On Dads, Boys, & the importance of Building a Family Culture around Books

My interview with Sarah McKenzie at Read Aloud Revival is up. Just click here.

Inoculate your children against cultural barbarism with a dose of Rosemary Sutcliff

As a new cultural Dark Age extends its shadow over our culture, it is good once in a while to transport yourself back to a time when the old virtues went unquestioned.

In an excellent article from one of the best blogs going on one of the great historical fiction writers for children, Rosemary Sutcliff. Our family read her Eagle of the Ninth (recently turned into a feature film) and other books about Roman Britain:

Though primarily a children’s author, the depth and quality of Sutcliff’s canon resonates strongly with readers of all ages. As with numerous British children’s writers (Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, for example) whose formative years coincided with the struggle against Hitler, Sutcliff’s work displays clear distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, civilized conduct and barbarism. There is no post-modern ambiguity, equivocating or hedging of bets here. We also find a firm commitment to the value of law and order (inherited from the Pax Romana) and an overarching belief in the significance and intrinsic worth of Judeo-Christian civilization. 

Her novels, at times, have a distinctly valedictory feel, almost as if Sutcliff herself was waving goodbye to what she recognised as civilization. 

Read more at the Imaginative Conservative.

The Battle of the Red Books and the Blue Books: The literature of the town vs. the literature of the country

After the 2004 presidential election, someone posted a map showing, county by county, who voted for which candidate. Whoever made the map (I have forgotten now) chose to represent the counties that voted for George W. Bush, the Republican, in red, and the counties that voted for Al Gore, the Democrat, in blue. The map has become a familiar part of the American political lexicon, invoked now by pundits on an almost daily basis.

If you look at the map, the association is as clear as day: the denser the population, the more liberal the political leanings—and the sparser the population, the more traditional. But it is more than just politics that divides the red states and the blue states.

From before most of us can even remember, we are soaked and steeped in the distinction between the town and the country. As far back as Aesop, we are told that the ways of the city are not the ways of the country, and that, in fact, the country life is more solid, more stable, and more satisfying.

Aesop's Town Mouse, having visited the Country Mouse’s home and found the lifestyle too quiet and the cuisine too plain. He convinces the Country Mouse to return with him to the city, where there are “sweetmeats and jellies, pastries, delicious cheeses, indeed, the most tempting foods that a Mouse can imagine.” On its face, the city offers luxuries unattainable in the country, and the country mouse is dazzled. But as soon as he has availed himself of these delicacies he is confronted by the servants, the dog, and, worst of all, the cat. The Country Mouse stopped in the Town Mouse's den only long enough to pick up her carpet bag and umbrella.

"You may have luxuries and dainties that I have not," she said as she hurried away, "but I prefer my plain food and simple life in the country with the peace and security that go with it."

I think I understand the Town Mouse’s impatience with the country. Shortly after we were married, my pregnant wife and I moved from the suburbs of southern California to the rustic environs of small town Kentucky. When we first visited the small town in which we still live, we were charmed by the old-fashioned main street, with the bandstand in the park in front of the courthouse and the classic beauty of the little college in town—not to mention the lush green of the fields and horse farms that seem to go on forever.

But it wasn’t long after we moved when other things began to loom large: There was little in the way of restaurants, fewer choices at the grocery store, and if you wanted to shop for clothes, you had to drive for an hour to Lexington to do it. Everything seemed to close at 5:00 p.m. And don’t even ask about Sunday: Nothing was open, and you were on your own.

We traveled back home frequently with our two, three, and then four children. And, for a time, we might have moved back to what we perceived to be civilization if we could. We missed the luxuries and dainties.

But the years began to tell on our way of looking at things. The trips back to California became less frequent and less gratifying. The polluted air, the crowded roads, the endless asphalt—I don’t remember noticing them much when I lived there, but they came to seem chief features of the landscape. Where were the cows? Where were the corn fields? Where were the patches of woods and the occasional deer crossing the road? Why did no one wave to you when you drove by?

Our three boys had by then spent a good part of their childhood tromping through the creek that ran through our backyard (or fishing in it), and our daughter had already taken to horseback-riding (which eventually became her profession). We left as unwitting town mice, but every successive trip contributed to our transformation into country mice.

There was something about the country that seemed more solid, satisfying, and safe—and there was something about the city that was artificial, anxious, and threatening. And this was not our judgment only, but the judgment of time and civilization.

The ancient Romans loved to tell the story of Cincinnatus, who, after serving as Roman consul, retired to his country estate. When Rome’s enemies later began to rise against them, the Roman senate sent a delegation to his farm to beg him to return to lead the country out of its crisis. They found him, the story goes, at work with his plow. He returned to Rome and led it out of one of its darker moments and, as soon as he had accomplished his purpose, gave up the absolute powers they had granted him and returned to his farm in an act that George Washington consciously copied when he resigned after his second term as first president of the United States.

Washington, a farmer himself, saw in Cincinnatus the same agrarian virtues that animated the many Virginia planters who attended at the birth of this nation. In fact, if you visit the Capitol Rotunda today, you will find the famous statue of Washington. He is leaning with one arm on the fasces, the cylindrical bundle of bound rods and axes that represents civil authority, and behind him is a plow. Jefferson too extolled the virtues of agrarian life. If you ever visit the Jefferson Memorial, walk to the back of his giant bronze statue and notice the two things sitting behind him: a column of corn and column of tobacco.

Once you notice the prevalence of these symbols on almost every statue and pediment in this nation’s capitol city, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this nation’s founders saw the agrarian life as anything other than the seedbed of virtue.

And literature joins history in its testimony to these values. The story of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse is joined by innumerable others in the case for the country. Children’s literature in particular is full of it. It is hard to imagine Laura falling asleep to the sweet strains of Pa’s fiddle in mid-town Manhattan. Wilbur was “some pig,” but would not have been so “terrific” in a place other than the barn in which he lived. And good luck finding blueberries for Sal in the cement jungles in which many of us live.

In fact, it is striking when you consider how few children’s stories take place in a city. The lessons which we are admonished to learn (or which, more frequently, are taught implicitly) are country lessons. When Almonzo’s father in Farmer Boy is showing him how to plant a wheat field, he tells him the story of a “lazy, worthless boy” who was sent to sow a field, but who instead poured the seeds on the ground and went swimming, thinking no one would ever know. “But the seeds knew, and the earth knew,” and in time, when the weeds finally grew, they would tell of his wickedness when even the boy had forgotten it.

It is hard to imagine what urban analogy could be employed to make a similar point. There is something about the fields and forests that allow the moral imagination to run free, and something too particular and artificial about the things of the city to allow what happens there to be universalized. What F. Scott Fitzgerald called the "urban distaste for the concrete" seems to militate against the poetic. For some reason we seem to know ourselves better when we are closer to the soil. In fact, it is worth observing that the word “human” comes from the Greek word humus, which means “earth” or “soil”—that from which, according to Genesis, we are made.

We are more and more in thrall to the artificial, as Levin, the protagonist of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina sees when his city-dwelling brother comes to visit him at his country estate. His brother sees it as a place to escape to for leisure, while Levin sees it as a place to work and live in. Shoulder to shoulder with the peasants mowing the fields Levin finds “a remedy … for every folly,” and finds in his wife, Kitty, who also loves the country, a down-to-earthness that grounds his life in reality. So too in Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, a story in which Stephen Kumalo, an old, Black Anglican priest leaves his tribal home in the country on a mission to find his son who has left for the fleshpots of Johannesburg, and who is in trouble. Johannesburg in Alan Paton’s story is a modern Babylon that has taken and corrupted his son.

Our modern lives are spent more and more in company with man-made things. We build man-made houses in man-made subdivisions in which we watch our man-made television sets and eat our increasingly man-made food, enabling us to lead our man-made lives and think our man-made thoughts. The country life, far from being “at odds with God and man,” as the pastor tells the reclusive Uncle Alp in Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, is a life closer to the things that God made.

There is a distinction made in the old material logic of the medievals between man-made artifacts, whose pattern and purpose are imposed on them from without, and natural objects, whose pattern and purpose are really in them. The wood of a tree has its formal and final cause buried within its very being, whereas a bed has its pattern and purpose imposed on it from the outside by man. This is why, said Aristotle, if you were to bury a wooden bed in the ground and it sprouted, it would sprout a tree and not a bed.

In the old classical conception of the cosmos, natural things not only seem more real, but really are more real. So when we surround ourselves with unnatural things, we should not be surprised when we find that we have been distanced from our natural selves.

Heidi, who is being raised by her grandfather in the mountains, is taken to Frankfurt, Germany to be the companion of Clara, a young disabled girl where she turns the house upside down with her impulsiveness, driving the stuffy Miss Rottenmeier to consternation and the more good humored servant Sebastian to fits of suppressed laughter. Used to going out first thing in the morning “to see whether the sky was blue and the sun shining, and to say good morning to the trees and flowers,” Heidi finds the doors of Clara’s house nailed shut and no view at all from the open front door. She was “like a wild bird in a cage, seeking a way through the bars to freedom.”

She is sorely unhappy there, and her very health deteriorates. Clara’s doctor recommends returning Heidi to her mountain home—and after later visiting Heidi and her grandfather, the same doctor ends up recommending that Clara too be taken to Heidi’s mountains.

There are stories set is small towns, but seldom in big ones. Small towns are towns in which humans not only live, but, being human-sized towns, they are towns into which they can comfortably fit. Margaret Wise Brown’s Mike Mulligan, Jane—Eleanor Estes “middle Moffat,” Robert McClosky’s Homer Price—all live in the kind of small towns that still dot the red state landscape.

The nihilist modern adult stories that make up so much a part of modern literature are set exclusively in the city. All the modern tales of alienation and despair—Gogol’s Overcoat, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment , Tolstoy’s "Death of Ivan Ilych," Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’ The Stranger—They all take place in an urban setting, far away from the hundred acre wood.

But the allure of the city is strong, and more and more of us eventually end up there at some point. The boy in Robert Penn Warren’s “Blackberry Winter” sees a strange man walking down the road and onto their farm. He is an outsider who asks for work, but he is a threatening presence, invading the innocence of the life of the boy and his family. He wears tattered city clothes and seems to represent the more modern industrial life. After he is told to move on by the boy’s father, the boy follows him for a ways down the road. Finally, the tramp turns to him, saying “You don’t stop following me and I’ll cut your throat …”

“That was what he said,” said the boy, “for me to stop following him. But I did follow him, all my days.”

There are exceptions to this thesis of course, even among children’s books. Curious George, Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, and Trumpet of the Swan are all set in the city, although even in these the country is often resorted to as a moral refuge and for spiritual relief.

In fact, much of the country life that once thrived in America has atrophied. Anyone who drives the side roads of America can see it: small towns which have been bled dry by the nearby interstate and commercial districts which have taken away the thriving commerce that the main streets of this country once enjoyed. In my home state of Kentucky, the demise of the tobacco culture has left ghost towns where there were once thriving townships .

Conversely, there are many cities which enjoy a more thriving culture, with their burroughs and smaller districts. In these places the very density of the architecture has prevented the larger stores like Wal-Mart from luring people away from the smaller businesses. Here small groceries and corner hardware stores still thrive in a way that is no longer possible in small towns, where the siren song of the strip malls lures many a shopper to her ruin. There is still a community in which you know the butcher at the market, and the waitress at the local coffee shop, and where you are on a first name basis with your doctor, and your mechanic, and where the barber who cuts your hair is the same one who cut it when you were a kid.

You can find a little bit of the country even in many cities.

When Heidi’s grandfather is asked what will become of Heidi if she never goes to school, he responds, “She’ll grow up with the goats and the birds. They won’t teach her any bad ideas and she’ll be very happy.” Most of us wouldn’t go that far. Still, some of us are sympathetic to the judgment of Beatrix Potter, who, after telling of Timmy Willie, the country mouse in The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse, remarks, “One place suits one person, another place suits another person. For my part, I prefer to live in the country, like Timmy Willie.”

The Dangerous Article for Boys: Why boys don’t need to get in touch with their feelings and how you can protect them from people who think they do (with a list of books to help you fend these people off).

The following article contains some elements from past posts, but it mostly new. It is the monthly article for the Memoria Press August E-Newsletter.

It is now well-recognized that boys are not reading. What is the problem? Most commentators want to say that boys have an aversion to books. But the problem is quite the opposite: books—modern books, that is—have an aversion to boys.

A recent edition of The New York Times Sunday Book Review featured an article by Robert Lipsyte that attempts to address this problem. Here is the proffered solution:

[B]oys need to be approached individually with books about their fears, choices, possibilities and relationships — the kind of reading that will prick their dormant empathy, involve them with fictional characters and lead them into deeper engagement with their own lives. This is what turns boys into readers.

Excuse me while I dab my eyes delicately with my handkerchief, touched as I am by this tender thought.

Okay, let's get something straight here: solutions like this are part of the problem. I'm normally against shooting spit wads in class, but I am willing to make an exception in this one case. The entire educational establishment has tried for over 50 years to force boys into their effeminate mold, and in the process, they've succeeded in evacuating literature of all the things boys like in books: action, adventure, danger, bloodletting--and an iron moral code that is taught, not by smarmy sermonizing, but by immersing them in the moral universe of a story about a hero who not only believes in this code, but enforces it with a vengeance.

Boys now seek refuge in cheesy horror novels because the Cultural Authorities won't give them the adventure books that were once staples in every boy's life. It is to this I attribute the popularity of vampire novels (and movies and television shows). But even here a boy is destined for disappointment.

The crisis of wimpy vampires 
In fact, the extent of our modern cultural crisis can be at least partly measured by the plight of the vampire. The vampire of yore was an evil and only partly human creature. He sucked peoples’ blood and didn’t second guess himself. The modern vampire is the pure creation of the modern therapeutic mindset: a tortured emotional soul dealing with his vampire condition as if it were some kind of psychological neurosis.

The vampire of old was a danger to others; the modern vampire is a danger primarily to himself. The vampire of old looked into the mirror and saw nothing; the modern vampire looks into a mirror and sees the other part of his bi-polar self. The vampire of old required only a stake through the heart; the modern vampire requires months on the psychologist’s couch.

The pure evil of the traditional vampire is a rebuke to the modern relativism that dominates our literature, which avoids unadulterated evil because it implies an equally unadulterated—and unacceptable—good.

Morality has been replaced in young adult literature by therapy, and boys have fled in droves.

Heroism can never be completely eliminated from literature because we are naturally attracted to it. And so, when it is repressed (if you will forgive my commission of psychologism in the very act of criticizing in), it always comes back in some other form.

The pathogenesis of the superhero 
This accounts for the continuing popularity of comic books and the more recent phenomenon of superhero movies. Our culture has never fully recovered from the demise of the classic Western. We have to have heroes, and in an age in which we were not ashamed of it, we put them in a historical context. These were things that really could—and in some cases actually did—happen.

But in the modern era, we are not supposed to admire great men, largely because we are uncomfortable with the whole idea of greatness. So today we must relegate our heroes to the realm of the fantastic. They are now figures who could never really be, doing things that can never really be done. And even here, the therapeutic is never far off.

Every modern superhero must deal with the psychological consequences of something from his childhood: for Spiderman it is the murder of his uncle; for Batman the death of his parents; and, of course, Superman’s planet has been blown up. The modern superhero wreaks havoc on the bad guys less because he is pursuing truth, justice, and the American way than because it is the only way he can work out his angst.

The mother of a friend of mine in high school was a famous psychologist. One day I noticed padded bats propped up against the wall and asked, “What are those?” She told me they were for her mom’s patients so they could express their anger without hurting anybody. All we common people get to work out our anxiety are padded bats—and we don’t even get to destroy anything. Batman, on the other hand, gets a helicopter, a fast car, and a cool costume—and destroys half a city.

Life just isn’t fair.

Hands off my psyche
I have three boys, mostly grown now. Not a one of them ever needed to be lead into “deeper engagement” with his life. Had you asked my wife about it at the time, she would have told you that they were all way too engaged in their own lives and that they needed to think about something else—like cleaning their rooms or mowing the lawn. And I hate to think of what would have happened if anyone had tried to “prick their dormant empathy.” To any healthy boy, those are fighting words.

Boys, though they cannot articulate it, can usually see right through the modern psychobabble. In fact, say what you will about the Harry Potter books (and plenty has been said), they at least betray a consciousness of the old adventure ideal, and are light on the psychological reflexiveness—at least in the early books in the series, although I am told (I have not read them) that the later books portray a much more effeminate Harry.

We have the mistaken impression that it was traditional children’s literature that was preachy. This is not only untrue, it is almost the exact opposite of the truth. It is precisely the preachiness of politically correct modern literature that offends their innate sense of honesty and justice—a human instinct that we do our best to educate out of them.

Boys are not interested in getting in touch with themselves, and it is particularly off-putting when they are told that it is good for them. The minute the politically correct schoolmarms approach, they head for the woods, where they are free to pick up sticks and pretend they are swords and fight monsters and hunt frogs and swing from trees--anything but be preached at by people whose sermons consist of high-minded meaninglessness.

Most boys are born cynics and are rightly suspicious of moralistic platitudes. They respect words only to the extent that they see them followed by actions. Tell them (in mere words) what the right thing to do is, and they will look at you suspiciously and walk away. Do the right thing—preferably at the risk of your own person or reputation, and they will follow you in zealous allegiance.

The older authors of books for boys knew this: they forsook the sermonizing for the story of men in action. G. A. Henty, Johnston McCulley, Anthony Hope, H. Rider Haggard, P. C. Wren, Howard Pyle, C. S. Forester, as well as Western authors like Louis L’Amour and Max Brand—these were authors boys not only didn’t avoid, but sought out. Even a few female authors were on to this secret about boys: Baronness Orczy, she of Scarlet Pimpernel fame, being the most notable, as well as Laura Ingalls Wilder. These were books once illumined by flashlights under bed covers so that, late at night, when they were supposed to be asleep, the young male reader could find out what happened next. To do the same with most modern therapeutic fiction would be a waste of batteries.

This is not a romantic discourse on the nature of the boy and how we should leave him to develop on his own, but merely a defense of the idea that he has a nature, and that it should be taken into account in how we deal with him. A necessary part of this (given that his nature doesn’t always lend itself to doing what the dictates of civilization require) is a straightforward and honest discipline, something which too often these days has been replaced by psychotropic drugs.

Boys needs to be tamed, not treated.

Good books for boys
But in addition to restraint, a boy needs inspiration. And one way to do this is to give him books that meet him where he is, which is far from the place that most professionals (who are admittedly only trying to help) think he is. In addition, of course, to the great classic hero stories of Homer and Virgil, as well as the various books of the authors I mentioned above, here is a short list of books to utilize that predate the Conspiracy Against Boys, in the general order in which they should be read:

Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (and anything else Wilder ever wrote)
The Jack Tales, by Jonathan Chase
Call it Courage, by Armstrong Sperry
Robin Hood, by Roger Lancelyn Green
King Arthur, by Roger Lancelyn Green
Adam of the Road, by Elizabeth Janet Gray
Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Lost in the Barrens, by Farley Mowat (and anything else Mowat ever wrote)
Goodbye Kate, by Billy C. Clark (and anything else Clark ever wrote)
The Bronze Bow, by Elizabeth George Speare
The Mask of Zorro, by Johnston McCulley (and the rest of the Zorro books)
The Scarlet Pimpernel and El Dorado, by Baroness Orczy (and the rest of the Scarlet Pimpernel books)
Men of Iron, by Howard Pyle (and anything else Pyle ever wrote)
Shane, by Jack Shaeffer
The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien
Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
Old Squire’s Farm, by C. A. Stephens
Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
The Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow, by Allan French
Little Britches, by Ralph Moody
Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
A Texas Ranger, by N. A. Jennings
Penrod, by Booth Tarkington
The Jungle Books, by Rudyard Kipling
Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
The Worm Ouroboros, by E. R. Edison
The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien

Tell your boy to read them. And when you send him to bed, tell him to go to sleep—but make sure there are plenty of flashlight batteries around the house. Just in case he needs them.

The Decline and Fall of the Book: Why the demise of the Encyclopedia Britannica means the end of Western civilization

There was the Great Flood. There were the Ten Plagues of Egypt. There was the Fall of Rome. There was the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem and the Fall of Constantinople. And now this.

The Encyclopedia Britannica is going out of print.

While the Simpsons just celebrated its 500th show, the world's greatest learned publication couldn't even make it to its 250th anniversary. Will the last person who even knows what Western civilization is please turn out the lights?

I submit that this is the most significant cultural event of the last fifty years. No. Make that a hundred. The New Dark Ages are upon us.

T. S. Eliot ended his poem, "The Hollow Men," with the words:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The sing-song rhythm of the first three lines evokes a child's careless playground chant, as if Eliot meant to say that the end of the world would be attended with a general lack of awareness that anything significant was really happening--and that, when it did happen, it might go unremarked or even unnoticed.

If you want proof that our own culture is experiencing this very kind of end, just look at the malaise with which we have greeted the Britannica announcement. Note the general cultural yawn directed toward the announcement that they will be suspending their print edition.

The best anyone could do was to give the glib assurance that there was nothing to worry about, since Britannica will continue in an electronic edition.

If someone important to you died, would you find comfort from being told that he or she would continue on in a digital form? No. Encyclopedia Britannica is dead. We now have only its electronic ghost.

Our cultural landscape is fast becoming welter and waste. Before the barbarian onslaught of the computer, one would go to a place and read a thing. There was a library, and it had books, and one went there to read them. Go into a library now, and look to the right, where there are rows of shelves of books, but no people. Then look to the left, where there are rows and rows of people--sitting at computers.

Soon the shelves will be gone, the books sold, leaving only the people, staring mesmerized at their screens. They won't even notice that the books have been taken away.

Every technological revolution has its benefits--and its casualties. The invention of writing was itself a technological  revolution. In his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato tells a story about the old god Theuth, the inventor of many arts, including arithmetic and geometry. But his greatest discovery, said Plato, "was the use of letters." He came one day to Thamus, the Egyptian god-king, who dwelt in Thebes. Theuth presented his great invention, writing, to the king. "This," said Theuth," will make the Egyptians wiser. It will increase their memory and improve their wit." But the Egyptian king was not impressed.

"Because these letters are like your own offspring," he said, "you are blind to their faults. This discovery of yours will only create forgetfulness in the learner's soul because he will no longer need to use his memory. He will trust to the written characters instead of his memory, and will not remember them himself. These letters of yours may help in reminiscence, but they are not an aid to memory. Your hearers will become, not disciples of the truth, but of a semblance of truth only. They will be hearers of many things, but they will learn nothing."

This seems a harsh judgment to us today, and yet there is truth in it. Writing brought about many improvements, but it would be false to think that, in moving away from an oral culture where memorization was the primary method of learning, something was not lost.

The invention of letters was followed more than two millenia later by the invention of movable type, a revolution without which the Renaissance and the Reformation would not even have been possible. But with the increase in the availability of the written word, there have been losses once again. For every work of Shakespeare put between covers, there were twenty cheap romance novels. For every book designed to teach an intelligent public, there are fifty newspapers distorting events. And for every learned tome, there are an hundred volumes of pornography.

But over the last twenty years, we have been taking another step. What Marshall McCluhan called the "Guttenburg Galaxy" displaced the Parchment Planet. But as we have moved into the Electronic Era, we find that the actual universe itself cannot contain it.

The material on which we would now inscribe our thoughts and our dreams is not material at all. For at least two millenia we have seen the physical act of writing as a kind of embodiment. Our thoughts were somehow rendered complete by being made incarnate on the written page.

They became flesh and dwelt among us.

The digital revolution comes at us with a kind of Gnostic pretense. Far from any kind of embodiment, it promises to liberate us from the physical altogether. Just listen to the justifications from those who have abandoned their books for Kindles or Nooks or iPads:

The "delivery method is convenient." Amazon.com delivers my books right to my home. And if I go to a bookstore (which is something I do, not as a chore, but because I actually like to do it), I have this trick I perform with my arm whereby I lift it vertically in the air, grasp the book on the shelf in my hand and bring my arm (in another intricate movement) back down again.

After a while you get pretty good at it.

"iPads and Kindles are good for the environment." Is that before or after we found out that the manufacturing plants discharge toxic metals that can cause birth defects into nearby streams in China? Producing books may involve killing trees, but you can grow more trees. But if you're born with three noses because of toxic chemicals in your ground water from the nearby iPhone plant, growing another one won't do you much good.

You "don't have to carry fifty pounds of books everywhere." Neither do I. If I have fifty pounds of books, I'm carrying too many books. Who needs to carry around fifty pounds of books? Some students say they have to carry around fifty pounds of books, but that's probably more a function of inefficient study practices than anything else. And if you really have to spend a day at school and you're a commuter and you have to carry around fifty pounds of books, the get a travel bag with wheels.

I will admit that my wife accuses me of carrying around fifty pounds of books, but I deny it. I only carry around, oh, I don't know, about thirty pounds of books. And I really don't need them all. I tell my wife I bring them with me for the same reason I bring her: because I take comfort from having them there.

"You can highlight things in a kindle that can be easily erased" and "make notes." Look folks, GET A PENCIL.

My books have a number of distinct advantages over your iPad.

When the stewardess comes around and tells everyone to turn off their electronic devices, I just look around and laugh an evil laugh as all of these people with iPads and Nooks have to stop reading until we reach the right altitude. I, on the other hand, go on reading. The next time I'm on a plane and the stewardess gives this command, I'm going to flag her down and tell her that I can't find the on/off switch for my print copy of Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy and so what should I do?

She may call TSA on me, but it will have been worth it.

And when I get old and die, I can hand on my books to my children. If I have a Kindle, what am I going to do? Hand down an old Kindle that will undoubtedly be completely obsolete by them?

Each one of my books has a history. Some of them are previously owned books. The other day a student's paper fell out of the pages of one old book I had. It had the teacher's marks and the student's own amusing responses. It was from the 1950s. I don't remember anything falling out of any digital device I have ever owned that did not render it inoperable.

I can sometimes tell something about the previous owner of a book. I have a small set of philosophy books I bought once and I can tell that the man who owned them was a smoker. I have imagined that maybe it was a priest, sitting in his study, reading about Thomas Aquinas' metaphysics.

And if they do not have my own marks and notes, they have the marks and notes of others who owned them before. I buy a lot of used books, and a couple of years ago I bought a used copy of The Idea of Nature, by R. G. Collingwood, online. When I received it, I opened the cover and beheld a bookplate with the name Richard Niebuhr. Niebuhr had marked the book extensively, and so what I had received in the mail was not just a good book, but the thoughts about the book from one of the great Christian thinkers of the 20th century.

A book can almost have a personality. It was written by somebody, and it is about something. Neither of these things can be said of a Kindle, or a Nook, or an iPad. They are not written at all and are not about anything.

After libraries have all closed down or become free computer centers, there will still be people like me, feeling like monks in monasteries preserving books in their own private libraries.

Ten Dangerous Books for Boys, or, how to scandalize the Politically Correct reading establishment

It is now well-recognized that boys are not reading. What is the problem? Most commentators want to say that boys have an aversion to books. But the problem is quite the opposite: books have an aversion to boys. The New York Times Sunday Book Review's new edition features an article which attempts to address this problem. Here is the proffered solution:

[B]oys need to be approached individually with books about their fears, choices, possibilities and relationships — the kind of reading that will prick their dormant empathy, involve them with fictional characters and lead them into deeper engagement with their own lives. This is what turns boys into readers. 

Excuse me while I dab my eyes delicately with my hankerchief, touched as I am by this tender thought.

Okay, let's get something straight here: solution's like this are part of the problem. I'm normally against shooting spitwads in class, but I will make an exception in this one case. The entire educational establishment has tried for about 50 years to force boys into their effeminate mold. They've succeeded in evacuating literature of all the things that boys like in books: danger, bloodletting--and an iron moral code that is not preached at them in some smarmy way, but assumed in the moral universe of the book by the heroic characters, who not only believe it, but enforce it with a vengeance.

Boys have had to seek their pleasure in cheesy horror novels because the wimpy Cultural Authorities won't give them the adventure books that were once staples in every boy's life.

Of course, what writers like this really mean by "pricking their dormant empathy" is producing books about contemporary boys just like they perceive their prospective readers to be who are alienated, cynical, and disinterested. Exposing them to boys who are just like them, we are given to believe, will have some kind of therapeutic effect, the exact nature of which is never actually explained.

The thought that they should be exposed to heroic characters who represent an ideal that should be imitated has yet to cross their minds. And then they wonder why boys are interested.

This is supposed to work with girls, who unaccountably read authors like Judy Blume, an author, one writer has remarked, has been popular with many girls because she is "the only adult who didn't lie to them." But if you scratch the surface of such platitudes, what you discover is that being "honest" with children involves telling them lies, such as that we live in a basically amoral universe. Girls buy these books, of course, because girls do what they are told.


Boys, on the other hand, who have their own innate sense of justice, will have no part of this.  They are not interested in  getting in touch with themselves and others. The minute the politically correct schoolmarms approach, they head for the woods, where they are allowed to pick up sticks and pretend they are swords and fight monsters and hunt frogs and swing from trees--anything but be preached to by people whose sermons consist of politically correct twaddle.

The liberals have a routine: They produce books that spout the establishment agenda, but are so bad that they provoke opposition here and there in isolated places, the vast majority of which has no practical effect because most people just don't care. But it allows them to appear as if they are braving real dangers when, in fact, the worst thing that could happen to them is to break their fingernails on their keyboards as they write about how brave they are.

I'm not against letting these people portray themselves as brave, so long as they experience some actual pain, the perpetration of which I am not at all opposed.

Here are some books that predate the Conspiracy Against Boys. They are examples of a genre of books once deemed by Digby Anderson as "blood and morality" books. They're the books boys want but that the Reading Establishment frowns upon--because they don't lie. 


Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Am I embarrassed by the fact that the first book on my list of books for boys is by a woman? You bet I am. So why did I do it? There is a story about the battle of Salamis in which Xerxes proclaims, as he sits on a promontory watching the battle in which the Greek ships, some commanded by women, are defeating his forces, proclaims, "Their women fight like men, and our men fight like women." While many contemporary men write like women, Laura Ingalls Wilder writes like a man. She  was not primarily concerned with changing boys into the docile beings that women think they want in the way of men (but, when they finally see the actual results, are horrified). She portrayed boys as they really are: squirming, fighting, eating, mischievous, frequently lazy, often distracted, sometimes unconsciously cruel, but always lovable--not despite these things, but because of them. Writing of her husband's childhood, Wilder gives you a portrayal of boyhood in the mid-19th century, long before anyone thought that boys ought to be more like girls. The literary critic Mark Van Doren once said that a poet "is a namer, not a describer"--which is just another way of saying that adjectives are for sissies. Wilder (with a masculine penchant for nouns and verbs), produced pure poetry as she writes about her husband's childhood, simply telling what Almanzo did, where he did it, and what it was like, and who he did it with. She told (as we recount here the many things you can do with nouns) when, where and how he did it, how much of it he did, what was done to him--and what he had. Oh, and the dude can eat. Practically every chapter features Almanzo consuming mass quantities of his mother's home cooked food. In one of the other books in this series, he eats 21 pancakes in one sitting. Check it  out.

Call it Courage, by Armstrong Sperry. I submit that every boy be required to kill a large white shark with a knife as well as a charging wild boar to prove his manhood. That at least is what Mafatu has to do to prove his in this short but fabulous book about a Polynesian boy who is afraid of the sea after his mother dies, but who leaves in one of the village canoes, ends up on a deserted desert island, and in addition to killing wild beasts, has to deal with the threat of cannibals. It just doesn't get any better than this. He returns to his village with a necklace of sharks' teeth and boar tusks and they realize he has become a man. I told my boys when they were younger about the traditional Cothran rite of initiation into manhood, which involved tying them down on a hill of fire ants for 24 hours (just like the Indians), but, unfortunately, they were already too inured to my somewhat warped sense of humor by that time to take me seriously. They also pointed out that there are no fire ants in Kentucky and that no Cothran had ever actually had to do this. Obstacles that could be overcome, I argued, but to no avail. Every time I hear they need a book to read, I go get a copy of this book and give it to them, at which point they remind me that they have read it before and that, anyway, this is the tenth time I have tried to hand them this same book. Too many times, fathers are simply unappreciated.


Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson. This is the book that Henry Fonda's crotchety character in On Golden Pond makes his grandson read when he (the boy who has been too long under the influence of the effeminacies of the city) comes for a visit. Stevenson was a great writer. Period. Jim Hawkins' widowed mother runs the Admiral Benbow. One day, Billy Bones, who, it turns out, has a treasure map sought by a bevy of less than savory pirates, shows up at the inn. Once the pirates are dispatched by several certified males who come to help, the adventure begins as they go hunting for the treasure, whose location is indicated by the map. There is gold, skulls and crossbones, rum, and "yo, ho, ho"s--all the necessary elements of a respectable pirate story. Jim becomes a man in the process. It is a book that will scandalize your local women's studies professor--which is just one of the very good reasons for reading it. All of Stevenson's books are good. Boys may also enjoy his Twice Told Tales.

The Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow, by Allan French. This is the heroic tale of an Icelandic boy whose father has been killed, who is betrayed by those close to him, and who goes on a quest to avenge his father's death. It's got swords, bows and arrows--and, in a shocking turn of events that would force the evacuation of the campus at any teachers college, actually uses them in physical violence against the bad guys for a good cause. Allan French, I am told, was a member in good standing of the Kolbieters, a group of Oxford scholars and others who translated Norse sagas together for fun. His The Red Keep is also good.

The Mark of Zorro, Johnston McCulley. Somehow this story made it into a modern movie, although the effeminate cultural barbarians dutifully sterilized it of all the aristocratic patriotism in the original, leaving Zorro an oversexed and overgrown adolescent. Dispense with the Antonio Banderas movie. Even the Disney series (great as it was) does not approximate the original pulp fiction work of McCulley. What a great yarn. Returning from school in Spain, where, unbeknownst even to his own family and the girl he loves, he has become an expert with a sword, Don Diego de la Vega rejoins his father in Old California, pretending to have become a sissified dandy. He becomes the scourge of the corrupt army officers who are persecuting the poor as he becomes, in disguise, Zorro (Spanish for "the Fox"). Your school librarian (do they still have actual books in your school library?) will need smelling salts as your child reads of this son of a nobleman ("Boo, hiss," they will say) stands up for the poor and dispossessed--and who, horror of horrors, stands squarely on the side of the Church, which is portrayed in a solidly positive light in the character of Fray Filipe. And there is an extra bonus: there are sixty other Zorro stories, many, I am told, as good as the first and all equally anathema to the politically correct Cultural Authorities.

The Cat of Bubastes, by H. A. Henty. Henty wrote over 100 books, all of which featured a young teenage boy (he is given different names in the different books, but is essentially the same character) who is witness to various great historical characters and events. In Under Drake's Flag, it is Ferdinand Drake, the British privateer accosting the Spanish fleet, in The Young Carthaginian, he accompanies Hannibal as he plagues the Romans across the Italian peninsula. In this book (my favorite of the ones we have read), Amuba, a young prince of his tribe, is taken prisoner and enslaved in the household of the High Priest of Egypt. The sacred Cat of Bubastes--the official cat god of the Egyptians--has died and must be replaced with another one, chosen by the priest for its special qualities. But Chebron, son of the High Priest, accidentally kills the cat, setting off this harrowing tale. The bonus in this one is that the Pharoah is Thutmose III, portrayed here as the Pharaoh of the Exodus, and therefore Moses himself is part of the story. This book contains quite a number of fascinating (and historically accurate) observations about the Egyptian religion. Every boy should be given a good dose of Henty in order to inoculate him against the Plague of the Feminizers.

Little Britches: Father and I were Ranchers, by Ralph Moody. Moody wrote a number of stories (all excellent) about growing up in Colorado at the beginning of the 20th century--and other places, after his mother, upon the death of his father, moves them back east. Ralph's father grew up in a deaf household, and says little. But in one scene, Ralph comes home from school with his clothing torn. He admits to his indignant mother that he has been in a fight with a bully at school, to which his mother responds (in a remark that will cause palpitations of delight among the ) that he should never, ever fight at school no matter what the circumstances. But that night, as he is milking the cows, his laconic father asks, "Heard you got in a fight today at school." "Yes, sir," responds Ralph. "Did you lick 'im?" his father asks calmly, not bothering to stop with his own work. "Yes, sir." "Good," says his father. Nothing else was said. It made me remember one of my sons, who was having a problem with a boy at school who was constantly taunting him, asked me whether he could just slug the kid. I told him that if he did, the principal would throw him out of school for a week and that I would ground him on top of that, but that, if he needs it, it might be worth the cost. You can continue on with Man of the Family, The Home Ranch, Mary Emma & Company, and Shaking the Nickel Bush. And don't miss Fields of Home, where Ralph spends a summer with his crotchety, unpleasant grandfather who, despite his dyspeptic demeanor, teaches Ralph lessons he will remember for the rest of his life.

A Texas Ranger, by N. A. Jennings. This book is part of the Lakeside Classics series that has been published by R. R. Donnelly and Sons Printing company once a year since 1902. These books are fairly rare but each one is a primary source account of American history. This one is an autobiographical account of Jennings, who, writing later in his life, recounts his time as a Texas Ranger in the late 1800s, a time of trouble along the Texas-Mexican border very similar to what the region is experiencing today. I just got back from McAllan, Texas, which lies right across the border from Reynoso, where drug cartels have engaged in full battles in the city streets. Some of the violence has spilled over into Texas. I asked a priest I was with who was the principal of a school in Reynoso if it was as bad as the news accounts had made it sound. "It is worse," he responded. In Jennings time, gangs from Mexico were terrorizing settlers along the border, and the Texas Rangers were called in. Forget Walker, this is the real story of real men who, with a good horse and a good gun, executed justice on the frontier. In one scene, a new ranger, wet behind the ears, joins the group. That night, they take him on a snipe hunt, leaving him (as veterans of the game have traditionally done) wandering out in the middle of nowhere (in this case the desert) to find his way home, no snipes actually being available. The young man returned several hours later, at which point the others, safely cooling their heels around the fire and snickering, ask him whether he had caught the snipe. "Yup," he said, holding up a wriggling burlap sack in his hand. As they traded questioning glances among themselves, the rookie suddenly flung the contents of the bag around the fire. It had been full of rattlesnakes. For the pranksters it was a mostly sleepless night. This book will cause equally sleepless nights for the Feminizers.

Old Squire's Farm, by C. A. Stephans. Stephans was a writer and editor at The Youth's Companion, one of the great 19th century family magazines, from which these stories were taken. He recounts his youth, which he spent mostly in the company of his cousins and grandparents. He and his cousins were orphans of the Civil War after the three sons of the Old Squire (their grandfather) and his wife were killed in the war. The old folks raise them on their farm in rural Maine. The girls help do chores and cook, and the boys work hard and get into trouble. The accounts of their adventures at the little school, building a fortified sled to drive through the gauntlet of hostile boys in the settlement down the road, the summer swims in the watering hole, and tricking the mean bull down the road into disturbing a hornets nest are pure Americana. In one scene, as the boys are sheering sheep, a young man shows up at the barn door looking for work. His dress tells them he is from the city. With a twinkle in his eye, the oldest of the boys (the smartest and most mischievous), tells the newcomer that they might be able to use him, but that, in order for them to see whether he is capable, he must first shave the pig. In a hysterically funny scene, the young man from the city, with a determination that impresses them all, actually does it. The Old Squire, returning from town, realizes what the boys have done, and suppressing his own mirth, hires the determined young man. There are stories of sorry and stories of love; stories of hardship and stories of laughter. And then there is the final scene, in which, years after the cousins have all grown up and left, they all return to the farm to surprise their lonely grandparents, who they see, as they peer through the window, eating supper all by themselves, bereft of all whom they have loved. At this point, even male readers are allowed to cry (but only here). They realize that one of them must forsake his own career to care for the people who sacrificed their own life for them. And there is a sequel: Skating on Ice, which is just as good.

King Solomon's Mines, H. Rider Haggard. Haggard is probably the greatest of all the old adventure writers. His style influenced Tolkien, and was popular and beloved in his time. He wrote this book on a bet. Stevenson had just written Treasure Island, to much popular acclaim. He wagered with a friend that he could write an adventure book that would outsell Stevenson's work. He won the bet. Surprisingly, the book is still in print, despite the fact that it portrays blacks as primitive African tribesmen, when everyone knows that that is a historical myth and that precolonial Africa was more advanced culturally that Europe at its cultural zenith. I was shocked when several years ago, the movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen featured, as one of the four literary heroes returned from the grave, Sean Connery in the role of Alan Quatermain, the  protagonist of King Solomon's Mines. I had assumed the book had been entirely forgotten. Mines was written when Africa was still the Dark Continent, mysterious, not fully explored, and dangerous. It was also a time when lost civilizations, long dead, were being uncovered. King Tut's tomb had just been discovered, and the discovery by Schliemann of the lost gold of Troy was still fresh on everyone's mind. Haggard's literary innovation was to have his characters discover great civilizations too, but with a twist: they were still there, alive and thriving. Haggard also wrote about women, mostly of the disquieting and intimidating type, who enjoy the unfair advantage of supernatural powers which they use to strike fear into the hearts of men. It's kinda creepy. C. S. Lewis' favorite fantasy book (with the possible exception of George MacDonald's Phantastes) was Haggard's She Who Must Be Obeyed, although I much prefer Morningstar, a book which Roger Lancelyn Green has called the "greatest evocation of ancient Egypt ever written."  Haggard also coauthored, along with the great writer of Fairy Tales, Andrew Lang, The World's Desire, a sequel to Homer's Odyssey, and which features Helen of Troy, whose fabled beauty is so great it is literally physically debilitating to the man who beholds her. Haggards's historical fantasies are vivid, exotic, and beautifully written. His stories are as evocative as their titles: Montezuma's Daughter, Nada the Lily, Alan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, People of the Mist, Ivory Child, Treasure of the Lake, Queen Sheba's Ring, Maiwa's Revenge, Pearl-Maiden, Red Eve, The Ghost Kings. Haggard spent much time in South Africa, and combines a classic literary style with the African tradition of storytelling. And don't miss his Zulu trilogy: Marie, Child of Storm, and Finished.

The Rhetoric of Amazement: What children's literature tells us about the world

The following is the text of my article "The Rhetoric of Amazement," which appears in the Summer issue of the Classical Teacher magazine:

Dr. Seuss is my favorite modern philosopher. I say this because of the view of the world his poetry betrays. Dr. Seuss writes what has been called “nonsense” verse. Yet it may be the books like Dr. Seuss that, in the end, make the most sense.

In Dr. Seuss books, we encounter creatures that we are tempted to think God forgot to create: creatures that will have you so surprised you’ll “swallow your gum.” You’ll ask, when you see these strange animals come, “Where do you suppose they get things like that from?”

We discover, with his help, the tizzle-topped Tufted Mazurka, whose neck is so long that if he swallows an oat the first day of April, “it has to go down such a very long way that it gets to his stomach the 15th of May.”

Hike all the way up to the mountains of Tobsk, and one finds the singular dwelling place of a thing called an Obsk, “A sort of a kind of a Thing-a-ma-Bobsk/Who only eats rhubarb and corn on the cobsk.”

Dr. Seuss, of course, follows Edward Lear in the pantheon of “nonsense” writers. Lear, the author of such words as:

There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, ‘It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!’

Along with the Pobble Who Has No Toes, the Pelican Chorus, the Quangle-Wangle’s Hat, the Owl and the Pussycat, and, of course, the Jumblies (“who went to sea in a sieve”), we have an entire bestiary of the seemingly bizarre. But, even as we are lured into believing that we are in another world than our own, we all of a sudden realize that it is our own world we are being introduced to—or, more accurately, reintroduced to.

“It is Mother Goose,” says John Goldthwaite, in his excellent book, The Natural History of Make Believe, “who first introduces us to who we are in the world … Our infant imaginations are jollied awake as she translates the toes on our feet into pigs going to market, sends a cow over the moon, and tucks the world’s biggest family into bed in a shoe.”

What is it that nonsense verse and nursery rhymes—indeed, all imaginative fiction—tell us about the world? Imaginative literature employs what I call the “rhetoric of amazement.” And lying behind it is something deeper: metaphysics of amazement—a view of reality that is implicitly transmitted to the reader—a view that underlies these books and that is necessary in understanding what this kind of literature does.

What is the world like, according to this literature? I think I can state it in one simple sentence: the world is enchanted.

We have often heard that “familiarity breeds contempt,” and indeed this is true. We take the world for granted. But what imaginative literature does is this: it turns things upside down and helps us to see them as if for the first time. The world is enchanted, and, in order to see it, we only need a little help from Mother Goose and her friends.

What Dr. Seuss and Edward Lear and the writers of fairy tales and other imaginative literature do is to take the created order apart and put it back together in new and unusual ways, allowing us to be surprised again at the things of this world. We are introduced to elfland only so that we can look in wonder once again on what Lord Dunsany calls “the fields that we know.”

“The mind is stubborn in its need for order,” says Goldthwaite. “Upset its expectations with a spiel of gibberish and, like a turtle looking to right itself, it will seek the stability of meaning every time. Nonsense might be defined more accurately as a flirtation with disorder, a turning upside down of the world for the pleasure of seeing it come right side up again.”

There is no greater defense of the rhetoric of amazement than the essay, “The Ethics of Elfland,” by G. K. Chesterton. “My first and last philosophy,” said Chesterton, “that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery … The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.” Thus begins his great explanation of the rhetoric of amazement.

“This elementary wonder,” he says, “is not a mere fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this.” Enchantment is a metaphysical reality, and fairy tales serve merely as a way to reveal it. “It is not earth that judges heaven,” he says, “but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticized elfland, but elfland that criticized the earth.”

In explaining this philosophy, Chesterton first draws our attention to certain facts about the world that do not contain their own explanation:

I am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfland, but with the whole spirit of its law, which I learnt before I could speak, and shall retain when I cannot write. I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts. It might be stated this way. There are certain sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that reason and that necessity. For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are older than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) necessary that Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Sisters. There is no getting out of it … If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller is the father of Jack. Cold reason decrees it from her awful throne: and we in fairyland submit … that is true rationalism, and fairyland is full of it.

But then Chesterton turns his attention from the true rationalism of fairyland, and looks upon the irrationalism of our own world:

But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened—dawn and death and so on—as if they were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail.

One of the themes of modern thought is a sort of mechanistic materialist determinism: the idea that the world is nothing more than a vast, self-contained machine. This view sees everything, including the repetitions in nature, as merely a physical unfolding of what came before:

These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the apple. That is true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike. We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions.

If Chesterton sounds fanciful here, we should remember that this argument had been made 150 years before by the 18th century British empirical philosopher David Hume. Hume argued that
just because we see one event repeatedly follow another, we have no basis on which to say that the first thing “causes” the second. No one has witnessed a cause; he has only witnessed event A repeatedly followed by event B. The belief in causation involves the assumption that the future is always like the past. Since B has always followed A in the past, therefore it will do so in the future. But we have no strictly rational justification for saying these sequences will occur in the future.

Hume’s argument shows that, from the point of view of the materialist, there is no basis upon which to believe in causation, since causation itself is a metaphysical, not a physical thing. From a non-theistic perspective, there is no way to justify science, which relies precisely on the assumptions Hume refuted. There is no rational basis for causation in the strictly mechanistic world that exists outside of Christian belief. Modern scientistic thought has given up on metaphysics, and because of this it has found itself in an intellectual cul-de-sac out of which it cannot reason itself.

Chesterton continues:

The man of science says, “Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall”; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The witch in the fairy tale says, “Blow the horn, and the ogre’s castle will fall”; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause… She does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary mental connection between a horn and a falling tower. But the scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple reaching the ground. They do really talk as if they had found not only a set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those facts. They do talk as if the connection of two strange things physically connected them philosophically. They feel that because one incomprehensible thing constantly follows another incomprehensible thing the two together somehow make up a comprehensible thing. Two black riddles make a white answer.

Science has come before us in all its formal regalia—its beakers and test tubes and laboratory smocks—and announced that, because it knows that things happen in a certain way, it therefore knows why they happen that way. But knowing that, and knowing why are two entirely different things.

Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the “Laws of Nature.” When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is magic. It is not a “law,” for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen. It is no argument for unalterable law … that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. … All the terms used in the science books, “law,” “necessity,” “order,” “tendency,” and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched.

Those who find Chesterton’s reasoning unscientific in its tone might be shocked to find that “The Ethics of Elfland” was included by Martin Gardner, the former editor of Scientific American, in his anthology, Great Essays in Science, along with essays by Darwin, Eddington, Fermi, and Einstein.

This state of the world, Chesterton argues—the fact that it is enchanted—is the root of the amazement we do or should feel toward the world. It is an instinct that we have as humans, an instinct that we associate with children, who have not forgotten it. When we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales—because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him.

One of the functions of fairy tales and nursery rhymes is to awaken what Chesterton calls the “ancient instinct of astonishment.”

These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

“Every work of make-believe,” says Goldthwaite, “bears the same implicit message. Its miracles may be mysterious like [George] MacDonald’s, they may be tricks for fun like Helen Bannermans’, but they all announce to a credulous audience that the world is possessed of a quality that is beyond empirical knowing.”

But what is the nature of this empirical knowing? If there is not a mechanism behind the universe, then what is there? What is the origin of the enchantment we see in the world? Again, Chesterton has our answer:

Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. …I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were wilful. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.

This world, Chesterton thought, may not be the cold outworking of some dead mechanism. It may instead be the theatre of the Divine Magician who, like an excited child, wants to see things
again and again:

They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grownup people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain.

The rhetoric of amazement is, then, as we said at the outset, based on a metaphysics of amazement. Our attitude toward the world, the fact that we treat it as if it were enchanted, is based on the belief that it actually is enchanted. And it is only because we believe in God, who is the Divine Magician, always demanding—and bringing about—another encore.

We can, then, take this rhetoric of amazement into our classrooms—and our homes—in the confidence that we are not just engaged in some fanciful exercise in foolishness, but that we
are, in fact, making our children see the world as it really is.

I think my students wonder about me sometimes. Every once in a while, in the middle of class, I’ll get a call on the cell phone and it will be my wife, and she’ll give me the usual greeting, and say, “Hi, Daddy Bear.” And sometimes, oblivious of my surroundings, I will respond with the matching greeting, “Hi, Momma Bear.” And my students will look at each other, either thinking it is extremely humorous or, alternatively, that I might need professional help.

And sometimes, when I come home after a particularly grueling day at school (what my wife would term, “Daddy and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”), I’ll plop down on the couch, and my wife will look over, and say, “Sad Dad, Bad Had.” But come Saturday morning, when the hard week is over, we sometimes have pancakes, and we try to remember how many Almonzo and his brother ate in their little house on the prairie.

In the summer, when the corn in the farmer’s field behind our house gets to a certain height, and there’s nothing to do and the kids are getting underfoot and into trouble (“Wild Things,” we call them), they are told to go play in Farmer Maggot’s field.

And when the beans have begun to spring up in the garden, and Peter Rabbit is having his fill (such as was the case several weeks ago), Farmer MacGregor goes for his gun, making him highly unpopular among the little MacGregors. But these beans are worth defending, since they are magic beans—not because they grow a giant beanstalk that allows us to climb into the sky and sneak into a giant’s house. No. They are magic because we put them into the ground and they somehow, in a way that can only be explained by the fact that we live in an enchanted world, spring to life in new bean plants.

When things need to be cleaned up around the house, (usually because there are things people have left out—we don’t know which people because no one seems to remember leaving them out, causing us to attribute them to You Know Who—Mr. Nobody) and the children are dawdling, my wife will exclaim, “Let’s go! Spit-spot!” because that’s what a certain nanny says to Michael and Jane in a certain house at 17 Cherry Tree Lane, “where the houses run down one side and the Park runs down the other and the cherry-trees go dancing right down the middle.”

Recently, our veterinarian convinced my wife (when I was away on a business trip last year) to take two cats that needed a good home—just like it happened in Hilda Van Stockum’s book, Friendly Gables. They were orphaned when their mother was killed in a tornado, and had been raised thus far in a cage with only each other for company. When they arrived in their new
home, they quickly warmed to their new freedom and proceeded to terrorize everyone in the house by chasing each other all day and long into the night. For several days, the question before the family was what to name them. But there was no doubt in my mind what to call them.

They were Thing One and Thing Two.

When you want to express affection for a child around my house you say, “I’ll eat you up I love you so.” When the dog comes in out of the rain, “You never yet met a pet, I bet, as wet as they let this wet pet get.” When someone is not nice, “their heart is three sizes too small.” And you don’t play with the telephone, because you might call Australia.

And, of course, by that time it’s getting late, so we spank the children all soundly and send them to bed. But it’s okay. Because they are where someone loves them best of all.

In children’s imaginative literature, says Goldthwaite, “the miraculous becomes real by association with the mundane and the mundane is transformed by its association with the miraculous. When you hold a volume of Mother Goose in your hand,” he concludes, “you are holding a weight of proof that the world is real and a thing of make-believe both.”

A few years ago, my youngest son came up to me with a little plastic star. He wondered where it came from. I informed him that it must have fallen from the sky, an explanation he readily accepted. So I got out the ladder, placed it on my back lawn, and put the star back. I later noticed the same occurrence when we read Mary Poppins.

I'm not sure, but I think P. L. Travers got the idea from me.

Down with Shrek--and other issues involving Disney

My friend Andrew Kern writes at Quiddity against the movie Shrek, a review in which I am in significant agreement:

Humble comment number one: This movie should never be watched by anyone under any circumstances.

Here is the comment I posted there, however, taking issue with his issue with Disney:

I agree with you wholeheartedly about this movie. The other aspect of this is that Shrek plays off of an assumed knowledge of fairy tales that many children today simply don’t possess. In many cases all they know about fairy tales are the satires of them. They don’t know the story of the Three Little Pigs; but they know the story of the Three Little Pigs from the Wolf’s Perspective. This is very tragic.

But you talk about “every fairy tale ever ruined by Disney.” I know it is fashionable to bash on Disney, but I find their early animated movies to be well within the spirit of the traditional fairy tale. Tell me the problem with Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty or Pinocchio. I think even Beauty and The Beast was quite well done. And don’t miss Disney’s Tall Tale, a fundamentally agrarian movie that exalts home and family–and tradition. Not to mention that it is an apologetic for the poetic.

I know many people who point out that Disney completely changed the ending of Han’s Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid,” but, quite frankly, its ending needed to be changed–as do many of the endings of Andersen’s pessimistic tales. They’re obviously not comedies, but they’re also not tragedies, since there is no satisfaction in the losses that punctuate their endings.

If someone is going to perpetrate the pessimism of his unrequited love affairs (some with other men), I’d prefer it not be done in a fairy tale.

Sorry, I’m being too hard on Andersen, but I would love to know your reasons for bashing on Disney–at least if you mean to include classic Disney films.

Read the rest here.

Did J. D. Salinger go to Heaven?

J. D. Salinger is dead at 91. He is most famous for Catcher in the Rye, a book about teenage angst and alienation. Several commentators have said it is also about the protagonist's "loss of innocence," but that is clearly an overstatement, since there seemed little room in Holden Caulfield's personality for anything but cynicism and self-consciousness.

It's always hard to determine how much a cultural artifact influences the culture and how much it is influenced by the culture. Catcher in the Rye, like so many other things, seemed to share in both. There was obviously an audience for it, although one wonders how much of its support was confined to the intellectual elites who spend the time they occupy in our important cultural institutions undermining the authority of the institutions from which they draw their livelihood. For such people, Holden Caulfield is a hero, rather than a cautionary example.

That would at least explain why the New York Times thought so highly of it when it came out.

Whatever it is that produced the book, it obviously had some influence on the rest of us. I remember someone once pointing out--I think it was George F. Will--that the first time anyone ever appeared before the public (albeit in Caulfield's case it was in the textual mode) with a baseball cap worn backwards was Holden Caulfield. It was a fitting expression of the alienated arrogance that characterized Caulfield--and those who now gush effusively in appreciation to Salinger for creating him.

I don't think I have ever heard anyone I knew say they actually liked the book. I didn't like it when I read it in high school, and I don't remember any of my classmates who did either. But it was a work which has taken its place in the canon of literature maintained by those who don't believe in canons of literature. In fact, the very idea that Holden Caulfield, a scourge of the adult establishment, should be idolized by the very adult establishment he railed against is an irony too delicious not to take notice of.

Leave it to the Onion to capture this irony perfectly:

CORNISH, NH—In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. "He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers," said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don't have to look at them for four years. "There will never be another voice like his." Which is exactly the lousy kind of ******** thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it's just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything.

Maybe that's why Salinger became a recluse, spurning the literary establishment that lauded him. If so, maybe he made it to Heaven. Hell for him was here, having to listen to these people.

First Lesson in How to Become a Human Being: The Best Children's Books of All Time

There is a knock down, drag out debate on the worst children's books ever over at the Guardian, and the author of the post gives the award to Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree and The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg.

My own nomination is The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. There is nothing wrong with the content of this book--and likewise nothing remarkable about it. The problem is with how it is written. I think the problem is that there are some books whose reputation is based, not on the book's quality, but on its place in the history of children's literature. The Five Little Peppers, is, I think, one of these. I tried to read it to my kids once and just had to put it down because you just couldn't read it out loud, the prose was so bad. It is notable only for position as one of the first books written with children in mind. The same is the case with Charles Kingley's Water Babies, and equally atrocious book that is remarkable only for the author's literary pioneering spirit.

But I would like to put the emphasis on the positive here. What are the best children's books? Here's my list of books (in order of reading age) that we have read over and over as a family, and which never get old:

• Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown. We read this to our children when they were very young before they went to bed. There was something comforting and peaceful about the old woman, and the comb, and the brush, and the bowl full of mush. And what fun we had trying to find the mouse on every page.
• Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss wrote nonsense, the value of which, I think, is that it turns the world upside down so that you can see the wonder of it anew. This, along with Dr. Seuss's other books (with the possible exception of the Cat in the Hat), create a whole Seussian world which provides a comment on this one. For an excellent explication of the value of nonsense literature, read Chesterton's great essay, "On Nonsense."
• Are You my Mother?, by P. D. Eastman. I am willing to admit that this one may be the one book on this list without universal appeal, and is possibly meaningful to me because it captured me when I was a child. But when my wife is not feeling as accommodating as she normally is, and a child complains that he is not getting his way, my wife will stand straight up and say, "I am not your mother, I am a snort!" And that seems to work pretty well.
• Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling captured the mythological spirit in these jataka tales. "How the Elephant Got is Trunk," was a continued delight to our children. These are stories that feed the imagination.
• Betsy-Tacy, by Maud Hart Lovelace. These stories take the reader back to the life of the kind of small town that used to be common in this country and that, I am afraid is almost extinct. The prose is that magical writing that evokes the poetry of simplicity. Don't miss Betsy's hysterical attempt to make "everything stew."
• Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (as well as most of the other books in the Little House series). Wilder will go down as one of the great American authors. Mark Van Doren once said that the job of the poet is to name things. In this sense the Little House books are pure poetry. Somehow she manages to bring the seemingly mundane things of daily existence into life.
• Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White. This book, as well as Trumpet of the Swan (I didn't like Stuart Little as well) are, again, magical books. E. B. White was one of the great prose craftsmen, and these are his best writings.
• The Moffats, by Eleanor Estes. Don't be fooled by the Newbery Award Estes received for Ginger Pye, which wasn't particularly good. The Newbery Committee did this because it felt guilty for not giving Estes the award for the earlier Moffats books, which include The Middle Moffat, and Rufas M. These books magically transport you back to the life of a quintessential American small town. Oh, and they are illustrated by the inimitable Louis Slobodkin, one of the great children's illustrators.
• The Jack Tales, by Richard Chase. This and Chase's Grandfather Tales are retellings of the European fairy tales after having been filtered through the mountain imaginations of generations of Appalachian story tellers. The clever Jack defeats all enemies, and does so without breaking a sweat. If you've ever had any contact with mountain politicians, you'll recognize the cleverness that is valued in the mountains.
• The Good Master, by Kate Seredy. This and The Singing Tree are stories of a family living in the Balkans during World War I. They are magical stories of a patriarch who watches over those--his family and those under his charge--as a war rages around them. There is nothing here of the modern obsession with everyone being equal. The good master is not equal, he's just good, and those around him thrive on his goodness.
• The Winged Watchman, by Hilda von Stockum. Hilda von Stockum wrote a number of books, including two series, the first, The Mitchells, and the second, the Pegeen books. They are all wonderful. And they take place, as did her life, in three different parts of the world. This takes place in Holland, the Mitchells in Canada, and the Pegeen books in Ireland. von Stockum captures the uniqueness of each place.
• Penrod, by Booth Tarkington. An Indiana version of Tom Sawyer, and at least as good. Penrod is a boy who is having trouble figuring out the rules of the adult world, and the adults are having trouble figuring out why Penrod can't figure them out. Tarkington, one of the great and under appreciated American writers, penned this rumination on boyhood in the early 20th century, and produced one of the funniest books ever written. Like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, this is a book about a "bad" boy (really, an ignorant boy). And, like all such books, it helps your own "bad" boy at home see himself in the third person. He sees how silly he is by seeing how Tom and Huck and Penrod look to the outside observer.
• Papa's Wife, by Thyra Ferre Bjorn. Papa's Wife is an thoroughly and explicitly Christian book. It is about a woman who is the maid of a Swedish minister in Lapland, who then moves to the United States, and eventually marries the minister who joins her in the U.S. Their life together with their children is an endearing and wonderful story.
• Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt. If you could drink of the Fountain of Youth, would you? We never think of what it would do to the meaning of life if it didn't have an end. A young girl discovers a fountain in a wood near her house that a group of traveling people have already discovered. She meets them, and the boy, about her age tries to convince her to drink with him so they can be 17 years old together forever. But she refuses. The final scene, when the boy, many years later (and still 17) travel back through town and visits the graveyard, is a devastatingly poignant moment that puts life in perspective in a way few other things do.
• Ann of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery. I was introduced to these stories through the excellent PBS television retellings. But as good as the television movies were, the books are even better. A young red-headed arrives in a Canadian village to meet her adopted family, an old maid her brother. Despite her precociousness, she quickly endears herself to her stuffy new family. A bit like the also excellent Pollyanna.
• The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien. What can you say about Tolkien? One of the few authors who is able to create a world that seeming has been there forever. The Lord of the Rings, one of the greatest books ever written is, of course, better. But this book is the introduction to Middle Earth. An old fashioned dragon story that will also serve as a great way to help children understand Beowulf when they read it later in life.
• The Jungle Books, by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling had a mythic sense that comes out clearly in these books. Those who were introduced to the Jungle Book through the Disney movie will have to simply erase their memory banks and start over. The book is nothing like the movie. They are serious investigations into the meaning of life and the nature of humanity. Kipling's world is a place where "the Law of the Jungle and the sea are your only teachers" (to quote Dylan). Kipling has an Old Testament sense that pervades the books from "The Water Truce" to the "The Elephant Dance." I have a hard time with books in which there are talking animals, but Kipling's is one of the few (along with the excellent The Wind and the Willows) that pull this off by portraying the particular kinds of animals as the kind of people they really would be if they had human characteristics. Baloo is what a bear would be if her were human. And everyone has met the Bandar-Log somewhere on the road of life.
• The Old Squire's Farm, by C. A. Stephens. An old Maine farmer and his wife lose their three sons in the Civil War, and all the children come to live. These stories, published in the Youth's Companion in the 1800s, are true stories of the author's life growing up with the Old Squire and his wife in 19th century New England. They are among the most moving, funny, interesting, and compelling stories you will ever read. The final story, in which the children, all grown and moved away, come back home to decide who must stay with their now lonely grandparents in their last days will bring tears to your eyes. The sequel, Sailing on the Ice, is equally as good.
• Men of Iron, by Howard Pyle. Every boy should read this book. It is the coming of age story of a young nobleman whose father has been disgraced and who has been sent to the castle of a man who, unbeknownst to the boy, is a friend of his father's who is watching him become a man. The boy makes his way from a page to a squire to a knight, and does so by rebelling against the fagging system in the House similar to that which later pervaded the British public school system. He eventually avenges his father in a final fight scene that is one of the best action sequences in literature.

When I come to write my book, How to Become a Human Being, I will include a chapter on these books. This is what it's about folks.