Poetic Knowledge more of ch 2

This is from pages 32-42

Augustine wrote about God being at the center of our soul and mind, illuminating our stored memories. This was his explantion for those "aha!" moments we have. Similarly, Charlotte Mason wrote about those times when we sleep on a problem, and wake up suddenly knowing the answer. She thought it was divine, too.

More Augustine:

"He [the student] learns not by means of spoken words, but by means of the realities themselves and his senses . . . He is taught not by [the teacher's] words, but by the Realities themselves made manifest to him by God revealing them to his inner self."

This sounds to me like CM's concept of ideas. They originate from God, and are transferred from mind to mind by words, books, music, even a look. It isn't the words or music that teach; it's the ideas that enter a mind and the mind responds to the ideas.

The simple, hard-working life of Benedectine moks illustrate poetic living. The idea of getting back to the earth, appreciating birds singing, time to refelct - sound appealing. But then the author goes on, and I'm reminded of the book Old Ramon by Jack Schaeffer. Old Ramon is an old shepherd apprenticing a youth, and the sheep they're tending are actually a lost flock of ancient Inca sheep necessary to revive their old religion, so the youth is actually being trained to carry on the ancient way of life. He asks questions, and the old shepherd gives him wise, cryptic answers that are frustrating to me because they never answer the question. The poetic mode is being held up against the scientific mode of progress. When it comes down to it, I think I fall more on the scientific way of progress. So - I'm thinking maybe this book isn't for me. Maybe I'm too INTJ to wrap my head around a poetic way of looking at life. INTJ's are called "systems builders," which the opposite of the poetic mode.

There's a quote from Newman that says:

"As science makes progress in any subject matter, poetry recedes from it. The two cannot stand together; they belong respectively to two modes of viewing things, which are condradictory of each other. Reason analyzes, investigates, numbers, weighs, measures, ascertains, locates, the objects of contemplation, and thus gains a scientific knowledge of them. Science results in a system, which is a complex unity; poetry delights in the indefinite and various as contrasted with unity, and the simple as contrasted with systems. The aim of science is to get a hold of things, to grasp them, to handle them, to comprehend them; that is, to master them. . . Poetry does not address the reason, but the imagination and affections."

I haven't given up on the book; I imagine there are helpful things about how to educate. But I feel like an outsider now, looking at how other people live and think.