Hard Times For the Mind and Soul Bayan AlMomani
Facts and Hard Times happen when something creeps to the mind that has never been intended to be there and develop. It is an unexpected circumstance that trifles the mind to go beyond, to stir the imagination to wonder, if one never wonders then how he can acknowledge facts, but you should never wonder, just facts, facts, and facts. Facts emerged from deep thinking; each detail is a kind of a challenge. Books come from their writers' imagination based on life events. These events determine their authenticity. What seems fantasy has a real life theme, nothing is done in vain. Events in life have a definition in literature known as Suspense, "Suspense is the quality in a story that makes readers ask "What's going to happen next?" or "How will this turn out?" and impels them to read on to find the answers to these questions. Suspense is greatest when the readers' curiosity is combined with anxiety about the fate of some sympathetic character. Two common devices for achieving suspense for achieving suspense are to introduce an element of mystery-an unusual set of circumstances for which the readers crave an explanation, or to place the protagonist in a dilemma-a position in which he or she must choose between two courses of action, both undesirable. Suspense is usually the first quality mentioned by immature readers when asked what makes a good story. Discriminating readers, while they do not disvalue suspense, may be suspicious of stories in which suspense is artificially created or in which suspense is all there is. They will ask whether the author's purpose has been merely to keep them guessing what will happen next or to reveal something about experiences."1 Discriminating readers are those with Dimensional Minds. Literature holds the fairy tale of life, where there are no hardships for the mind and soul that one cannot conquer. The freedom of questioning and wondering about vagueness, about the narrating of events, and above all making one own judgements which makes one realizes that here he needs not to be obsequious. And the salubrious conclusion is that facts are merely facts, not to be interpreted according to personal preferences of anyone which eventually lead to hardships. One usually goes through the first stage of encountering other people's facts when he or she is a child. The stage of gulping facts without really digesting Perrine, Laurence. Literature, Structure, Sound, and Sense. Fourth Edition. P. 43 .11
them to see what they are really. Charles Dickens calls it Murdering the Innocents, Chapter 2 in his novel Hard Times, the tone used to address a little girl just because she is poor and uneducated is mere arrogance, despite the fact that she is asking to be educated in Mr. Gradgrind school. "Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact, what is called Taste, is another name of fact." Life is ironically about murdering the innocents, murdering suspense, life is full of characters that have one teaching and that is never wonder. So Mr. Gradgrind asked again, "Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?" "No, sir!" was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes; among them Cecilia Jupe. And when he said that people will walk on them with heavy boots, she answered "It wouldn’t hurt them, sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant." Thomas Gradgrind repeated, "You are not to do anything of that kind." "Fact, fact, fact! And fact, fact, fact." The image is far more than that method of murdering the innocent, of subjugating imagination to an outstanding degree of brutality, and that gives a sense of fear which will grow through time and kills imagination. What is a mind without imagination, the ability to fly away from insouciance facts? Facts will be dull and repetitive to the original or dimensional mind, but not so to the conventional mind. If many accepted this way of thinking language wasn’t invented, man wouldn’t have cared to think of ways to communicate, to have in the first place an interest to come up with ways to make his thoughts make sense. "Many of the early theories on the origin of language resulted from man's interest in his origins and his own nature," An Introduction to language, Victoria Fromkin, p. 17. The origin of language, a story of how man thought of ways to communicate, to translate his thoughts and make them understandable and full of meaning to others. Asking questions, wondering about things around us can take us to fields of knowledge that were unpredictable in the first place. Everything starts from childhood. Robert Greene says in his book Mastery, if we think deeply about our childhood as he puts it, our minds were completely open, and we entertained all kinds of surprising, original ideas. Things that we now take for granted, things as simple as the night sky often caused us to wonder. Greene continues that when we were children our minds teemed with question about the world around us. Not yet having commanded language, we thought in ways that were preverbal-in images and sensations. Greene calls this quality the Original Mind. This mind looked at the world more directly-not
through words and received ideas. It was flexible and receptive to new information. Greene uses the past tense in describing the qualities of the original mind, and I suppose that one perfect explanation for such use comes from Charles Dicken's Hard Times. A chapter is entitled Never Wonder, Louisa Gradgrind was about to talk to her brother Tom so she started by saying, "Tom, I wonder." Mr. Gradgrind said, "Louisa, never wonder." "There was a library in Coketown, greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this library. It was a disheartening circumstance, but a melancholy fact, that even these readers persisted in wondering. They wondered about human nature, human passions, human hopes and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the cares and joys and sorrows, the lives and deaths, of common men and women!" Gradgrind told his close friend Mr. Bounderby, the Bully of Humility, that something crept to Tom and Louisa's mind "which has never been intended to be developed, and in which their reason has no part." "Then comes the question, in what has this vulgar curiosity its rise?" Bounderby answered "I'll tell you in what. In idle imagination." Gradgrind wondered, "Whether Louisa or Thomas can have been reading anything? Whether, in spite of all precautions, any idle story-book can have got into the house? Because, in minds that have been practically formed by rule and line, from the cradle upwards, this is so curious, so incomprehensible." "Stop a bit. You have one of those strollers' children in the school." "Cecilia Jupe, by name," said Mr. Gradgrind. Cecilia is the rock that disturbed the still water; the facts of both Mr. Gradgrind and Bounderby are losing their balance. Cecilia is the one that made these two compliant children start asking questions, to go out of the box of taught facts. What are facts that do not follow reason, that do not make us wonder about their authenticity, wouldn't they sometimes sound apocryphal. But Thomas the disciplined boy is aiming for revenge for being forced to follow and compel, so he said to his sister, "When I go to live with old Bounderby, I'll have my revenge." "I mean, I'll enjoy myself a little, and go about and see something, and hear something. I'll recompense myself for the way in which I have been brought up." Cecilia was that someone that makes you think, and to use the senses of listening and seeing things rather than just looking, so the outcome will be to those two children is to speak their thoughts and their imagination is lit up. Gradgrind and Bounderby's Facts say see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and that in fact is folderol. Robert Greene reasonably explains the conventional mind that leads the way of life we are forced to live unconsciously, unwillingly or taught by the line and rule. As the years pass, the intensity inevitably diminishes. We come to see the world through a screen of words
and opinions, we no longer look at things as they are, noticing their details, color what we see. Our minds gradually tighten up. We become defensive about the world we now take for granted, and we become upset if our beliefs or assumptions are attacked. 2 Major discoveries were made from noticing details, from wondering about the logic and reason that lie beneath what we see, and hear, so that facts were said and registered. Nothing comes from being phlegmatic about details, books showed that even in enjoying reading fiction small details played major part in solving or understanding what went wrong. One great example is Sherlock Holmes. Yet, every rule has its exception or reservation about things, facts can never be about being chaotic, it is either you look for a breakthrough facts or never be a breakthrough for others to form their facts. Ironically, facts say that this kind of aspiration in this hard world is naĂŻve. Hard Times is not only a novel by Charles Dickens; it is a perpetual life fact, the way of life nowadays. And to look more in Greene's book, one is surprised how this writer has a powerful way to make you see yourself in each line you read. Greene says, "We may seek to retain the spirit of childhood here and there, playing games or participating in forms of entertainment that release us from the conventional mind. Masters and those who display a high level of creative energy are simply people who manage to retain a sizable portion of their childhood spirit despite the pressures and demands of adulthood. This spirit manifests itself in their work and in their ways of thinking. Children are naturally creative. Masters not only retain the spirit of the Original Mind, but they add to it their years of apprenticeship and an ability to focus deeply on problems or ideas. Greene explains more, like children they are capable of thinking beyond words-visually, spatially, intuitively-and have greater access to preverbal and unconscious forms of mental activity, all of which can account for their surprising ideas and creations.3 The reality part of the story is that those with such tendency to maintain an amount of their childlike spirit, are being sometimes treated in a ribald manner, and subjected to different kinds of pressures to wake up and leave their world of fantasy, according to conventional minds. Dickens shows how Mr. Gradgrind was outraged of the books that Cecilia read, he asked her what she used to read to her father so she answered, "About the Fairies, sir, and the Dwarf, and The Hunchback, and the Genies, and about-", "Hush! Said Mr.Gradgrind, "that is enough. Never breathe a word of such destructive nonsense any more. This is a case for rigid training, and I shall observe it with interest." 4 How many times many Greene, Robert. Mastery. P. 176 .22 Greene, Robert. Mstery. P. 177 .33 Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. P. 61 .4 4
felt alienated for keeping an original mind and nature, and lectured to face the real world, whereas in fact they have their way of thinking in observing this world. The point is that they simply think; they don’t take facts for granted because originally facts came from a mind process. To Mr. Gradgrind and Bounderby anything that doesn’t fit within their school of conventional facts is cavil. Cecilia amazed readers with her Original Mind that turned out to also Dimensional, but she was told that she had a dense head, and she was also extremely slow in her mental process. She was asked about National Prosperity, "Now this classroom is the Nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn’t this a prosperous nation?" She explained to Louisa, "I didn’t know. I thought I couldn’t know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it is mine." Cecilia was scolded, "That was a great mistake of yours." 5 With her childlike spirit she actually gave a reasonable dimensional answer, such a thick head of hers. She was more convinced that she made a great mistake when she gave another answer, "This school is an immense town, and in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year. What is your remark on that proportion?" she said to Louisa, "My remark was- for I couldn’t think of a better one- that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million."6 It is never about numbers, it is the idea of suffering by itself. In wars, politicians come out and proudly declare that they did their best to minimize the number of casualties, as if the suffering of those who were killed doesn't count. They are numbers and that is a fact to them, it is hard times when you hear that causalities are expected to happen, and you need to accept it. According to Greene, Masters manage to blend the two-discipline and childlike spirittogether into what we shall call the Dimensional mind. The conventional mind is passive-it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The Dimensional Mind is active; transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.7 Greene said what in one's mind when he talked about the childlike spirit, which to most people as it is well-known, is to be childish with badinage way of communication. To Greene this spirit comes back to masters as they attain the freedom and opportunity to actively use the knowledge they have gained. He made it clear that it is often a struggle, and .Dickens. P. 73 .55 p. 73-4 .66 Greene, p. 177 .77
Masters go through a crisis as they deal with the demands of others to conform and to be more conventional. Under such pressure, they try to repress their creative spirit, but often it comes back later with double intensity.8
How many of us faced Mr. Gradgrind and
Bounderby in their lives? That they needed to be disciplined by the line and rule? That they are playful, irresponsible individuals living in their world of fantasy? And that they should never wonder because facts are obvious. Books attract their own readers, and readers are defined by their preferences. We become selective when we feel that the books in our hands are expanding our knowledge, and they communicate such information elegantly. The original mind is an essential part of language change, of the language development to be more challengeable to the idea of creating rather than consuming, as I believe. Books are judged by its language and events or let's say suspense. Suspense is simply what attracts us to read, and it is both language and plot. It is a fact that languages change, "Linguists don’t know how or why languages change. A basic cause of change can be attributed to the way children acquire the language. No one teaches the child the rules of the grammar. Children receive input from many dialects used around them and from many individual styles. We find many factors that contribute to the linguistic change, but it is the children learning the language who finally incorporate the ongoing changes or create new changes in the grammar of the language. 9 Then why suppress such mind and spirit, there is a major difference between discipline and rigid training. If there is anything to be said about the real world, is its tendency to preserve the conventional with a strong reservation about what is new or dimensional. And due to the obdurate way of rigid training, the world became in many places chaotic, a beast out of control. Dickens made his point when he used the term Murdering the Innocents, which is never only about taking lives but also the mind and soul.
Greene, 176-7 .88 Fromkin, Victoria. An Introduction to language. p. 307-9 .99