Been in a Tunnel Lately

My apologies to the one or two fans out there. I've been reading much more widely than the news lately, and somehow convinced myself that it wasn't germaine to this blog. Bad assumption, I know. I don't have much to say, but I've been reading a lot of old history and digging through the classics at Bartleby, a website I can't recommend highly enough when you find yourself spinning your intellectual wheels.

I'd recommend this essay, a lecture on the "The Art of Reading" from Arthur Quiller-Couch. It's got a lot of great suggestions to make on aesthetics. If you can get past the stuffiness of Victorian rhetoric, you'll find him a refreshingly sympathetic observer of high culture and low who can cut through the crap of his period's cliches like a steak knife through butter. It takes some time getting acquainted with the issues of his day since they're not our own. But it's worth the read.

An Example - Quiller-Couch's response to the doctrine of Original Sin in children...

I know surely enough what must be in your minds at this point: I am running up my head hard against the doctrine of Original Sin, against the doctrine that in dealing with a child you are dealing with a ‘fallen nature,’ with a human soul ‘conceived in sin,’ unregenerate except by repression; and therefore that repression and more repression must be the only logical way with your Original Sinners.

Well, then, I am. I have loved children all my life; studied them in the nursery, studied them for years—ten or twelve years intimately—in elementary schools. I know for a surety, if I have acquired any knowledge, that the child is a ‘child of God’ rather than a ‘Child of wrath’; and here before you I proclaim that to connect in any child’s mind the Book of Joshua with the Gospels, to make its Jehovah identical in that young mind with the Father of Mercy of whom Jesus was the Son, to confuse, as we do in any school in this land between 9.5 and 9.45 a.m., that bloodthirsty tribal deity whom the Hohenzollern family invokes with the true God the Father, is a blasphemous usage, and a curse.

But let me get away to milder heresies. If you will concede for a moment that the better way with a child is to draw out, to educate, rather than to repress, what is in him, let us observe what he instinctively wants. Now first, of course, he wants to eat and drink, and to run about. When he passes beyond these merely animal desires to what we may call the instinct of growth in his soul, how does he proceed.