Photo Op

I was taking pictures of the boys and a friend, and took the opportunity to get this one of all the boys and Miss M.

Two Quotes

Sometimes when you're reading you find a quote that makes you stop and think--the mental equivalent of stepping on the brake--but you merely note it as you pass, assuming that it was an interesting tidbit which shall quickly be forgotten. But you don't forget it. It stays with you and keeps coming back at unexpected times, like a theme in a Wagnerian opera, displaying its depth and strength over and over again until it gains a place in your mental library of leitmotifs. These quotes were like that for me.

The first is from a book about E.M. Bounds, a Civil War chaplain and writer of books on theology:

[E.M. Bounds]...was never overheard to vindicate or defend his own actions or stand. That intensely human need to explain ourselves and make others understand, what St. Augustine called "this lust of always vindicating myself," was overcome by this magnetic preacher of the gospel.

- Lyle Wesley Dorsett, E.M. Bounds: Man of Prayer

The second is a C.S. Lewis quote that the Headmistress used in one of her posts over at the Common Room:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time.

- The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (20 December 1943)

May I say that I think this a comforting thought? It means that I don't have to worry about my life not turning out the way I think it should, because my idea of What My Life Should Be was never real anyway. The true meaning of my life isn't what it means to me; it has meaning beyond all my thoughts and dreams, grounded forever in Something that is true and unchangeable. As the hymn says:

My life is hid with Christ on high,
With Christ my Savior and my God.

Found It!

Last year, when Tim was working on his essay for his national merit scholarship, I was looking around for some information and accidentally found a blog with a cartoon that I loved. I tried to find it again, and I retraced my steps, but I never could find the blog again. I spent days trying to find it.

MerryK posted some comics she found and as soon as I saw her post, I knew that the comic I had been looking for was one of these. I started flipping through the site to find that particular one, and Tim saw me, asked what I was looking for, and I described it to him. It turns out that he had bookmarked the exact same comic after flipping through the site after he saw MerryK's blog!

Here's the cartoon; it's home is here:

Six Quirky Things

Kim tagged me with this Six Quirky Things about Yourself meme.

Here are the rules:
1) Link to the person who tagged me.
2) Mention the rules.
3) Tell six quirky yet boring, unspectacular details about myself.
4) Tag 6 other blogger's by linking to them.
5) Go to each person's blog and leave a comment that lets them know they've been tagged.

So 6 uninteresting quirky facts about myself are . . .

1. I don't like to talk on the phone. If I have to make a phone call (except for a quick call to a close friend), I have to psyche myself up for it, sometimes with many cups of tea.

2. I don't like drinks either really cold, or really hot. I make tea by the half-cup so I can add cold water to bring it to lukewarm, and I add tap water to cold drinks to make them less cold. When I'm out, I never get drinks with ice, although, if I order hot tea, I'll add ice cubes with a spoon to make it lukewarm. I found out a few years ago out that my sisters do this, too.

3. I never learned to type, so I've become a pretty fast two-finger typist. I always look at the keyboard when I type. I have small fingers, so I use a small keyboard - it's actually made for a PlayStation.

4. I never took a driving test. I learned to drive late and had an out-of-state ID, and I went to to take the driving test to get my license, but the lady behind the counter insisted that my out-of-state ID card was a drivers license and wouldn't listen when I insisted that it was only an ID. So she issued me a drivers license and I never took a test: government incompetence in my favor.

5. I rarely leave home without a jacket no matter how hot it is because I get cold easily, and many places over-compensate with the air conditioning. I never order cold drinks in restaurants for the same reason.

6. I like to sleep with the radio on. My tastes in music have changed over the years, from rock to Christian pop, to classical - but I've always had a radio playing all night.

Here's who I'm tagging:
1. Roxie
2. Mrs. Sensibility
3. Mama Squirrel
4. Dogwood Mama
5. Dawn ;)
6. Phyllis

New Camera

Tim needed a camera to take to college with him, and I wanted a smaller camera that I could carry everywhere in my purse. Since he likes the features on my camera (it lets you set the speed, light, etc), it made more sense for me to get a new, small camera (Sony Cyber-shot), and to give him my older one.

So now I have a new camera, and lots of new pictures!

One interesting feature is the "smile" setting: the camera waits, locking onto the person's face, and, when it senses a smile, it snaps a picture. At first I thought it was a dumb feature, but now that I've had such good results with it, I think I like it:

It also does very well in extremely low-light with no flash:

I tried the "twilight" setting, which is supposed to flash just enough to provide a small bit of light, but every picture I tried was blurred like a double exposure. Oddly enough, low-light pictures came out better with no flash than a "twilight" flash.

And, another neat feature: it takes pictures in vintage sepia:

This was also low-light without a flash, no tripod.

A New Blog!

I've been taking more and more pictures lately, and even with what I post here a lot of them end up sitting on my hard drive. So I finally decided to start a separate blog for them: de Lumine, hosted on Blogger. I spent all last week setting it up and there are still some things to be done, but I'm ready for visitors!

My sister

Book Find: Will o' the Mill

On July 4th we went downtown to see a parade--down in the old section of town, with all the little shops and artisans and restaurants--and afterwards we spent some time poking into the shops. Brother J spotted this book in one of the antique stores and I loved it. It's leatherbound, with ink-and-watercolor illuminations and a beautiful frontspiece. It was made by Elbert Hubbard at the Roycroft Shop in East Aurora NY (which is about a half hour from Buffalo--we came very close to visiting while we were up there).




Unfortunately the binding is broken and several of the pages are coming out. Does anyone know how a book like this could be repaired, or whether it would be wise to try?

Silver

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and a silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.

- Walter de la Mare

(John Duke did a lovely job putting this poem to music. I'm learning the song for my voice lessons.)

Book Find: Y Bibl

I like looking at old books. I like looking at books in other languages. So I was curious when I was in the Old and Rare section of our local used books store a couple weeks ago and saw the title of this Bible. Imagine my excitement to find that it's in Welsh, one of my favorite languages, and it was printed in honor of the coronation of an English King. I mean, I say!

Edward VII R & I
Coronwyd
Mehefin 26
1902
Duw gadwo'r Brenhin

("Edward VII R & I, coronated June 26 1902. God save the King." I'm not sure about the R & I.)

Presented to Arianwen Thomas

The Gospel of John

Quote for Pip

In my Twilight review I mentioned a C.S. Lewis quote, and I think this is the one I was thinking of:

"In this sub-species [of bad science fiction] the author leaps forward into an imagined future when planetary, sidereal, or even galactic travel has become common. Against this huge backcloth he then proceeds to develop an ordinary love-story, spy-story, wreck-story, or crime-story. This seems to me tasteless. Whatever in a work of art is not used, is doing harm. The faintly imagined, and sometimes strictly unimaginable, scene and properties, only blur the real theme and distract us from any interest it might have had." (C.S. Lewis, On Science Fiction, in the collection Of Other Worlds)

There's also this one: "I have sometimes wondered whether the 'excitement' may not be an element actually hostile to the deeper imagination." That's taken from On Stories (also in Of Other Worlds), in which Lewis is arguing that there is more that draws us to story than the action and suspense of the plot. It's an excellent essay; if you ever get the chance, read it.

Twilight

I also read the first three Twilight books this week. They were engaging some of the time (I like Alice) but I found them rather frustrating. Stephanie Meyers has a good story in there, but she can't seem to find it. (Not that I won't read the fourth book too when I get the chance...) Anyway, I've been thinking about the books in relation to three quotes.

The first is C.S. Lewis's, which I shall have to paraphrase because our internet is still down and I am working away from home and I don't have my copy of Of Other Worlds with me. Lewis said that there are certain ideas that can only be explored with fantasy. But many writers unfortunately jump onto the fantasy bandwagon, missing the point of fantasy and writing "fantasy" stories that could just as well--or better--be written without the fantasy element. Lewis laid down a general rule, that if the fantastic element isn't integral to your story--drop it.

Stephanie Meyers seems to me to have this problem. She has the makings of a great fantasy story in the love affair between a mortal and a vampire (I'm hearing echoes of Tuck Everlasting and the Lay of Luthien), but she instead fills her story with irrelevant action and teen angst.

I'll leave the other two quotes without commentary.

"Love, having become a god, becomes a demon." (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves)

"Q: Maybe writing is some kind of Resurrection Stone.
"A: Yes, of course, but I think you realize that once you’re writing to make a dream come true. If it’s just like that then, for me, writing loses its worth. Describing your fantasy is not the same as creating a world." (J.K. Rowling, interview with Spanish magazine El Pais)

Offline

This will be short - I'm posting from a friend's house because, after some bad storms on Thursday, our internet went out and is still out two days later. I'm beginning to wonder if we'll ever have internet again.

In the meantime, this week I read the first three books of the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer, about unextraordinary Bella, who goes to Forks, Oregon and is suddenly every guy's dream, including the unearthly gorgeous vampire, Edward, who she falls in love with, and one of the local werewolves. Werewolves happen to be the mortal enemies of vampires.

There are so many questions left unanswered . . . What will happen to Bella? Will she end up a vampire and love Edward forever? Will Edward put up with her whining, stubbornness and selfishness that long? Will she stay human and pretend to be his grandmother when she's eighty and he's still seventeen because vampires don't age? Or, in a bizarre twist, will she ditch Edward altogether and decide to run away with the werewolf? Would this series seem less self-absorbed if it hadn't been written in the first person, from Bella's point of view? Was it really necessary for this series to be so steamy that I'd blush to think of my preteen daughter reading it (if I wanted her reading about vampires and werewolves, that is)? Why is it that every time I think of Bella and Edward, I can't get the song "Muskrat Love" out of my head?

This quote from the first book pretty much sums it up (it may not be exact; the book is loaned out and I typed it from memory): "There were threre things I knew for certain. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was some part of him--I didn't know how large a part--that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him."

Everything seems to hinge on the Big Question of whether vampires have souls. There's a new fourth book in the series. I might just read reviews (spoilers) to see what happens. But I have my own theory. I think it will go something like this: "But if the Volturi could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, they would have read there a different incantation. They would have known that when a willing vegetarian vampire who had committed no treachery was willing to suffer eternal destruction in a human's stead, the Table would crack and Transformation itself would start working backward . . . "

Here's my favorite quote from the series--Good Vampire Edward can read most peoples' minds; Good Vampire Alice has a limited ability to see into the future. "Edward and Alice playing chess was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen. They'd sat there nearly motionless, staring at the board, while Alice foresaw the moves he would make and he picked the moves she would make in return out of her head. They played most of the game in their minds; I think they'd each moved two pawns when Alice suddenly flicked her king over and surrendered. It took all of three minutes."

I've also started Ruth Beechick's You Can Teach Your Child Successfully. And I'm changing over Parents' Review article files on the amblesideonline website - merely a cosmetic change, just so they look better. The last 150 are done; the rest are in progress. Then, during the next couple of years, I'll read through them one a day, proofreading as I go.

Miss M's Swing Pictures

The cute one

The silly one

The sweet one

The fun one

Miss M's Plans for Grandma's Future

Miss M was thinking out loud as I was laying with her at bedtime. She said out of the blue, "Tutu (grandma) needs to marry somebody." I asked her why. "Because then I'll have a grandpa. Both of my grandpas are in heaven. I wish I could go to heaven to see them." She never met either of her grandpas, but she loves her Tutu, who she's met. Actually, I didn't know she was able to put all of that together. We haven't talked about it all that much.

I don't think Tutu knows that plans are being made on her behalf.

Socialization Snobs

I saw this article at HomeschoolBuzz.com.

"Homeschooling allows us to be socialization snobs. We can filter out kids whose behavior offends us. We don't discriminate on the basis of race, creed, nation of origin, or other such nonsense. No, we discriminate on the basis of morals. If your kid insists on talking about the number of boys she slept with in the last month, I really don't want her around my kid. Call me fussy." Read the rest of the post here.

Fireworks

Happy 4th, everybody!

How Does a Poem Mean? ch 1

I started this book with Tim and J yesterday. I'm just going to say a teensy bit about it because I think that to do any more would be more work than I need.

John Ciardi says that a poem isn't about what it means; poets don't write poems because they have something to say. People who put a message into rhyme usually end up writing doggerel. Poets write poems because they like to play with words. And people by nature enjoy tackling challenges, so poets like to the challenge of working within the framework of poetic style. Their playing with words might be likened to a juggler. The more difficult he makes it by juggling more balls, the more pleased he is with himself, and the easier he makes it look, the more people will enjoy watching him. A poet enjoys seeing how he fit words into a difficult set of parameters. And the more smoothly he can make it work, the more his poetry is enjoyed by others.

Good poems often go from specific details to something bigger, and the best poems do it seamlessly. Ciardi uses Rober Frost's poems Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve to show this. Robert Frost starts with a specific snowfall in a specific woods, but ends with a broader context ("...miles to go before I sleep.") If asked what he meant by that, he doesn't exactly know, because it wasn't written to say something specific. Yet through Frost's mastery of words, it elicits a feeling in those who read it.

That's why the book is called "How" does a poem mean, because the art is how words are used more than the precise, direct meaning of the poem.

Pride and Prejudice Reading Schedule

My friend Ginger and I finished Jane Eyre this week (my other friend finished weeks ago!). So far, the books we've read have been Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Jane Eyre.

Today we start Pride and Prejudice. The best schedule seems to be one chapter per day, six days a week. It's manageable, and if anyone falls behind, it's easy to catch up on a weekend.

Pride and Prejudice reading schedule for Jul-Aug 2008

Jul 2-5: Ch. 1-4
Jul 6-12: Ch. 5-10
Jul 13-19: Ch. 11-16
Jul 20-26: Ch. 17-22
Jul 27-Aug 7: Ch. 23-28
Aug 3-9: Ch. 29-34
Aug 10-16: Ch. 35-40
Aug 17-23: Ch. 41-46
Aug 24-30: Ch. 47-52
Sept 1-6: Ch. 53-58
Sept 7-13: Ch. 59-62

Van Loon's Lives

Tim and I are going to read this over the summer. It looks like a fun book and I've been waiting for years to finally read it. Van Loon gives these dinner parties and invites famous people from history - usually two at a time. And then he writes about what happened. Here's the contents; the descriptions of each chapter are funny, but I only typed in the guests.

Van Loon's Lives

1. Desiderius Erasmus pg. 3
2. William the Silent and George Washington pg. 68
3. Sir Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus pg. 128
4. Bach's and Breughels pg. 141
5. Cervantes, Shakespeare, Moliere pg. 162
6. Archbishops of Bithynia and Cyrenaica pg. 216
7. Cartes and Emerson pg. 244
8. Empress Theodora and Queen Elizabeth pg. 296
9. Robespierre and Torquemada pg. 356
10. Buddha pg. 429
11. Saint Francis, Hans Christian Andersen and Mozart pg. 431
12. Beethoven and Napoleon pg. 475
13. The Greatest Inventor of All Time pg. 525
14. Plato and Confucius pg. 532
15. Peter the Great, Charles XII of Sweden and Voltaire pg. 577
16. Dante and Leonardo da Vinci pg. 629
17. Montaigne and Rabelais pg. 671
18. Emily Dickinson and Chopin pg. 731
19. Lost Children of History and Benjamin Franklin pg. 767
20. Fridtjof Nansen, Jakob van Heemskerk, Willem Barents and Surgeon de Veer pg. 799
21. Thomas Jefferson pg. 855

Unconditional Parenting: The Child's Perspective (and CM)

Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason
by Alfie Kohn

This is the last post I'll be posting about this book - because it's the last chapter. As I was reading it with Tim, I kept stopping to exclaim, "That sounds so much like Charlotte Mason!" or "That's just what what Charlotte Mason said!" So, included in my posts directly about Alfie Kohn's chapter from Unconditional Parenting, I've interspersed my own comments with quotes from Charlotte Mason's books, using my modern English paraphrase. ;)

10. The Child's Perspective

This is how Alfie Kohn begins chapter ten:

"How do we raise our children to be happy? That's an important question, but here's another one: How do we raise our children to be concerned about whether other people are happy?

"It's important that we don't allow the first issue to upstage the second--or, for that matter, that we don't spend more energy trying to get kids to be polite and well behaved than on trying to help them become genuinely compassionate and committed to doing the right thing. We need to focus on our children's moral development.

"To do so is to recast various ideas that are discussed in other parenting books. For example, 'boundaries' and 'limits' are usually thought of as restrictions that adults impose on children. But shouldn't our goal be for the children to refrain from doing certain things not because we've forbidden them, but just because they're wrong? The limits on kids' behavior, in other words, should be experienced as intrinsic to the situation. We want them to ask, 'How will doing x make that other kid feel?'--not 'Am I allowed to x?' or 'Will I get in trouble for doing x?'

"This is an ambitious goal, but not an unrealistic one because we have good material to work with. Human beings are born with the capacity to care. Thus, parents hoping to raise a child who is responsive to the needs of others already have 'an allay within the child,' as Martin Hoffman once put it.

"Of course, that doesn't mean that kids will automatically grow into ethical people if left to their own devices. They need our help. To begin with, they need us to stop doing things that interfere with moral growth, things like punishments and rewards, which are rooted in--and underscore a child's preoccupation with--self-interest. The elimination of these staples of traditional discipline is an important step toward helping children become attuned to the well-being of others. But it's only a single step. The subtraction of bad parenting practices must be accompanied by the addition of good ones."

____________________________

I included that whole quote because it really sums up the whole why of unconditional parenting, and because it sounds so much like what Charlotte Mason was saying. Kohn wrote, "...we have good material to work with. Human beings are born with the capacity to care." This goes along with the second of Charlotte Mason's 20 Principles (Children "are not born either good or bad, but with possibilities for good and for evil.") Because children are fully Persons made in God's image, they have within them the capacity to care. (CM talks about the noble riches born in each person's heart in Vol. 4, Book 1, pg 96). As parents and teachers, we aren't trying to force something in them that's foreign to them, or create something in them they weren't born with. We're nurturing and working with something that's already there. "Chivalry, honor, tact, obedience, and passionate obedience to God's law--these are the chords within the child that we need to play on if we want our youths to be pure. But we have to believe that chivalry and purity are already there within them, rather than foreign concepts that we need to introduce with lectures." (CM's Volume 5, pg 397, modern paraphrase)

From Alfie Kohn's quote: "To begin with, they need us to stop doing things that interfere with moral growth." This reminds me of Charlotte Mason saying parental authority that appears arbitrary "offends" the child, who needs to learn to do what he should because it's right; a child needs to see his parents enforcing rules simply because they're right for everyone. "Authority isn't harsh or indulgent. She is gentle, and easy to reason with about nonessential matters--because she's uncompromising when it comes to matters of real importance. For those matters, there's always an established principle." (Volume 3, pg 17, modern paraphrase) "Authority tries not to offend . . . wise parents will find a balance. . . In the unusual event that requires a new regulation, they might casually comment on the reason for doing so, but if that's not convenient or possible, they don't mind resorting to the most important reason for obedience: 'because it's the right thing to do.' To put it plainly, authority tries its best not to give reason for offense." (Vol 3 pg 22, modern paraphrase) Charlotte Mason talks more about teaching morality in Volume 1, pages 13-16.

Alfie Kohn lists ways to raise moral kids.

1. Care about them by developing trust through attachment and respect. By meeting the child's basic needs for love, nurture, warmth from the beginning, they aren't preoccupied with meeting those needs and can be free to focus on others. This echoes studies that show that infant attachment parenting builds trust that carries into later life, and prevents problems that some adults face because they're still dealing with unmet needs for closeness.

2. Show children how a moral person lives - no, silly, this doesn't mean introducing them to the upstanding citizen who lives down the street. :) Model morality for them, and let them watch and listen as you grapple with issues so they can see how it's done, and so they can see that it's not always easy or black-and-white.

3. Let them practice - Give them opportunities to work with others to solve problems, or be responsible and caring--by looking out for their little sister or taking care of a pet. (I think Charlotte Mason's concept of "masterly inactivity" would fit here.)

4. Talk with them - guide and explain; discuss. CM stressed this, and thought that meals around the dinner table provided an excellent opportunity for this. Alfie Kohn writes, "We need to establish clear moral guidelines, to be explicit about what we expect, but in a way that minimizes coercion. Yes, there has to be some force behind what we say to them (about how other people should, and shouldn't, be treated), but it's important that force itself doesn't become the message." Charlotte Mason said the same thing: "He's free to do what he should, but in his deepest heart, he knows very well that he's not free to do what he shouldn't. . . He needs to be treated with full confidence, and he must feel like choosing the right thing is his own free choice that his parents trust him to make. But he must also be aware of a deterring force in the background that's always alert and ready to hinder him when he wants to makes the wrong choice." (Volume 3 pg 32, modern paraphrase) When debating an issue (such as when a child tries to make a case for staying up late), respond to what your child means, even if he can't articulate it very well. In fact, help him out. Articulate his position for him, trying to nail down the real issue and his real concern, to demonstrate how to word his opinion, and to show that you understand his point of view. You don't have to agree, but you want to let your kids know that they don't have to be good at rhetoric for you to respect their opinions.

Perspective

The section on being able to see things from someone else's perspective sounded very CM. Kohn says that we want children to be able to see things from another person's point of view. This requires imagination. CM agreed, and used living books as one way of getting children to picture life from someone else's vantage point, to bring home the concept that other people, whether down the street or in other cultures and times, feel the same things they do. This kind of imagination was important to CM as a way to develop compassion. She wrote that the child, with proper teaching, will "be able to put himself in someone else's shoes without anyone suggesting it. He'll judge others in the same way he'd like to be judged himself" (Volume 5, pg 208, modern paraphrase). Alfie Kohn says we need to nurture and encourage this in children, although he never mentions using books to nurture this ability. Children need to understand that decent people can come to very different conclusions and have different opinions than we do--CM also said this; she faulted the fallibility of Reason. "But if two equally intelligent and equally good people are passionately convinced by their Reason of two things exactly opposite, then their Reason can't both be infallible. At least one of them has to be wrong. Perhaps one of them believes that a certain war is the duty of his country, and the other believes that the war is a crime. They can't both be right. Since all men (unless they're idiots or insane) have this same ability to Reason, then we can only conclude that Reason is not infallible. Not all final conclusions are correct. It all depends on the notion from which the reasoning began." (Volume 4, Book 1, pg pg 62) CM talks more about the fallibility of Reason in Volume 4, Book 2, pg 58 and pg 76.

Perspective means that when a grocery store clerk is rude to us, we won't react in anger, or wonder what we did wrong. It isn't about us! Instead, we'll wonder what made the clerk so moody--we'll show understanding and compassion. CM said something similar. "People who have Goodwill understand that glaring faults and annoying habits don't make up the real person any more than sun spots make up the sun itself. Therefore, it's not difficult to put up with his faults." (Vol 4, Book 1 pg 92, moden paraphrase), and, "He won't assume negative intent, or quickly accuse someone else of unworthy behavior. He'll be fair in assessing other people's conduct, character and reputation. . . His good-will and kindness won't only reach out to the needs of others, but will also result in patience when others are irritable, and nobleness in forgiving others when they offend him." (Volume 5, pg 208, modern paraphrase)

As parents, we need to remember our own perspective, and try to see things from our child's perspective. If you were a child and someone told you what you just told your child, how would it feel? This makes us more apt to figure out what's really going on with our child, more observant of their moods, and more effective at responding to them. And this will help us in our journey to be unconditional parents.

I'll end with a quote from Charlotte Mason about her perspective of the child: "The child is a human being. He may be immature, but, still, he might represent a human being at his best. Who among us adults has such gifts of seeing, knowing, understanding, imagining, and such capabilities to love, give and believe as the 'little child in the midst'? The highest praise that we can give to the wisest and best among us is that they're as fresh and quick in their interests and passions as a little child." (Volume 2, pg 205, modern paraphrase)

For the other posts in this series, click here.