The Classical Teacher Parent Edition - Winter 2019

Saving Western civilization one student at a time.

Winter 2019

On The Incarnation of Words

by Martin Cothran

The Thing About Books

by Steve Ayers

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Why Books Are Important

by Martin Cothran

I

n 1929, c h i ld r e n's b o ok author Anne Parrish was visiting Paris. She left her husband at a cafe to visit one of the city's many bookstores.

T here she fou nd a copy of Helen Wood's Jack Frost and Other Stories, a favorite of hers from childhood. She returned to t he c a fe, s at dow n, a nd showe d her hu s ba nd wh at she had found. He opened the book, turned a couple of pages, and paused. He handed it back to her, opened to the flyleaf.

There, in the hand of a child, she read, "Anne Parrish, 209 North Weber Street, Colorado Springs, Colorado."

T he book she had fou nd half a world away turned out to be her very own childhood copy. It was as if she had found a long-lost friend.

A book is just a physical object. And yet, as every book lover knows, it is something more than that.

A book is not merely a vehicle for the transmission of abstract ideas. There is something about the tactile nature of a book that seems to embody what it tells us. It somehow incarnates the words written on its pages. A book is something we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled.

I am talking, of course, about paper books, not a Kindle or an iPad. These are not things we will ever happen upon later in life, in a far-off place, years after we have lost them. And if we did, they would be long obsolete.

A real book is never obsolete.

Any true book lover will tell you that it is not only the sight of a book, or the feel of it, but that even its smell can affect your soul.

When I was a child, my father had a set of Collier's Encyclopedias that he had bought with what little money he had when he was a student at Clemson University in 2

Letter from the Editor

the mid-1950s. They were among the few books we had in our house. They had a peculiar but pleasant smell that hit your nose when you opened up a volume.

It is said that among the senses, it is smell that you remember the longest.

To me, the smell of those encyclopedias was the smell of learning and knowledge. I will remember it until the day I die.

Books are artifacts: They are important for the ideas they relate, but they also have a life and a history of their own.

One of the books in my library is an old hardback edition of R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of Nature. It is one of the great accounts of the shift from ancient to modern thought. But, beside the quality of the book's content, it has a bookplate on the inside of the cover bearing the name of Richard Neibuhr, brother of the philosopher Rienhold Neibuhr. Richard was famous in his own right for Christ and Culture, one of the great books about how Christians should relate to the culture in which they live. In this copy of Collingwood's book, once a part of Richard's library, are Richard's marginal notes on what Collingwood had to say. I bought it for $3.00 from a careless bookseller.

I mark in all my books, including this one. When one of my sons saw me marking in it, he protested and accused me of desecrating an otherwise valuable book. I looked at him calmly and said, "This book will now not only bear the marks of Neibuhr, but the marks of your august father.

And since this book will one day be yours, I know my marks will only increase its value in the eyes of my devoted children."

What could he say?

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Winter 2019

FEATURED ARTICLES

Letter from the Editor by Martin Cothran...................................................... 2 Elysian Fields: Why Students Should Learn Greek by Mitchell L. Holley ......... 4 Philosophers 1, Scientists 0 by Martin Cothran............................................... 6 Words on Paper by Rick Bragg.................................................................... 8 The Thing About Books by Steve Ayers..................................................... 10 Book Review: The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis............................... 13 The Danger of Discovery by Cheryl Swope................................................. 14 Why Read Literature? by David M. Wright.................................................... 16 Going to the Library by Dr. Carol Reynolds.................................................. 18 On the Incarnation {of Words} by Martin Cothran....................................... 20

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GREEK

ELYSIAN FIELDS Why Students Should Learn Greek

by Mitchell L. Holley

W

hy should the student learn Greek? No shortage of pragmatic reasons comes to mind, and parents and teachers will delight to know that Greek has utilitarian value, although it seems uncouth to speak of it as such. While usually a hybrid of Greek and Latin influence, most existing English words come from the Greco-Roman vocabulary. Even though Medieval and Renaissance scholars wrote in Latin, they largely relied on a Greek vocabulary to communicate technical terminology. As a result, most technical and scientific terminology derives from Greek—no lawyer, doctor, or scientist will ultimately escape the clutches of the Greek language. Also, English prefixes like pro-, proto-, poly-, hypo-, hyper-, micro-, macro-, chrono-, and photo-, and suffixes like -ology, -thesis, -meter, -nomy, and -ism developed from Greek influence on English. Therefore, students who learn Greek vocabulary also grow in their knowledge of English vocabulary.

And if we're talking utilitarian value, the student with a knowledge of Greek possesses the capacity to learn from the greatest canon of literature the world has ever produced—authors like Aristotle, Homer, Plato, Plutarch, Thucydides, Xenophon, and many others from the Hellenistic heritage. Mathematics, Mitchell L. Holley works for Memoria Press as a Greek specialist and a writer. Since completing his Master of Divinity, he has started work on a second master's in theology. After eight years of studying Greek, he still has to memorize new Greek vocabulary.

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Elysian Fields

philosophy, politics, literature, science, medicine, and art have all been parsed, categorized, and analyzed by the ancients, and modern contributors to these fields must interact with the Greeks and the intellectual bedrock upon which the Western world was built. For example, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and John Milton's Paradise Lost follow the structures that were already established by the grand epic poems of Homer and Hesiod. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales bears a remarkable resemblance to Aesop's Fables. Many of these later authors feasted at the table of their Greek progenitors and carried Greek influence through the centuries.

While translators have brought some of the Greek masterpieces into English, history reminds us that every translation will betray the original, and the translator is always the betrayer. During the Renaissance, the French and Italian intelligentsia engaged in arguments over who had the best opéra, among other things. Rich, bourgeoisie Italians criticized French translations of Dante, claiming the translations concealed the beauty of the original. A disdainful phrase emerged to describe these French dissenters, traduttore, traditore: "Translator, traitor." Greek authors often wrote about an Edenic, heavenly country called Elysium like this from Pindar's Odes: "There, the ocean blows a breeze over the island of the blessed and the golden flowers are radiant."

However, the English conceals Pindar's artistic prose, which depicts golden flowers blowing in the wind like MemoriaPress.com

a flickering wildfire across the countryside. Hesiod also "Über Sprache und Worte" ("On Language and Words"). In describes Elysium in his Works and Days: "Dwelling this essay, he explores the many ways a new language without sorrow or frustration, happy heroes live on requires the mind to map new conceptual worlds and the island of the blessed, alongside the deep edge of new ways of understanding the relationship between the outward sea." Even the best translation would fail things, all of which previously did not exist. He explains, to capture the sophisticated wordplay and the creative "Now from this it follows that a person thinks differently poetic tempo of the original dactylic hexameter—indeed, in each language; therefore, by learning each one, our poetry is almost untranslatable. While both Christian thinking receives a new modification and coloring." By and classical literature can be read in translation, a learning a classical language, the mind learns multiple translation will inevitably betray the original. perspectives on the same phenomena.

Christians, especially, will benefit from learning As an example, unlike English, the tense of a Greek Greek. Hellenized Jews in Alexandria translated verb is less important than its aspect. Aspect refers to the Jewish scriptures from Hebrew and Aramaic what kind of action occurs (e.g., ongoing or completed), into Greek around the third century B.C., and their but tense communicates when an action occurred (e.g., in translation dominated the Jewish and Christian the past). A student who learns Greek understands world until Jerome's Latin translation reality and his own language better. He in the fourth century A.D. The New learns that English also has grammatical Testament authors wrote entirely in aspect (he walked vs. he was walking), Greek, and they most frequently and that verbs convey intrinsic Every translation quoted or referred to the Greek aspect (hit vs. sing are two present O l d Te s t a m e n t , c a l l e d t h e tense verbs, but hit has a completed will betray the Septuagint. Early Christianity aspect and sing an ongoing aspect). original, and the developed a t heolog ical a nd Aspect is an important part of any l it u rg ic a l vo c abu la r y ba s ed language, but without exposure to translator is always entirely on the Septuagint and a language like Greek, one might the Greek New Testament. never grasp it. the betrayer.

For example, in the Septuagint Similarly, in "Über die the Hebrew term for "covenant" (bireth) verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens" was most often translated by the Greek ("On the Different Methods of word diathēkē (διαθήκη), a term which later Translating"), Friedrich Schleiermacher came to mean "covenant" but more closely refers develops the idea that languages frame how the to a "last will or testament." The use of diathēkē to translate world is perceived: "Every human is in the power of the the Hebrew bireth meant that the Greek term became language he speaks; he and the whole of his thinking synonymous with the Hebrew term denoting is a product of it." Greek, and the learning of Greek, the covenants of God, and that diathēkē began to constitutes a new way of seeing and understanding the communicate more the idea of "covenant" than "last world because it employs a new taxonomy that organizes will" or "testament." Both the author of Hebrews (in the world differently than other languages. And, unlike Hebrews 8-10) and the Gospel of Luke (in Luke 22) play any other language in the history of civilization, Greek with this double meaning to portray the death of Christ carries with it a lexicon of the best of human knowledge as a new covenant and new testament, in contrast to the and wisdom, and the student of Greek benefits from this old covenant and old testament. Only Greek students articulate culture when he learns Greek's contours. will recognize this subtle conflation of "covenant" and So why should the student learn Greek? Because by "testament" because it comes from the New Testament's acquiring Greek, the student learns grammar, syntax, adoption of the Septuagint term diathēkē, which and vocabulary. He receives eyes with which to see a new eventually led to the nominal division between the Old world, and he acquires a rich corpus of literature. In this and New Testaments. collection, the student will read tales of exotic adventures Nevertheless, Greek is not primarily a descriptive in Xenephon, plays saturated with irony in Sophocles, and tool, but a creative instrument that shapes and forms lyric poetry in Sappho and Pindar—the likes of which the for its speaker how the world is seen, felt, tasted, and world will never see again. The student will also discover touched. As students grow in their understanding Elysium, the pristine paradise of Peloponnesian poetry, of Greek, it begins to shape their understanding of "where the things of life come easiest for mankind. There the world and change their expression of it. Arthur is no falling snow, heavy storms, or even rain, but there is Schopenhauer explores the capacity of language to always a whistling blast of west wind—Ocean reaching create new ways of perceiving the world in his essay out to refresh mankind" (Homer, Odyssey 4.565-68).

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Elysian Fields

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LOGIC

PHILOSOPHERS: 1 SCIENTISTS: 0

by Martin Cothran

T

here are some questions we ask of science that it is ill-equipped to answer. The question of how human beings are different from animals is one.

I thought about this when I read Kevin Laland's article in a recent issue of Scientific American. "[H]ard scientific data have been amassed across fields ranging from ecology to cognitive psychology affirming that humans truly are a remarkable species," he says. So we read on in the expectation that we will gain some insight into this difference.

The title of the article is "What Made Us Unique." "[O]ur ability to think, learn, communicate and control our environment," he says, "makes humanity genuinely different from all other animals." But, alas, Laland spends the whole article undermining this point.

The bulk of the article is spent trying to establish that evolution is a plausible explanation for the differences between humans and animals, but invoking evolution only undermines the argument that humans are unique. In fact, one of the main points of Darwinian evolution—the primary reason it was controversial when Darwin articulated it and the reason it remains controversial today—is that it denies human uniqueness.

By appealing to Darwin, Laland implies that the differences between humans and animals are only Martin Cothran is the editor of The Classical Teacher and author of Traditional Logic Books I & II, Material Logic, and Classical Rhetoric.

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Philosophers: 1, Scientists: 0

differences in degree, not in kind. So much for being unique. In fact, Laland says several times that animals do many of the things that humans do—think, learn, communicate, and control their environment—it's just that humans do them better.

But how does that tell us anything about human uniqueness? You can't explain why humans are unique by studying behavior that is not unique. If you are going to say something meaningful about human uniqueness, then you are going to have to talk about what humans do that animals can't do.

Furthermore, when we ask the question, "How is man different from an animal?" we are looking for something essentially different between us and the rest of nature. There are many non-essential or accidental differences between the two. When Plato jokingly called man a "featherless biped," he was voicing a definition of man that did, in fact, distinguish him from every other animal. But neither being featherless nor being a biped says anything essential about the difference between man and animal.

The featherless biped kind of definition is the only kind of definition science can give to account for the difference. Science doesn't deal in essential differences.

Science can only treat quantifiable or behavioral differences, and essential differences between man and the rest of creation are metaphysical.

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So where, if not to science, do we go for an And here again, science is confounded. Science explanation of how humans are fundamentally may tell you what happens in the brain when distinct from animals? consciousness is happening, but brain activity is not In the fourth century B.C., the Greek philosopher what consciousness is. Neuroscience can tell us what Aristotle articulated the difference quite clearly. Man, happens physically when consciousness is happening, he said, was a rational animal. This designation was but that is very different from consciousness itself, part of his larger division of substances—non-material which is non-physical. substances, bodies, organisms, animals, and man— Then there is another level, one that gets us to our each of which had something that made it essentially main point: different from what came before. Life rendered mineral + life + awareness + self-awareness = Man organisms different from other bodies, sentience made animals different from other organisms, and rationality Man is not only aware, like animals are, he is made man different from other animals. self-aware. Not only can he think, he can think about In A Guide for the Perplexed, E. F. Schumacher gives thinking. Animals are conscious, but not conscious a simple explanation of these differences about their consciousness. They do not reflect by appealing to "Levels of Being." The back on themselves as humans do. They first level of being is the mineral are themselves, but they do not think As Chesterton level. Minerals are non-living about themselves as selves. pointed out, stuff—inanimate matter. It is the Since self-consciousness (like life lowest kind of thing. But when we and awareness) is not scientific, scientists begin with add life to this mineral, we get scientists have no way to account explanations and end up something completely different. for it. So instead, they must look We call this a "plant": for something other than selfwith mysteries; philosophers awareness to try to explain human mineral + life = Plant begin with mysteries uniqueness, as in the Scientific and end up with Schumacher points out that this American article. difference—the difference of life—is We have such a high view of explanations. not physical, but ontological. It is not a science that we think it can answer matter of what humans and animals and questions that cannot possibly be plants do, but rather of what they are. It is a answered using scientific tools. Philosophy, matter of philosophy, not of science. and, we should add, theology, are the only disciplines We don't really have an adequate scientific that have the tools to address these kinds of issues, explanation of what life is. The great physicist Richard which is why the difference between humans and Feynman once said, "If you can't create it, then you animals was well-known to and understood by can't explain it." This may not apply to everything, but philosophers as ancient as Plato and Aristotle. it applies to life. Life is not physical, but metaphysical, Philosophers and theologians do not pretend they can and yet it touches the physical world. We know when explain life, or awareness, or self-awareness. These things it is present and we know when it is absent, but we are mysteries. But, by resorting to the metaphysical, can't really say what it is. philosophers can see more deeply into the essential But even though we cannot explain what life is, we differences between different kinds of creatures. As can understand the difference it makes. A thing with G. K. Chesterton pointed out, scientists begin with life is radically different from a thing that does not explanations and end up with mysteries; philosophers have life and there are no intermediate steps between begin with mysteries and end up with explanations. them. They are worlds apart.

We didn't have to wait until an evolutionary biologist The next level of being is awareness. A plant, which wrote an article for Scientific American to find out what is a mineral plus life, does not have it, but an animal the key differences are between humans and animals. does. An animal is: So even if science were able to answer questions like this, it would already have been beaten to the mineral + life + awareness = Animal punch. To borrow a phrase from astronomer Robert A being that has life plus awareness is radically Jastrow, even if a scientist could scale this particular different from a being that only has life. It has senses mountain of ignorance, and had conquered its highest a plant does not have. It can move itself in accordance peak, he would pull himself over the final rock and with its own will. It can have emotions; it is actively be greeted by a band of philosophers and theologians conscious of things around it. who have been sitting there for centuries.

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Philosophers: 1, Scientists: 0

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H Rick Bragg contributes to several publications, including Southern Living, where he writes the popular Southern Journal column on the back page. He has written several critically acclaimed and best-selling books, and as a national correspondent at The New York Times, he won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Bragg is currently a professor at the University of Alabama, where he teaches Advanced Magazine Writing and Narrative Nonfiction.

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Words on Paper

ere, between the shelves, I escape everything worrisome, petty, mundane. In late afternoon, as the weak winter sun begins its slide, pale yellow light washes through the west-side window of my office in Fairhope, Alabama, and something like magic floods the room. I sit in a big, soft chair, and the words that are bound here come loose all around me.

French cavalrymen on white horses charge through shifting shadows on the wall above my desk, as Lord Nelson, Fletcher Christian, and Captain Horatio Hornblower set sail across the floor. In one corner, Bedouins glide on camels MemoriaPress.com

across a void of Sheetrock, while, in another, Sherlock Holmes grapples to the death with Professor Moriarty on the lip of a high shelf.

Here, Willie Stark sits with Atticus Finch, Ishmael leans against Ignatius Reilly, and the Snopeses rub elbows with Shakespeare. It lasts only a little while, this glow, until the sun descends toward the dark trees somewhere across the Mississippi line, but not before Woodrow Call keeps his promise to Augustus McCrae, George Smiley sends one more spy into the cold, and Elmer Gantry does a hook slide for Jesus in the last, fading light of the day.

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I know that the world of reading has forever changed, that, in this cold winter, many people who love a good book will embrace one that runs on batteries. I know that many of you woke up Christmas morning to find that Santa graced your house with an iPad, or a Kindle, or a Nook, or some other plastic thing that will hold a whole library on a doodad the size of a guitar pick. Some of you may be reading one of my books or stories on one today, which is, of course, perfectly all right, and even a sign of high intelligence. Someday, I may have to read The Grapes of Wrath on the side of a toaster myself. I am hopeful when young people say, "I read you on the Kindle," because it means they are at least reading, and reading me, which means my writing life is somehow welcome in whatever frightening future awaits.

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of years, or just since the most recent Harry Potter. I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because they just feel good in my hands, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

Here, not far from the shores of Mobile Bay and the white sands of the Gulf, is a limitless world of Gallipoli; Sanctuary; Go Down, Moses; Tennyson's Poetry; The Comedians; Riders of the Purple Sage; For Whom the Bell Tolls; Of Mice and Men; The Last of the Mohicans; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; A Christmas Carol; Brave Men; An Outside Chance; Cold Mountain; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Blood Meridian; The Prince of Tides; a dog-eared edition of Salem's Lot I read in high school with a BB gun by the bed, and a slightly molded flea market copy of Dixie City Jam. It is not just the stories, but the physical book, the way I feel when I see the spines, when I read the titles, the very feel of the paper under my fingers as I turn the pages. I see the words Lonesome Dove and I see the beauty and great cost of true friendship, played out in a wild, wild West. Every book comes alive in my mind. I like to be in that company.

Cicero said a room without books is like a body without a soul, but I don't know about that. I just know I like to have them close, when the sun goes down.

Words on Paper

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The Thing About Books History must be constantly corrected and moderated by the seeing and handling of things.

—Hilaire Belloc

T

here are many reasons to collect books: admiration of an author, fascination with a subject or time period, love of the physical beauty of specially-printed or what are called "press books," beautiful bindings, illustrations, even because it was a childhood favorite, to name a few. There are scholarly reasons, too. A wonderful discipline called "critical bibliography," as one scholar explains, provides a kind of "grammar of literary investigation," especially on questions of textual problems and authorial intent. In a day (a far better day than today) when an author's intention was considered at least somewhat helpful in determining what a book is about, critical bibliography was foundational to the question. And it was book collectors—amateurs, and often very learned amateurs—who, through their intelligence and diligent sleuthing, acquired and eventually bequeathed to scholarly posterity the physical objects, the artifacts, of the scholar's task.

The premise is kind of a lovely one: the physical book and all the elements comprising it—editing, printing, binding, illustrating, indeed all the "book arts"—can have either an intentional or an "accidental" impact on the transmission of the intellectual content.

Steve Ayers was educated at St. Martin's College, Regent College, and Columbia University. After about ten years selling rare books and manuscripts for several firms in Chicago and New York, he entered the publishing industry. For the last nineteen years he has been the sales manager for Baker Academic and Brazos Press. He serves on the school board of The Sacred Heart of Jesus Classical Academy in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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The Thing About Books

by Steve Ayers

This applies to modern machine-printed books as much as to letterpress, or hand-set, books. It is a historical enterprise with its own methods and terminology (as witness the large bibliographical manuals), beginning with the examination of objects (books) and arriving at a narrative pertaining to the chronological story and vagaries of a given text.

But my own collecting didn't begin there. I began by collecting content. I was a young man, probably nineteen, when I read for the first time Surprised by Joy

by C. S. Lewis. It changed my life. This is a (happily) common story, I know. I was a young fundamentalist Christian, and when Lewis showed me that as a Christian I could, in a sense, own all the great literature and that all truth, beauty, and goodness were mine, I was transformed. Or at least, potentially transformed. I needed "eyes to see," so I compiled a list of works from what he read and determined to read them all so that I, too, might be C. S. Lewis.

And of course, not being anything like C. S. Lewis I didn't get far beyond George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton, especially, proved an education for me. He fired my imagination. He turned the world upside down and, as he says, what better way to see the world in all its wonderment than upside down. I started with his novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, and then his magical collection of essays, Tremendous Trifles—titles I found in a local used bookstore. After that I couldn't get enough Chesterton.

I scoured used bookshops, Salvation Army stores, Goodwill, and all varieties of thrift shops, antique shops, library sales, junk shops—these were the hills in which I searched for gold.

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Over time I've compiled a fairly respectable collection of Chesterton first editions, many in dust jackets, some of them signed or inscribed. Recently I acquired a copy of The Napoleon of Notting Hill inscribed by Chesterton to a man named Hubert Paynter, someone he met in 1916 when Paynter was recovering from war wounds, and to whom Chesterton later served as godfather upon his reception into the Roman Catholic Church. That touches me. An artifact of friendship and faith. A couple of years ago in London I found Prime Minister Arthur Balfour's own copy of The Club of Queer Trades. It's fun to wonder what the impact was on this politician of this book's curious observation "how facts obscure truth … [t]he mere facts! Do you really admit—are you still so sunk in superstition, so clinging to dim and historic altars, that you believe in facts?"

A favorite of mine, and what served at the time as a spur to my imagination toward the artifactual value of books, is a wonderful copy of Chesterton's St. Francis of Assisi. It's a first edition in its original dust jacket. I found it while studying at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C., some forty years ago. On Saturdays I worked in a downtown second-hand bookstore, sweeping floors, stocking shelves, packing books.

I found this copy on the shelf and it was inscribed "For my dear Lizzie / from Aunt Marie." There was a name, "L. Firmin," at the top of the front free endpage.

I knew exactly who that was. It was Chesterton's childhood friend, Lizzie Firmin—one of two sisters mentioned in the second chapter of his Autobiography.

"Aunt Marie," I knew, was Chesterton's mother! And it found its way here because the Firmin family had moved from London to Vancouver, B.C. I showed my 1-877-862-1097

discovery to the bookseller, who promptly doubled the price, putting it well beyond my reach. Some days later Dr. James Houston, professor of spiritual theology at Regent College, visited the store. When I showed him the Chesterton volume, he looked at it and said, "Steve, you should own this book. I want to buy it for you."

It is an artifact rich in associations connected both to Chesterton and his childhood and his family, and for me with the sweet generosity of a holy man.

As you can see, books can be artifacts in several respects, including artifacts of relationships, events and occasions, and intellectual influences. An interesting example is a book I found locally. It was a copy of Anthony Powell's Agents and Patients (1936), inscribed, "For Scott Fitzgerald / from / Anthony Powell / Hollywood / July 20th 1937 / with admiration."

Powell was an important English author whose twelve-volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time is broadly recognized as a modern masterpiece of upper class manners, and some have hailed it as one of the best works of literature of the twentieth century. His narrative technique is commonly compared to that of Fitzgerald's. This book turned out to be an artifact of the only meeting between the two authors, Powell being at the time one of the very few British admirers of Fitzgerald's work, especially The Great Gatsby, which he read every year. It happened at the commissary at MGM Studios where both were employed writing screenplays. In Powell's autobiography he says that after their meeting he sent Fitzgerald a copy of his book, From a View to a Death, only after, he writes, first asking Fitzgerald if he wouldn't mind. Powell mentions nothing about this particular gift, dated the actual day of their lunch, which leads me to wonder if he The Thing About Books

11

forgot about it or perhaps was slightly embarrassed by his presumption and invented a different account.

I purchased it, and since I collect neither Powell nor Fitzgerald soon after "flipped" it to a London dealer for ten times what it cost me, which enabled me to purchase books for my various collections that I could have never otherwise afforded. Collectors do that sort of thing from time to time to fund their passion.

Until about a year ago I was acquiring some extraordinary books from the library of Julian Jebb, a grandson of the writer and controversialist Hilaire Belloc. Julian, unlike his siblings (one became an abbot, another a nun, and the third an architect of sacred structures) rejected his Catholic faith, resented his grandfather, and chose a life of worshipping "beauty and beautiful people." Sadly, he became an alcoholic and killed himself at age fifty in 1984. But he was greatly loved by a lot of eminent writers and artists, and was himself somewhat accomplished as a journalist and filmmaker. I acquired a lot of interesting items from his collection that are inscribed or signed by Graham Greene, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound ("From Ezra Pound!! A Slave is a man who waits for someone to come and set him free!"), Truman Capote (I own Breakfast at Tiffany's and I make no apology), and more.

My favorite item from his library is indeed a remarkable artifact. It's a record of a significant meeting and a hilarious exchange between the twenty-eight-year-old Jebb and the complicated personality and writer Evelyn Waugh. In April of 1962 Jebb interviewed Waugh for The Paris Review, which was significant not just for understanding Waugh, but it was one of the few cooperative interviews the greatbut-often-cantankerous writer would ever give. In the letter he wrote in advance, Jebb promised that he wouldn't bring a tape recorder, imagining from what Waugh had written in his highly autobiographical novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), that he had

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The Thing About Books

a phobia of tape recorders. They met in the lobby of a London hotel, and the first thing Waugh asked was, "Where is your machine?" Jebb explained that he hadn't brought one. Waugh proceeded to needle him as they headed toward the elevator: "Have you sold it?" Well yes he had, but three years earlier when moving overseas. How much had he paid for it?

How much had he sold it for? Whom did he sell it to?

"Do you have shorthand, then?" Jebb answered no.

"Then it was foolhardy of you to sell your machine, wasn't it?" The interview began after Waugh changed into pajamas, lit up a huge cigar, and got into bed. It turned out to be a brilliant, if short, interview, and it's clear from Waugh's letters and subsequent meetings that he was fond of Julian Jebb. He later signed a copy—the copy in my collection—of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold for Jebb and inscribed it, "You sold your machine because of Gilbert! Too bad! Best wishes, Evelyn Waugh 10/11/63."

There are, of course, pitfalls to collecting books, moral and otherwise: greed, idolatry, debt, boorishness ("Let me show you just one more delicious morsel from my collection …."). But I think book collecting in itself is a Good Thing. It's not about mere accumulation, it's about a host of disciplines: the scholarly disciplines; the disciplines of taste, technique, and study; and even financial discipline (or so I'm told.) And it's about passion, and about love. And imagination. Any one of us, on almost any financial level, can participate in curating a small portion of Christian civilization. There are writers out there who are outstanding but under-collected.

It can be a lot of fun putting together a significant collection for relatively little cost. The key to good collecting is a guiding idea or principle that arises out of a passionate interest, and is rooted in an intelligent understanding. And in this age of gnostic abstraction, solipsism, and the pervasive illusion of mastery of one's own universe—if we don't do it, who will?

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BOOK REVIEW

by Martin Cothran In his The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis argues against the idea that our aesthetic and moral judgments are a matter of personal preference—the problem we know as the problem of "relativism"—and that they are rather a quality in the world itself.

"Until quite modern times," he says, "all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt." One of the chief jobs of education was to train us to see good and beautiful things as they were in their goodness and beauty—and, ultimately, in their truth.

Knowledge—correspondence between our mind and the world—has been demoted in importance, and its place taken by utility, the ability to control things in the world. Not only that, but our very effort to control

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(instead of understand) nature has been self-defeating, and not only self-defeating, but harmful.

In the older system of education (what we now call classical education), the nature of the world in its objective, moral, and aesthetic reality was assumed and taught as something we must all acknowledge. The older educators "handed on what they had received: they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly."

In modern education, the things of nature are not something given, but something to be gotten control of. Lewis argues that in order to render nature controllable, it must be evacuated of all qualitative aspects and seen as entirely quantitative.

There are many books that discuss the issues of scientism and its influence on education, but Lewis' is the best.

Book Review: The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis

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SIMPLY CLASSICAL

THE DANGER OF DISCOVERY

by Cheryl Swope

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ne of the most heartbreaking things I hear is fatigued resignation from a parent: "I loved the curriculum, but I gave up after the first few weeks of trying to make my child like it. Maybe he would do better with a non-traditional approach, like 'discovery learning.'"

Such a homeschooler has often spent months researching and approving the underlying vision, the tested efficacy, and the beautiful design of our curriculum; yet she allows an eight-year-old child to cast it aside. She acquiesces to a child's ada ma nt—or even tepid—disl i ke of being taught and g uided in favor of letting him seek easier pursuits on his own through s e l f- g u ide d e x plorat io n .

Ye t r e s e a r c h i n d i c a t e s that students, especially t hose w it h diff ic ult ies, perfor m bet ter w it h explicit instruction than with discovery learning.

Contrast the first mother's resignation with this powerful response we hear far more often: "I am so grateful I persevered.

The progress in my child's reading, language, confidence, and overall academics has been remarkable. We are now in the third year of the curriculum and we are amazed at how far he has come." When we as parents and teachers trust the promise of the long-range view rather than the fleeting instincts of a child, we do not bow to the laissez-faire notions of education that are advocated by discovery learning theorists and rooted in the romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

training programs, we may be more influenced by these discovery-based approaches than we would like. Yet, when examined more closely, the absurdity of the pure theory might surprise us. Consider this from Rousseau's Emile:

Give him absolutely no orders of any kind. Do not even let him imagine that you claim any authority over him …. It is a mistake to try to get him to approve of things he dislikes.

When parents say they want discovery learning, perhaps they should seek instead the more classical term—"delight." The Memoria Press motto is docere, delectare, movere (to teach, to delight, to move), drawn from Cicero and Augustine. One dramatic distinction in the difference between delight and discovery lies in this first element of the triad: to teach. We do not take a hands-off approach to teaching in order to instill a hands-on approach to learning;

If our own educational philosophies stem only from popular books, homeschooling blogs, or teacher Cheryl Swope is the author of Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child and Memoria Press' Simply Classical Curriculum, as well as editor of the Simply Classical Journal.

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The Danger of Discovery

Let us lay it down as an incontestable principle that the first impulses of nature are always right. There is no original perversity in the human heart. If the child manages to upset things and break some useful articles, do not punish or scold him…. Do not even let him guess that he has annoyed you. Behave as if the furniture had got broken of itself.

Consider you have done very well if you can avoid saying anything.

Such romanticized writing impacted influential thinkers in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Piaget and Kant, whose resulting philosophies were melded with the new "science" of pragmatic psychology. All of this became embodied in America in John Dewey, whose emphasis on discovery learning and "learning by doing" gained vast pedagogical sway across the country when Dewey became head of the department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago in 1894. Dewey's Laboratory School urged plenty of child-initiated, "hands-on" discovery with child-centered teacher training, resulting in consequences that we still feel today.

Delight vs. Discovery

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rather, through teaching we seek to delight and move students. Until the arrival of modern notions, the formative principle of education was largely unquestioned, as was the central and invaluable role of the teacher: to teach.

When this changed, the child became the center point. Likening himself to Copernicus, Dewey institutes this monumental shift in 1899 in The School and the Society: It is a change, a revolution, not unlike that introduced by Copernicus when the astronomical center shifted from the earth to the sun. In this case the child becomes the sun about which the applications of education revolve.

Dewey elevated discovery-based projects, resulting in a child-initiated school day: The ideal home would naturally have a workshop where the child could work out his constructive instincts. It would have a miniature laboratory in which his inquiries could be directed …. Now, if we organize and generalize all of this, we have the ideal school.

Many educators heard this dogma in college.

Our training directed our gaze away from our purpose as teachers and shifted it toward the child's own discoveries. As Dewey wrote, we were to be occupied less with clear, teachable, academic content and more with "the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself."

What Can We Do? Through teacher-led instruction we can reclaim the calling of teaching as a noble vocation. We can pursue depth rather than scattered dabbling. From the gentle

Simply Classical:

A Beautiful Education for Any Child Revised Edition Coming Soon!

by Cheryl Swope Text $24.95 | eBook $22.00

This book guides parents and teachers in implementing the beauty of a classical education with specialneeds and struggling students. The love of history, music, literature, and Latin instilled in her own children by a classical education created in Cheryl the desire to share the message that classical education offers benefits to any child.

kindnesses of Little Bear to the great ponderings of the Iliad, we can study great literature deeply. We can choose the literature the child should read, and we can avoid skimming through towering piles of literature every year.

We believe that a guided, penetrating approach cultivates mastery, concentration, and reflection. French philosopher Antonin Sertillanges encourages our efforts: We must always sacrifice extent to penetration …. A danger lies in wait for minds that spread themselves over too many subjects: the danger of being easily satisfied. Content with their voyages of discovery in every direction, they give up effort.

Sidestep the Danger By 1902, even Dewey knew the dangers of the extremes inherent in his own teachings. He began to warn against the inevitable indulgence that comes from placing undue emphasis on the interest of the child: Appealing to the interest means … playing with a power so as continually to stir it up without directing it toward definite achievement. Continuous initiation, continuous starting of activities that do not arrive, is, for all practical purposes, as bad as the continual repression of initiative …. It is as if the child were forever tasting and never eating; always having his palate tickled upon the emotional side, but never getting the organic satisfaction that comes only with the digestion of food and transformation of it into working power.

Let us devote ourselves to perseverance in our calling as parents and teachers. If we face moments of doubt or discouragement that come from a student's grumbling, we can rest in knowing that we are providing for him the gradual, well-earned satisfaction of depth, mastery, and true nourishment, and working toward definite achievement.

Simply Classical Journal Sign up today: MemoriaPress.com/SCJournal Do you wish there was a Classical Teacher magazine devoted entirely to special-needs education? Well, now there is. The Simply Classical Journal, edited by Cheryl Swope, author of Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child, has the same features as the Classical Teacher—insightful, informative articles, and descriptions of new and existing programs—but geared toward you as a parent or teacher trying to provide a classical education to your student with special needs.

FREE!

Cheryl Swope is the author of Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child and Memoria Press' Simply Classical Curriculum.

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LITER ATURE

Why Read Literature?

by David M. Wright

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midst the gushing river of popular culture, the turbulent climate of politics, media bias, and misinformation, the tornadic winds of modern educational theories, and the volcanic eruption of screens and technology, a pertinent set of questions exists: Why read literature? Of what value is literature?

It is helpful to think about the role of literature in the context of cultural problems—for literature has always persisted in the midst of and in response to a fallen, often chaotic world. Assuredly, Wordsworth's lament applies to all ages, a prescient vision of the past, present, and future: The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

David M. Wright is the director and author of the upper school literature curriculum at Memoria Press.

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Why Read Literature?

Truly, we have given our hearts away, disconnecting ourselves from God, nature, and others—but literature has the capability of providing a restorative cure. So then, what kind of literature holds such power? The answer is the Great Book. Samuel Johnson said in his "Preface to Shakespeare" that "the only test of literary greatness is length of duration and continuance of esteem." Moreover, a book may be considered great if it meets three criteria. The first is universality. A great book speaks to people across many ages—affecting, inspiring, and changing readers far removed from the time and place in which it was written. Second, it has a Central One Idea and themes that address matters of enduring importance.

And third, it features noble language. A great book is written in beautiful language that enriches the mind and elevates the soul.

Now that we have established what kind of literature to read, let's consider why we should read literature. Here are six reasons: MemoriaPress.com

1

Reading great literature exercises the imagination.

We enjoy stories; it is a pleasure to meet characters and to live in their world, to experience their joys and sorrows. In a practical sense, an active imagination helps us perceive truth, make value judgments, and deal with the complexities of life in creative ways. It even aids in our ability to use logic and to reason well.

2

Reading literature transports us out of our current context and into other ages and places. Interacting with characters across space and time diminishes our ignorance. Mark Twain once rema rked, "Travel is fata l to prejudice, narrowmindedness, and bigotry. Broad, wholesome, c har itable v iews of men a nd things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one's lifetime."

Because most of us cannot pilot a steamboat along the Mississippi River, or travel to many parts of the world as Twain was able to do, literature serves as a worthy guide and vessel for our exploration.

reforms in the mass production of food. Books have the power to shape culture and history.

5

Reading literature fosters contemplation and reflection, and improves our facility with language and vocabulary. Interacting with these texts requires deliberate, conscious thinking in order to understand and retain longer units of thought. The average number of words per sentence in the sixteenth century was 65-70 words, but, not surprisingly, that number has steadily declined through the modern era to about 15 words today. Likewise, the average number of letters per word has declined, revealing a decrease in the use of longer, higher-level words. The continual exposure to elaborate, elevated syntax and diction develops not only our thinking abilities, but our speaking and writing skills too.

We begin to conceive of sentences in the manner of the great writers, imitating their techniques in style and vocabulary. In his poem Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot prophesied that we would be "distracted from distraction by distraction." Alas, we are unable to retain and reflect upon an idea for any meaningful length of time. Reading great literature is an active push against this tendency.

In the pages of literature we learn about our creative and moral faculties, our conscience, and most importantly, our soul.

3

Reading literature enables us to see the world through the eyes of others. It trains the mind to be flexible, to comprehend other points of view—to set aside one's personal perspectives to see life through the eyes of someone who is of another age, class, or race. Reading literature nurtures and develops the power of sympathetic insight.

4

Great works of literature have played a fundamental role in shaping society. For example, The Epic of Gilgamesh initiated the archetypal narrative of the hero embarking on an epic quest, which became a popular and influential blueprint for literature the world over. Some other landmark texts include Homer's Odyssey, Dante's Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Cervantes' Don Quixote, which is credited as the first novel in the Western world, creating a genre that has since become the dominant form of literature in the modern era. A little later, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther was deeply influential (though not necessarily in positive ways); Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads initiated the Romantic era in English literature, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin helped push a divided nation into civil war over slavery. In the early twentieth century, Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle exposed the horrors of America's meatpacking industry and caused many 1-877-862-1097

6

Finally, reading literature helps us to know ourselves—in short, to understand man. For the subject of literature is man. In its pages, we learn about our creative and moral faculties, our conscience, and most importantly, our soul. We see man at the height of his glory and the depth of his folly—with every heartrending thought, action, emotion, and belief in between. In other words, literature holds a mirror up to human nature, revealing its inner depths and complexities, its array of virtues and vices; and moreover, it holds a mirror up to a cultural age, illuminating its shape and ethos.

Long ago, inscribed on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was the maxim, "Know thyself."

Reading literature remains the surest means to do just that—to live the life Socrates declared the only one worth living: the examined life. After all, literature may simply be the creative expression of metaphysics and being: In some mysterious way, each life is every life, and all lives are one life—there is something of ourselves in each and every character we meet in the hallowed pages of a Great Book.

Why Read Literature?

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FINE ARTS

Going to the Library

by Dr. Carol Reynolds

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emories of graduate school flood my mind these days. Those four years of coursework at the University of North Carolina marked the beginning of my life as a scholar. I had painfully figured out how to study as an undergraduate, but the fervid quest to learn, the burning desire to piece together difficult or obscure information, the yearning to cultivate knowledge and use it as a basis of one's understanding—these things I learned between 1975 and 1979 at Chapel Hill.

Much of it happened through a tripartite process called "going to the library." Three parts, you say?

"Going to the library" sounds like one action, does it not? Let me explain.

Dr. Carol Reynolds is a widely-acclaimed author, speaker, and educator. She regularly leads arts tours throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, recently in partnership with the Smithsonian Institute.

(Photograph by Guarav Vaidya, CC BY 2.0 License)

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Going to the Library

First, you had to prepare yourself to go to the library, and "prepare" meant more than rinsing out your tea mug and finding your shoes. Prepare meant hours of gathering up questions, formulating ideas and goals, making lists of needed material, and identifying potential stumbling blocks. In short, it meant creating a master plan for each visit to the library.

Second, you actually had to go. I lived outside of Chapel Hill down a dirt road. My paradise was a single-wide trailer with the name Flamingo emblazoned across its forehead. Today that area has been gentrified and overflows with half-million-dollar homes. To me, that's sad, particularly as I remember my neighbors—people who worked on farms, in stores, or at garment factories nearby—who saved my sanity on a dayto-day basis.

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Be that as it may, the fact is, I had to leave my cozy trailer, bid farewell to my orange tabby cat, Maxim Gorky, and drive ten miles into town.

And I had to park. Even then, parking on campus was tricky. As I recall, we graduate students parked in a lot buried in the trees near the stadium, past the historic carillon. The walk from the lot, while surely shorter than students today have to make, was still something—especially in ice storms (which North Carolina has!).

Li ke ever y Ph.D. st ude nt in that program, I spent huge swaths of time in the legendary basement of Hill Hall, otherwise k now n as t he music l ibra r y.

There, underneath a threatening web of low-hanging pipes on wh ic h you would ba ng your head every time, lay one of the country's best music collections.

Today that collection lives in a new librar y, a nd wh ile I'm sure it's wonderful, it can never evoke the kind of contradictory a ffec t ion we had for t hat magnificent basement.

But my deeper sense of "library" was formed in a different building: the impressive Wilson Graduate Library, a neo-classical library built in 1929 (now repurposed for Special Collections). Its limestone steps, stately columns, and hushed rotunda proclaimed, "Treasures of Western Culture Ahead: Enter Ye with Awe." So now we have part three: We've actually gotten into the library! Part three begins with sitting on the cool floor of the Reading Room, a circle of thick tomes stacked around me. The process went like this: Drag the books down, figure out their organization, scan their contents and indices, and decide. The volumes were heavy, so you had to be sure you wanted them before dragging them to your cubicle.

Ah, the cubicle! A little, airless, windowless space with an uncomfortable desk and chair, set against the back wall of the stacks. Today's students may not know the thrill of going deep "into the stacks," but it's similar to entering C. S. Lewis' Narnia through a wardrobe.

And whatever resource you worked with, you had to paraphrase, hand copy, and otherwise record information tediously and accurately. No copy and paste keystrokes here. Nor could you double-check data from the comfort of your sofa

at home. Instead, you put in your time, chose carefully, and copied it right.

Hours went by. Half-days went by. There was no cute cafĂŠ for a retreat either, as in some of today's libraries. A water fountain and a handful of forbidden chips kept us going. It was hard. It was tiring.

And it was heaven. Absolute heaven.

Today, every time I work online, I still fastforward through that three-part process in my mind. It still forms my structure, my foundation. I wish I could assert that we are better off with today's online system of research, but I cannot assert that. I fear that what we "learn" today is as superficial as the process.

For one thing, what I learned in those marathon library sessions did not flee my mind the minute I closed the book.

Too much effort had gone into it. Information circulated as I trudged back to the parking lot and drove back out to my little trailer. It continued to grow as I filed through my hand-written notes. It laid the basis for the next time I would "go to the library."

Yes, the technologies for today's research are astonishing, but the process does not satisfy me nearly as much. Sometimes I feel as if I am more in touch with the cords that charge my devices than with the strands of material I've just learned.

I bemoan the fact that today's student may never experience the visceral rewards that going to the library has brought for centuries: that marvelous physical process of preparing, anticipating, physically laboring, and painstaking fulfillment. These stages are no longer intrinsic to the cyber-learning world.

I also fear (let me get this out of my system) that the degree of inquisitiveness found in today's restless young students, impatient to get it done, will fade into a kind of bland soup. How will they develop the skills to ask the hard questions and wrestle forth the answers? The wrestling is gone.

There is a particular type of nostalgia for a childhood and life gone by. Is this worry about the lost art of learning simply a misplaced nostalgia? Many would say: "Get with it Carol. That world is gone and we don't need it, or buggy whips, any longer. The new way is better." I wish they were right.

But I know they are wrong.

I bemoan the fact that today's student may never experience the visceral rewards that going to the library has brought for centuries.

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Going to the Library

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ON THE INCARNATION { OF WORDS }

by Martin Cothran

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condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! t goes without saying that the greatest pleasure of Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my books is in the reading of them. The reader who thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me … Such, and so has learned to appreciate the exhilaration and magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We heartbreak of Charles Dickens; the vibrancy of life and expand to its bulk. sweeping human vision of Leo Tolstoy; the human drama and poetic insight of Shakespeare; the whimsical He argues here that the greatness of his style humor of P. G. Wodehouse—he has these pleasures to should be commensurate with the greatness of nourish his youth and to solace his old age. his subject. But could this be true, not just of the But this pleasure of reading a book is attended heavy style of the words, but of their physical and accentuated by things about books which do not manifestation? Is there not some important directly have to do with reading itself. I am thinking similitude in the fact that the book, Moby Dick, here of the physical aspect of books. It is something we should also be physically heavy? don't talk or think about too much anymore in this age My copy of The Awakening of Miss Prim, a of the internet and digital text. somewhat light and charming book, is physically People like me who are bookish somehow have it in light and charming. That is as it should be. But my their heads that words take on greater value when copy of Plato's Collected Dialogues, heavy and rendered into physical form. That is why many rich in content, is itself heavy and rich in of us prefer a real, physical book to, say, an size and appearance. The same is true of eBook, and are prouder of our physical my copy of Aristotle's Complete Works. libraries than the collection of eBooks My copy of The Complete Works of we have on our Kindles.

William Shakespeare is an imposing, Our thoughts I can remember many times when I blue, clothbound volume, with have shown off my library to guests. I dignified illustrations to match had an NBC Nightly News crew in my the exalted text. Its tangible form are rendered more home several years back, and when is a work of art worthy of the they saw my library they took their beauty of the words. significant by being camera and panned the stacks. One Tolstoy's War and Peace should of them (I believe she had been an be heavy: If it were not, the universe incarnated on the English major) said something like, would be thrown out of balance.

"You must have books from every It is not that it is wrong to buy a written page. important writer who ever existed." I paperback copy of a Shakespeare play affected a knowing look and solemnly or The Brothers Karamazov. I once bought said, "Quite possibly." a paperback copy of Moby Dick because If I had told them how many audiobooks the introduction was Irving Howe's great I had on my smartphone, it wouldn't have essay on Melville's masterpiece—the essay had the same effect. that convinced me it was a truly great book and Those of us who love books tend to think that I should read it. And yet even now I am eyeing a that the writing or printing of them in some way nice hardbound edition of Melville's classic, not because I commemorates the ideas they express. This is why will necessarily read it again, but just because it deserves we think that the better and more important the to be between beautiful covers. words of the book, the better the book itself should The physicality of a book is, to a book lover, one be. I have a lot of paperback books, and for most of its virtues. For at least two millennia we have seen books that are published, that is just fine. But when the physical act of writing as a kind of embodiment. it comes to the really great books, it seems more Our thoughts are rendered more significant by being appropriate that their physical expression should incarnated on the written page. match the greatness they express.

There is what philosophers would call a phenomenology In his great work Moby Dick, Herman Melville to a physical book unachievable by anything purely makes a similar point: digital. We tend to think abstractly about language—"It is the thought," we say, "that matters." When Marshall One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their McLuhan uttered his famous maxim, "The medium is subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, the message," he invoked the principle that the form then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? … Give me a something takes cannot be divorced from its content. It is not just what is said that matters, but how—and, we Martin Cothran is the editor of The Classical Teacher and author of Traditional Logic Books I & II, Material Logic, and Classical Rhetoric. could add, on what—it is said.

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On the Incarnation of Words

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McLuhan's maxim is only another version of one in Kentucky to my mother's farm in Kansas. She of Aristotle's central principles. Aristotle said that would say, "If we took the interstates, it would anything that exists in the world must have both form take only ten hours to get there." I would look at and matter. This same idea can be seen in the opening her and say, "Yes, but it would be ten hours of chapters of Genesis, where God creates the world boredom. Taking the side roads may take five hours by forming its structure and filling it with material longer, but the drive is pleasurable. Under what things. The act of creation, in other words, necessarily circumstances would I choose ten hours of boredom involves physicality, a principle that is made over fifteen hours of pleasure?" problematic in digital information, which is material She has since been cured of her addiction to only in the barest sense. efficiency and convenience. Being married to me, she Words expressed in a physical book give a kind of claims, necessitates it. And she now thanks me for benediction to the paper on which they are printed, taking the side roads and enjoys them as much as I do. and their having been printed bestows some greater When we go to the beach on a warm summer day, ontological significance to their meaning. The words do we bring a stopwatch to see how fast we can swim and the physical book that contains them form a sort of in the waves, walk on the beach, and sun ourselves? union, a union which, once sundered, results in a loss.

And, of course, the best life is not necessarily And yet all this—the love of physical books, and the shortest. the trouble we take with them—does not make much I would far rather take my time living a sense in light of our modern tendency to see pleasurable life than speeding through an value in things only in terms of their practical efficient one. utility. The utilitarian philosophy of life A book lover not only cherishes dictates that we should do those things individual books, but knows that two that are most practically useful. In books—even if they are the very this view, convenience and efficiency same edition—are different from Words expressed in are the watchwords. one another. Each has a different A true book lover is not bothered history and personality. a physical book give a by the lack of convenience of going I have a copy of Wendell to the bookstore or the problem Berry's The Way of Ignorance which of obtaining the book once he the author gave me as a gift. He kind of benediction to gets there. In fact, we only invoke inscribed it, "To Martin Cothran— convenience and efficiency on the for kind help and good company, the paper on which things that we find least desirable. many thanks, Thanksgiving, 2005."

When it comes to the things we most Having your Kindle signed they are printed. like to do, these considerations are by the author of one of the books beside the point, and, in many cases, it contains would not only be detrimental altogether. We take time physically difficult, but conceptually with the things that we like. We fuss impossible. Signing a book requires that over them needlessly. there be a book—an individual, singular, If you love books, going to a bookstore was solitary thing. A digital book has no history, no never a matter of convenience or efficiency. The best permanence. It has no personality. bookstore was never the one nearest my home. In fact, When I read a book, I annotate it. I summarize each I will go long distances to get to a good bookstore. And page at the top. I write notes in the margin. I even a good bookstore was never the one I spent the least draw pictures in it. In doing so, I make it mine. amount of time in. In fact, quite the opposite. I will spend A young woman I work with, about my own hours in a good bookstore, and the length of time I am children's age, loves books as much as I do. Every willing to spend there is a measure of how good it is. few days I will stop by her desk and ask her what Going to the bookstore is a ritual, a pilgrimage. she is reading. In the course of our conversations, I think the decline of the bookstore is related to the I will often mention some book I just read, one she decline of the road trip. You go on a road trip because has read too. She will say, "Oh, I love that book!" getting there is half the fun. I go to a good bookstore When she says this, she will hold her arms to because the effort expended in finding a book is part herself, as if she was actually holding the book. I of why I do it. think this is not insignificant, that when we have a My wife used to give me a hard time about true love for something, our very gestures should taking side roads on our annual trip from our home suggest a real, physical thing.

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On the Incarnation of Words

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