I read the first chapter of Character is Destiny yesterday. The main points seemed to be these: 1) there is a difference, not always recognized now, between personality and character; 2) we (and we alone) can change our character, or make the decision to; and 3) it is impossible to improve society without first improving personal character.
The reading also got me started on this thought:
Let's say Joe, a man of good repute and good character, is accused of stealing. "Oh, that's impossible," says his good friend Chloe, "Joe could never do such a thing--it's not in his nature."
The Christian and the Humanist have different replies to this. The Humanist says, "You're right that evil as such is not a basic part of human nature, but--well--we all get into a tight spot sometimes, and it's certainly possible that he did."
The Christian says, "You're wrong; evil is a basic part of all our natures. We're all capable of it. But good character (such as Joe's) is good character because it can be relied on not to. You see, I could, in theory, willingly jump off a skyscraper tomorrow. But the odds against it are so great that it's well-nigh impossible. True character is reliable."
The Humanist thinks the man is basically good, and then decides not to trust him; the Christian knows he is basically evil, and decides to trust him in spite of it.
Today has been a really nice day. Our second day of school went smoothly, we had a nice tea (Miss M was even well-behaved and smiling), I finally heard from a friend I'd been worried about because I hadn't heard from her in a month (she'd gone on a last-minute vacation to the beach!), and I got a whole chapter of images posted for a book that's going online. The weather is beautiful, and J took Miss M out in the backyard. I made a vegan 4-bean chili with rice in the crock pot and it came out okay. It's nice to have a warm meal all ready at that point in the day when you're through school but have evening stuff to do and you're already a little tired and really don't feel like tackling a meal. To open the crock pot, and there's a good dinner, all ready, is great! And it makes the house smell good all day!
Today is much better than yesterday. I was overwhelmed to the point of tears, I seemed to be drowning in projects, a house that needs de-cluttering, and I still hadn't gotten everything ready for school. The funny thing is, nothing has really changed. Maybe I had a good night's sleep? I don't know.
Miss M woke up with a rare runny nose and her mood hasn't been very good all day. I think she has a cold. She was restless all night, she kept waking up and fussing like she was irritated. I think maybe she was annoyed that she was congested.
I could get sentimental about that. I could write a long post about it. But I think I'll quote instead.
"...But now...everyone felt their term-time feelings beginning again, and they were all rather gloomy and no one could think of anything to say..."
"I have formed my plan, and am determined to enter on a course of serious study. ...By reading only six hours a day, I shall gain in the course of a twelvemonth a great deal of instruction which I now feel myself to want."
Although I hope that it won't be *six* hours a day. Not of rigorous academic study, at any rate. I suppose that, in a way, every minute of every day should be devoted to education...
Virtual M&M's to the quote identifier. (See's on backorder.)
I overheard J telling L about the art books he had been looking at. He commented that art history seemed to start poorly, got better and better, then degenerated into randomness--"splotches of paint".
This progression--from an art's simplistic beginnings, through perfection and refinement, to a high point that then degenerates into more and more chaotic work--can be seen not only in painting, but in sculpture, music, poetry, dance, and almost any other art form you can think of.
I said "chaotic." It's often called "modern" or "progressive" (which mean the same thing in this context), or "abstract" or "avant-garde*." Those who wish to defend it might say that it's a physical expression of abstract thoughts or feelings (generally feelings, which are less orderly); they might also say that it is a free expression of the artist's independent spirit. I say it's still chaotic.
What is the reason for the change? There are many and complex reasons, but the central one is atheism. As men lost belief in a orderly God they lost belief in an orderly world. Evolution is another: the idea that all life is the result of random chance is a good reason that art should be the result of random chance. (Or at least look like it.) Pessimism is another reason (though it is also a result): we believe much more in the grittiness and pointlessness of life now than we did five hundred years ago--and that is a good reason that art should gritty and pointless.
People nowadays seem to have art and science confused. They hail progress in both as if it were equally good and beneficial. But it's not. When science progresses, we learn more about the world and get nearer our goal of full understanding. When art progresses, we move away from truth, which is the goal. Look at it this way: if you were standing in the very middle of the city of Truth, then any progress you make would have to be away from it. Once perfection is reached, any change is for the worse.
("Stone him! stone him!" they cry, "He's trying to stop progress! His Christianity is trying to send us back to the dark ages!" If you mean scientifically, then that is complete nonsense. If you mean artistically--I say, "Why not?")
But back to my brother's comment, the thing that seemed to key him off most about modern art is that it's unrealistic. All I can say is, "Amen!"
* "Avant-garde" is related to our word "vanguard," the foremost part of an army. It means radically new and original, innovative, and pioneering. This is good when applied to science, but bad when applied to art. Or government. Our founding fathers consciously tried not to be innovative when they created the Constitution--they disliked the word and idea.
Just another way to bring more enjoyment into our family life.
I'll be spending the weekend looking for vegetarian crock pot meals that aren't too dependent on processed soy products.
Well, I guess maybe a little chicken wouldn't be out of the question.
C.S. Lewis
British Scholar and Novelist. 1898-1963
Find out which random famous person in history you most agree with!
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Now I wonder--I wonder...I wonder why that might be. Hmmm...
We plan to start school on Monday. We would have started this week like everybody else, but I wasn't ready. I feel like the long glorious summer that I had hoped to use to tackle a few projects is gone, and not much got done. In fact, I never even got our schedules ready. I like to have a 180-day scedule that lists which books will be read, how much, and reminders for daily things like copywork and math. I make out a list of each day, which subjects will be done each day, and then I use the Ambleside Online 36-week schedules to copy/paste books into their appropriate slots. When I'm done, I have full daily 36-week schedules for each student so everybody knows exactly what to expect, and what they're supposed to be reading that day. It makes the whole year a lot smoother, and prevents me from letting the year slide into unschooling (which, for me and my low energy and temperament, would mean undisciplined laziness and eating pop tarts by the TV all day).
I spent yesterday planning our school schedules. I started around noon, and I went to bed after midnight. I had finished the second schedule. It doesn't always take that long, usually I can have them all done in an afternoon.
But one of the online 36-week schedules needed work. A history book had been switched out and needed to be scheduled in chapter by chapter, which messed up the chronological sequence of another history book, so it also had to be re-worked. A couple of the books had never been scheduled to begin with because, at the time the schedules were posted, the person who did the schedules (me) didn't have the books. So that's what took so much time. After I had the online schedule fixed, it was a quick process of copying/pasting from it to my own personal daily schedule.
I finished late last night after the boys were in bed. J's schedule is done; you can see everything he'll be doing in sixth grade here. L's schedule needs to be permanently affixed somewhere if we don't want to spend twenty minutes every morning looking for it. So I taped it up (all 15 pages) where he'd be able to look at it easily, but Miss M can't reach it and rip it down. I didn't tell L where I had taped it, so he got to play Find The Schedule after lunch. It took a few clues, but he finally did find it. It was taped to the inside of a lower cabinet door in the kitchen, one of the cabinets with a child-proof latch. I originally wanted to tape it inside the cabinet where L keeps his school books, but the latch takes a few seconds to put on, so that door gets left open a lot. Miss M would have it ripped down in no time. She likes paper.
I have one more schedule to go, Tim's Year 10 one, but I expect that to go go pretty quickly. Our biggest challenge this year is that we're taking a class at our local homeschool group's co-op for the first time. It's every Friday morning, which really puts a crimp in our schedule.
