Our First School Tea

I feel like I lost the last couple of years, between working with AO and having the baby. But this year is going to be different. My children are growing up so fast and I feel like I could be making more of the opportunity to be with them while I still can. I've had this verse in my mind for awhile: "A wise woman strengthens her family, but a foolish woman destroys hers by what she does." (Prov 14: 1) I don't want to let the time I have with them slip through my fingers. I'm inspired from the recent AO conference, both from hearing the speakers, and from watching Queen Shenaynay's family in action during our stay at their beehive. I'm hoping to spend more time enjoying my kids and enjoying our school year instead of just trying to rush through it. I haven't got it all worked out yet, but one thing we're going to do is to have tea a couple times a week.

We've done that some Sundays, but I think we need something to make our schooldays a little more fun. Tuesdays and Thursdays we have nothing going on, so those will be our tea days.

The first thing to do--plan for success by getting the tea things out where they'll be easy to get to, and easy to put away. I re-organized a shelf to make room for the teapot and cups - including Miss M's plastic cup and saucer. :)

Then a trip to the health food store to get some non-trans fat treats and organic cheese. I figure fruit-nuts-cheese-and a treat ought to be a nice routine.

Today, being Tuesday, was our first school tea (even though we don't start school for almost two week). We put on Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, buckled Miss M in her chair, and we had tea.

Jane Austen Novel Quiz

The Pride and Prejudice type: Truly an Austenite,
this type is a Romantic at heart, but they
always keep their head and are wary of
melodrama. Lively, clever, and independent.
These people are easily amused by their own
foibles and the quirkly foibles of others. They
lament society today, and dream of the time
when guys were gentlemen and s were ladies.


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Our Little Hobbit

Picture taken by J

My Favorite Cow

I don't know why I love this cow, but I do. I'm not even particularly fond of cows. It's something that somebody painted on the side of their out-building on their farm. I took this picture years ago, but it seemed to want to be posted in my blog, so here it is:

The Educated Imagination chapter 6 by Northrop Frye

I started writing my own summaries of this book as a way to help myself absorb more of it. Previous chapter summaries are here:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

I had to set the book aside for a couple of weeks to tend to other things, but I finished the sixth (and last) chapter just now, and it was the best chapter in the book! He explains how education needs to expand our entire beings, not just bits and pieces of us, and we need to have a vision, not just cliches and opinions . . . it all ties right in with why CM thought that the whole *person* needed to be educated, and taught to reflect and think. Very CM, this book is. ;)

Chapter 6 - The Vocation of Eloquence

Everyone should know how to read and write, but why does that have to include literature? Language/communication is on three levels, and reading and writing needs to be done at all three levels. We all have an imagination. It's what makes us dream when we sleep. And some of us have educated our imaginations, and some don't.

The way we experience society is based on our imaginations, it's our perception of what the world is that makes us act the way we do. Our worldview isn't a tangible reality, it's how we perceive reality--it's within our imagination. We rarely speak totally honestly--it wouldn't be proper. We don't say how awful our friend looks, or we choose to overlook an awkward remark, or we keep our discomfort to ourselves for the benefit of others. Frye likens this kind of speech to wearing Sunday clothes. Our words clothe our real feelings and hide what would be improper to show publicly. On the receiving end, we pretend to take what we hear at face value. When a friend insists that she's fine, we may opt not to pry, even though we know she's upset. It's a kind of dance we do, reading between the lines while being polite about taking the words at face value.

As a society, we have a bigger dance. We refer to a country or our own government as a single individual. Advertisers have gotten wise to this aspect of society and they use it for their own ends, to sell the public an image of status, acceptance and security that everybody idealizes, yet knows doesn't really exist. It's a world of illusion, and we choose what to accept and believe, and what to reject as false. Politicians attempt to appeal to our emotions by presenting only part of the truth. If we're not wise, we can be swept up, like the Nazis were under Hitler. Our part is to accept a certain amount of status quo, to adapt to the illusion enough to survive in the world without rocking the boat.

When people in a society get insecure, usually because changes are coming too fast, they huddle for security behind cliches and stereotypes. They label those who are different ('commie,' 'imperialist pig,' racial slurs) in an attempt to dehumanize or even demonize them. People who wholeheartedly buy into those stereotypes are not thnking freely, they're refusing to see the whole truth. Real people are complex and never fit neatly into a stereotype.

Then there's jargon, where lots of impressive but vague words really mean nothing, or hide the truth (the kind of language that turns a housewife into a 'domestic engineer.') Politicians use it to hide or soften the truth. Ordinary people use it for diplomacy, or tact. Direct speech is forceful, but jargon makes things sound less imposing than they really are. For instance, an email moderator might say, "We'll activate your membership when we've assessed your interest in this list," instead of "We don't want spammers! If you're a spammer, stay away!" LOL!

There are other illusions that society uses--the myth that it was better in the simple, good old days and that the world is declining and society is getting more and more immoral. The truth is, every society has always thought the world was getting worse and youth was corrupt and rebellious. Or, conversely, that progress with its factories and technology will bring a better world for everyone. The truth is rarely that black and white.

Generalizations and stereotypes aren't useful to someone seeking the truth. They tend to be used by people who want to sway the masses with fear. When people feel threatened, they react without consciously thinking through their actions--they resort to name-calling and labelling.

Wise people understand that they need to exercise discernment and choice. In wartime, a society agrees to accept propaganda, understanding the need for half-truths until the war is over. In a totalitarian regime, discernment and choice are limited by only allowing one view to be spoken. In George Orwell's book 1984, language was so debased that only meaningless jargon was allowed.

What does this have to do with studying literature? Language and literature are part of our right to free speech. Mob rule has no free speech--the mob overrides and drowns out everything in a cliche or slogan. Generalizations (the kind of liberalism that criticizes Bush every time he opens his mouth, or right-wing fanaticism that sees a conspiracy in every bit of environmental legislation) aren't really free speech. They're hysteria that's blinded to the truth. They're vague cynicism looking for a mob to follow along. And a mob can never exercise freedom.

Mobs operate on fear and ignorance. Freedom operates on truth, and that takes education. To improvise freely on the piano, you need training and practice. To go wherever you want, you need to be able to walk, and that takes practice. In the same way, freedom of speech doesn't happen all by itself. It takes more than skill with rhetoric and grammar. It takes years of practice handling ideas until you have something worthwhile to *say.* So, freedom of speech is really something that's exercised fully by only a very few thinkers.

Most people adapt to the illusion of society, they accept status quo. But in order to find meaning in life, people need more than that. They need more than keeping pace with the illusion of reality. it's those who see beyond the illusion with their imagination, and imagine something better. Then they use their freedom of speech to pass that vision on to others and make it a reality. It's the few educated people whose ideas inspire people to work together to make the real world a better place. That's why people become doctors, or work for peace as a social worker, or teach. Their vision for a better world becomes an unselfish act.

Humanity is a constant. People are always people, whether they live in 1500 or 2005. And the spirits of those people are immortalized their ideas and thoughts, which are stored in books. So, while fashions may come and go, and buildings may crumble, the human spirit lives on in books. The vision of a better world (or the warning about not seeking a better world) is what we find in the best of literature. That's usually what's meant by 'culture.' It's in the records of those visions for a better world that we find the standards and values that are more eternal than the shadowy illusion of current society. If we're going to go beyond just existing and keeping the status quo, we need to read those books.

It's natural to use language to express our immediate needs, and to be diplomatic. That keeps society running. But the world pressures us to live in fear and join the mob, labelling anyone who's different and regarding new ideas with suspicion. Every time we resist that pressure, we're using language to express something beyond our own immediate needs, and beyond diplomatic politeness. We're exercising our free speech and joining the 'great conversation' that tries to preserve the permanent spirit of man. We're using our imagination to go beyond the illusion and to join with the voices of all of humanity.

Jane Austen novel quiz

The Sense and Sensibility type: These delightful
(:-P) people have their feet set firmly in the
Eighteenth Century. Devotees of satire and
irony, they are far more likely to be reading
Alexander Pope or Jonathan Swift than Lord
Byron or William Wordsworth (no offense to
these men; all four have merit). Generally
reserved and self-controlled, they quite often,
though not always, resemble Elinor more than
Marianne.


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Prelude in C Major by J.S. Bach

I apologize for the static. And yes, there is a skip in the audio file; I'm not sure why.

More Fair Pictures

The ferris wheel we rode. It's called the "Seattle Wheel" and was commissioned along with the Space Needle for the 1962 World Fair.

The view from the ferris wheel.

An aquaintance we made.

Art and Fantasy

A few days ago I was at a site which had articles attacking numerous games, movies, and pieces of literature. The one which struck me most was an article attacking The Lord of the Rings. The sad part was, it was a Christian site. The article accused The Lord of the Rings of paganism, the glorification of black magic, and (horror of horrors!) the lack of allegory. It attacked Tolkien's use of myth, claiming that myth is by nature an untruth and has nothing to do with Christianity. And by this it seems to say that man's creations, his "myths", have no relation to reality or Christianity and are therefore evil. Since man is evil, only something specifically Biblical can contain anything good.

How foolish! Do they think that, because man has fallen, everything he does is evil? It is not so. Man was created in God's image, and therefore reflects God's glory. Although we are under the dominion of sin and everything we do may be tainted by it, we still retain the image of God. We are basically evil; we cannot be completely evil*.

All good things come from God; the truth of mathematics and the beauty of nature are His and reflect His truth and beauty. It is the same for the truths of philosophy and the beauty of art. A beautiful painting reflects Him just by being beautiful. But a bad painting does not become a good one because it is dedicated to God, nor does a good painting become a bad one because it is not. A good painting cannot help reflecting God; and as far as the bad one, what is there to dedicate? Or to look at it another way, art is an expression of Truth: what does not express truth is not art.

Man has a desire to create. God loves creation, and man, made in the image of God, has the same love. Thus man, in the act of creation, follows in the footsteps of his Creator. Of course, man's "sub-creation" is not a new truth or an original thing: it is only a new expression of the eternal Truth. Tolkien said it this way:

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind...
'twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we're made.

Therefore art, our creation, is in itself a good thing. This goes for any art: good painting, or music, or story. But there are two levels at which a piece of art may be addressed: I'll call them the technical level and the philosophic level. The first says, "Are the proportions of the painting correct? Is the form of the poem kept well? Is the music harmonious?" The second says, "What does it say? And does it say something that conforms to the truth?" And the two levels are distinct from one another. A well-made poem or painting is good at the technical level insofar as it is well-made, even though what it is saying at the philosophic level may not be good.

(I have noticed that everything Christians bring against the Lord of the Rings is on the philosophic level; none I have heard question it at the technical level. And this is not a good thing: it says to me that Christians in general have forgotten the importance of excellence at the first level. Excellence at the second level in art is good, but without excellence at the first level it cannot be called art. And what is so necessary about art? Why, without art there is no beauty; and were we not given our gifts by God and commanded to use them?)


*You might say that nothing can be completely evil. Evil is not complete in itself, and the polar opposite of God would be non-existence.

First Haircut

I finally cut Miss M's bangs. I didn't want to, but she won't keep anything in her hair. It finally got so long that it was getting in the way of her eating--I couldn't put a spoonful of food in her mouth without getting food on the tips of her bangs where they fell in front of her mouth. And she was sometimes getting irritated and having little fits because her hair would be in her eyes.

So I cut off a little less than an inch from the bangs, so it's not hanging in front of her mouth anymore, but still long enough to motivate her to let me put it up to keep it out of her eyes. I tried to get a couple of snapshots, but she wouldn't stay still. I may try for some better ones later.

We Went To The Fair!

Miss M with her best buddy at the tractor exhibit.


Enjoying some lemonade.


The Merry-Go-Round.


Looking at ducklings.


L on a ride.


Waving from the ferris wheel.



Of all the fun rides at the fair, which was Miss M's favorite?

Big Brother tossing her in the air!

Wheeeee!!

We Picked Pears Today

Off the ground. Our pear tree drops its fruit before it ripens--and has done so for the last six or seven years. We don't digest unripe, rock-hard pears very well, so we can't really do anything with them. We'd leave them there, but our lawnmower doesn't digest them very well either (though of course the bees love them). So there we were, in the cool of the day (85 degrees) and the soft evening air (80-something percent humidity), picking up fruit that had left its proper place and settled on a different element. What was it Pope said?

And who but wishes to invert the laws
Of order, sings against th' Eternal Cause.

That goes for pears too. But of course, they won't listen. Oh, no.


For those interested, it has been decided that the pear tree will be cut down this winter.

"Palace of Fine Arts"

Matte painting with motion (video). I believe this is called a 2.5D(imension) matte: there are several layers (sky, background building, foreground building) placed at varying distances from a virtual camera, which gives a sense of parallax when the camera moves.

Also check out the original image here.

Happiness is Making Your Own Dinner

At the last minute, after you've found out there is no baking powder for muffins. Yes, I've made my own dinners before--large end-of-the-day snacks, rather. But tonight I had salad, bread with dip, and pasta (admittedly leftover). I am happy, and so is my stomach. It was lucky we had the things on hand. (Oh--except--there's no such thing as luck.) Never underestimate the power of leftovers.

Avid Reader

Charlotte Mason proves to be riveting reading for all ages. ;)

Of Men and Makeup

or, An Idea for a Poem Stolen from C.S. Lewis

Makeup is a made-up face,
A base attempt of man to trace
God's loveliest immortal lace
Which it, succeeding, does efface.

Lady, if my conscience reigned,
Although your so-called beauty waned
I'd ask from such things you refrained:
Your face is better left unstained.


Alas, even my poetry frames an argument. This is rhetoric gone too far: the work of the poet hampered by the mind of the logician. But ah well, it is what it is. Consider the argument framed.


I also like this verse, with a different rhyme scheme:

Makeup is a made-up face,
a mask of vanity composed;
hiding God's immortal lace
behind a curtain mortal closed.

And here is C.S. Lewis's original poem:

Lady, a better sculptor far
Chiselled those curves you smudge and mar,
And God did more than lipstick can
To justify your mouth to man.

Edit: (Disclamer) The opinions expressed above do not mean that I think those who use makeup will be found guilty at the Judgement, nor indeed that I think all makeup an evil...

Goodbye, Scottie

Last summer and the summer before, I went to Atlanta to meet some e-friends and go to a Jackson Browne concert together. We all stayed at Annie and Scott's and had a wonderful time. They found out that Scottie had cancer about two months ago. Annie started a website for him a week ago to keep everyone updated. This morning, he died. He will be missed.

Picture Break

It's time to lighten up, and what better way than with a couple of baby pictures? :)


Eating applesauce



Fallen asleep on the couch after a bad night

Charlotte Mason's Letter to the Editor

I read the letter that Charlotte Mason wrote about Montessori on Aimee Natal's site (the original is here or you can read my modern English paraphrase here), and I have a couple thoughts of my own. In one sense, I agree with Aimee, that CM reduced Montessori to a 'peculiar novelty.' Charlotte did go on and on about Montessori's method of blindfolding children to force their other senses to compensate so as to engage their attention more. I suspect that CM is grossly misrepresenting Montessori's method; I'm pretty certain that Montessori's method entailed a LOT more than blindfolding children so that they had to rely on a sense of touch. I found the book 'Maria Montessori - Her Life and Work' by E.M. Standing at a used bookstore for 99 cents yesterday, so I plan to make it one of the next books I read, and then I'll know more whether CM missed a lot of what Montessori was doing or not.

I've always thought that, in some of CM's criticisms of education sprinkled throughout her books, she had Montessori specifically in mind, and her letter to the editor makes me more sure of that than ever. But I think Montessori may have improved since CM's day, so the Montessori she was reacting against so strongly then might not be the Montessori of today. But I think CM made a good point in observing that "the note of popular education today is contempt for knowledge and for the books in which the knowledge of mankind is lodged. 'Education by things' is boldly advocated, regardless of the principle that things lead only to more and more various things and are without effect on the thoughts and therefore on the character and conduct of a man." It's books that enlarge and broaden the mind, not information gained from tactile, sensory experience.

Science and Religion

The difference between science and religion is as follows: science produces a logically proveable theory based on observable facts (think Historical Accuracy of the Bible), while religion is a set of beliefs and assumptions that often are not founded on observable fact (think Naturalistic Evolutionary Biology).

My Next Reading

I'm going to read Aimee Natal's summary of David Hicks Norms and Nobility and decide if I want to tackle the book myself. I hear it's not easy reading. Then I have a book about Maria Montessori, I'm curious to see how her ideas line up with Charlotte Mason's.

Wait, here's a letter CM wrote about the Montessori method.

The Educated Imagination ch 5 by Northrop Frye

Chapter 5 - Verticals of Adam

The last chapters outlined Frye's theory. Now he'll examine how his theory works in the practical world of teaching literature.

The general principle is that literature follows after a mythology in a sequence that parallels history. (I think that's what he's saying.) Myths are man's first step in trying to find his place in the world. Myths begin as stories about the deity and then become the form with which to pass on oral stories. It forms the foundation on which the rest of literature rests. The Bible might be considered a form of literature that falls into this category. So, then, scripture should be the child's earliest exposure to literature so that it forms the foundation for all later books. Frye isn't speaking as a Christian, but as a literary scholar. The Bible is often quoted and alluded to, and a student of literature won't get far without some familiarity with those references. And he's not talking about the spiritual truths, but the storyline from a literary perspective--the history and fate of the world as an epic tale.

On top of the Biblical framework should come classical mythology, its familiar characters and its cycles of life and rebirth, seasons, trials and victories. Patterns should be noted: the same patterns and plots from the Bible are repeated in mythology (and again in classics like Paradise Lost.) It's not easy to understand later literature if you miss the parallels between the Bible and myths. Early Bible developed into Psalms and Job as surely as mythology developed into Homer and the Greek dramas. Then came comedy, heroic romance, tragedy and irony. Comedy and heroic romance should be taught next. Tragedy and irony should be saved for older (middle school) students.

A student will get more out of Lorna Doone if he's seen the pattern of heroism and love from mythology, and if he can see the same pattern in a recent movie imitating Shakespeare. It doesn't matter if the student can't make value judgments and understand why Shakespeare is better than the movie. That will come with time and experience. Trying to rush him to value classics will just turn him off.

Stories should be read for what they are: just stories, whether they're myths, or classics, or modern romances. It doesn't help to try to find cryptic meaning where there is none.

Reading in other languages can teach students to value precise wording and using the correct phrase to convey exact meaning. It can be easy for students to become verbose unnecessarily just because they like wordiness. Language should convey thought and ideas, although it's not the only way. Music, art, architecture can also convey thought.

As students get older, they will begin to see that literature doesn't just relate to language, but to subjects like philosophy and science (because literature isn't just a bunch of words, but vital ideas. Sounds like CM!)

Most subjects are taught from the center and then move outward. But literature is often taught backwards, by trying to teach language application first, and then move into prose, and then poetry. But literature needs to start at the center--poetry--and then work outward. Nursery rhymes, and word rhythym, and the 'surge and sweep of Homer' shouldn't have to wait until techniques of language are mastered.

One reason some works are classics is because they capture a certain culture in time, such as Robinson Crusoe, or Tom Sawyer, or the Gettysburg Address, or the Victorian emphasis on manners to absurd lengths in Alice in Wonderland.

The purpose in teaching literature isn't so much to make writers of all students, but to transfer some of the imaginative element to him so he can taste heaven and hell and think beyond the narrow confines of his immediate surroundings.

The Purpose of Books

Okay, I still don't know how to do a trackback. But I really liked this conversation overheard at a library sale at The Common Room.

HaloScan and Trackback

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

This means that now anybody, not just Blogger members, can post comments. Haloscan allows me to delete comments and ban/report IP's that leave spam. And it's free.

Pretty cool, huh?

And here's a link I'm looking at to see exactly what a "trackback" is and how it's supposed to work.
http://www.cruftbox.com/cruft/docs/trackback.html
http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/

I still don't get it. it looks like I have to install software in order to be able to use trackback if I want to let another blogger know I've linked to their blog.

??

The Educated Imagination ch 4 by Northrop Frye

Chapter 4 - The Keys to Dreamland

Our world, artificial as it is, seems perfectly normal to us because we're so accustomed to it. But an alien first seeing our world might notice how much we all stick to convention -- we wear similar clothes, drive cars the same basic colors, adhere to accepted notions of beauty, etc, because nobody wants to appear odd. Even what we accept as truth is usually status quo, and attempts to expose new truth (like Galileo did) are resisted.

In literature, there's convention in its form: poetry couplets might have the same number of syllables, dramatic climax needs events to lead up to it, the good man always wins or gets the girl. Even literary irony has its own conventions--things happen that would never happen in real life, but are common within 'the maddened ethics of fairyland.' Symbols are very conventional. For example, song is compared to birds. Swans, being a bird that doesn't sing, has come to represent Shakespeare's poetry, which is beautiful but not a song. Certain authors focused on a particular symbol. Yeats had fairies, Shaw had life-force, Hemingway had bullfights, Dickens had bad writing to bring his characters to life. These things become conventions. To get around in the literary world, it's useful to know the alliterative vocabulary.

Prose is a written, cultivated language that's totally unlike what real people talk like. Nobody really talks like they do in books. Literary convention means that words have to be assembled in a literary way, not like casual speech. Or, in a novel, it's the how the events fit together, too.

Since literature is so removed from the real world, you can't confine it to the rules of real life. Here, Frye makes a case for why literature is above rules like obscenity and morality, but I'm not quite following him. (Maybe I'm one of the 'cranks' he's writing about who can't fully remove literature from any kind of accountability?)

Scientists need imagination as much as authors. After all, they have to get ideas and hunches and theories. But scientific ideas have to prove they work to be accepted. Literature doesn't have to 'work,' because literature doesn't relate to real life. Literature relates to other literature.

Although many people read as a form of escape, that's not really the purpose of literature. Many authors had a burning need to say what was in them, and faced persecution for it. They didn't do it so people could have a pleasant way to escape. They didn't do it to entertain (Shakespeare's scene of King Lear getting his eyes put out is hardly entertaining!) Literature can portray horror, yet it isn't *real* horror. We aren't supposed to enjoy the horror and cruelty in literature, that would be sadistic. But experiencing it in literature can help us to avoid the events that might lead to it in real life--it can serve as a warning and express our anxieties.

Then there's another kind of literature that envelopes us in beauty or heroism, the kind that would be too much in real life. Thus, in a sense, literature allows us to experience both heaven and hell vicariously.

We can imagine mankind as a whole experiencing these things as we read, thus taking us out of ourselves and uniting us with humanity. No one person could ever have the amount and variety of experiences first-hand that can be had from literature. Thus, in a sense, we can experience more of life by reading than we can by living. And when lots of people read the same books, they all share those experiences, forming a bond of community. [When people read timeless classics, they join the community of men throughout history who have read and discussed those classics. It's a community that crosses the barrier of place and time, and it allows us to share experience with them, and join in their 'great discussion.' It's a community of the ages, uniting men from every time and country, and all we have to do to join in, is to read the books they read and wrote.]

When we judge a book, we're not so much rating our personal like or dislike of it, but we're trying to discover how and where it fits in with other literature.

The Educated Imagination ch 3 by Northrop Frye

A continuation of my summarizing of this book. Chapters 1 and 2 are somewhere in the archives, about 2 weeks back.

Here they are:
chapter 1 The Motive for metaphor
chapter 2 the Singing School


Chapter 3 - Giants in Time

Characters in literature are rarely real people, they're usually charicatures. Even historical figures like Shakespeare's Hamlet are removed from reality and made more as types. Or they're immortalized in name only as poems. But they're very different from the real people who inspired the work. Does that make the author a liar? No, because literature's intent isn't to accurately convey factual information in the same way as history or news. Literature is more to identify the nature of man and life, to connect things to a larger theme.

People in literature resemble real people. In fact, we can usually recognize a bit of ourselves in literatary characters. Yet characters are also larger than life. They're sometimes heroes who have the power we wish we had, sort of a representative composite of lots of different people, but with an ironic twist. They have a weakness that destroys them. They're universal symbols of everything in man, written with allegory and simile, and not intended to be exact duplicates of any one person. And those literary characters come up in other works. For instance, lots of books make comparisons to Greek gods. The more characters you know, the more you'll understand the references in other books, and what the point about them being made is. The more literature you read, the more literary characters you'll know, and the more books will seem connected to each other because of common personalities. The more allusive allegories you're aware of, the more you'll understand as you come across it in stories.

Primitive people try to identify with a deity of some kind. Lovers want to identify with the one they love. Lunatics want to identify with some great cause. But all three are trying to identify with something. Since poets relate everything they see in nature to life, they're closer to primitive people. They try to make us suspend reality and believe in the world they present. That world is a place where anything might happen and all arguments are treated as plausible. Allowing ourselves to enter this world teaches us to have tolerance and faith in what others can imagine. it can give us confidence in people's dreams and possibilies. Interesting quote: 'Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities. It's possible to go to the other extreme...but such people are much less common than bigots and in our world much less dangerous.'

The reason literature teaches tolerance is because it allows us to look at different situations and opinions from a detached perspective. It allows us to imagine 'what if?' without having to actually live it. Real life happens, and we can't choose it or predict it or make meaning of it. But in literature, we can go through experiences vicariously and allow ourselves to entertain possible meanings that the author suggests.

Dinner

Miss M is just starting to enjoy eating and feeding herself.

Chess

We believe in getting our kids off to an early start. It's never too early for academic pursuits!





As I remember, I think she won that game. ;)

This makes me mad!

I'm told that vile peddlers have started posting their garbage via comments on blogger blogs. Therefore, I've switched our blog so that nobody can post comments anymore. I don't need my son finding that kind of trash being left as a comment to one of his posts. I hope internet spammers are prosecuted to the extent that the general public doesn't have to continue taking more and more steps to keep them at bay. In this case, their rudeness is limiting my freedom, and that makes me mad!!

New Chair!

Miss M has a new chair for eating in. I'd say she likes it!

Trying Again

As promised, more pictures.

Pharisee's Prayer

Dear Father,

Thank You for Your infinite mercy, O Lord! It is times like these when I see what I could have been that I am most grateful. I am so glad You didn’t make me a liar and cheat like George. Thank You, too, for not making me slow-witted like poor John. And thank You for giving me Faith so that I won’t doubt like Tom. But most of all, Lord, thank You for not making me like that horrid, stuck-up woman I met today. I’m sure glad I don’t look down my nose at people like that. But forgive me for my anger, Lord. Please give her humility. Oh, and one more thing, God. Thank You for not making me proud.

Amen

Taught is Fate

Several weeks ago I started writing a poem. It was about a man who gets a visit from some sort of spirit: perhaps an angel, perhaps not. I made it to four verses before I quit (complete lack of plot might have had something to do with it). The first three weren't good, but the last was better. The man asks the spirit why he has come, "I called thee not, why art thou here? / Why come unbidden now to me?" The spirit replies:

"Unbidden call me not, nor aught
That happens in thy mortal land:
Ordered all things are, and taught
Is Fate to follow unseen hand."


Yes, I've been reading Faust recently. How could you tell?

A Rose

Rose, thou art the sweetest flower
That ever drank the amber shower;
Rose, thou art the fondest child
Of dimpled Spring, the wood-nymph wild,
Even the Gods, who walk the sky,
Are amorous of thy scented sigh.

- Thomas Moore

What is an Atheist?

An atheist is a man standing in a room with God. The room is covered with dirty mirrors. The atheist tries to turn away from God, but no matter where he looks he can still see Him. And the more he cleans the mirrors and sees the world better, the clearer he sees God, and the more absurd he becomes in trying to deny it.

"From the time the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky and all that God made. They can clearly see his invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse whatsoever for not knowing God." - Romans 1:20

Conference Pictures

I put my conference narration on a page with pictures which can be seen here.

Let me know what you think -- leave me a comment!

AO Conference!

Thanks to Lisa's daughter, who made these cute figurines!


I had a great time at the conference! Everyone was so nice, I loved finally meeting people who had been a name on an email list for so long. To all the Advisory members, you're as wonderful in person as you are in email. What an honor to work with you!

I took loads of pictures! Here are just a couple -

Ambleside Advisory Babies


Busy With Walk-in Registrations


When my head stops buzzing, I'll be able to think more clearly and post a little more. But for now, it's back to work, which means enlisting the help of our kids to select books for AO's year 11.