Covering a manifesto from Ivan Illich, a literary maze by Vladimir Nabokov, short stories by Lampedusa, and one of Chesteron’s most classic works.
In being true to the name of this blog, here are a few notes about books I’ve finished this month. Along with a few initial impressions of my own, I’ve also included a quote to whet your appetite. In the comments below, let me know:
What you read last month? What you’re looking forward to reading this month?
Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich
No one writes manifestos like they used to. Thankfully, in 1971 Ivan Illich gave us his damning critique not only of the school system itself but of the “schooled” society which resulted from it. Both of them are not only around today, but worse than they were in 1971 when he penned this work.
Education and schooling are two different concepts for Illich. Education is the natural exercise of man’s inquiry in the world while schooling is the procrustean moulding of man through predictable and convenient doctrinal formulations. One encourages wonder, creativity, and exploration in the world while the other demands conformity and submission to an authority.
The corruption of education into schooling is a part of a “professionalization” taking place in the wider society. One cannot not heal himself or his family on his own—he must pay licensed professionals called “doctors.” One cannot not teach himself or his family on his own—he must pay licensed professionals called “teachers.” In our commercial society, we find ways to turn these most essential aspects of humanity—the health of our bodies and the health of our minds—into commodities and fungible goods in the mindless cycle of consumption and exchange. Given how much debt has been incurred in the name of “education” in our own day, his critique is perhaps more intense than when it was first written.
But for Illich, schooling is not only an economic question but also a religious one. Schooling’s methodology involves the obligatory assembly of people in order to adopt the dogmatic answers of a given authority, which means it has become the compulsory pseudo-religion of our secular society.
Along with his critique, Illich also offers a vision of how education might change to facilitate real human flourishing. He contrasts the funnels of schooling with his own image of “webs.” In these learning webs we find four main elements:
“Reference Services to Educational Objects” or access to the materials and sources necessary for pursuing particular subjects;
“Skill Exchanges” which let people list their skills and let them serve as models from whom others can learn;
“Peer-Matching” which lets people form spontaneous groups united around common topics;
“Reference Services to Educators-at-Large” or a directory of mentors, professionals, freelancers, who have been vetted and recommended by other learners in the web.
Given his image of a “web,” of course I wonder: how easily all of this can implemented in our Internet age? Are we doing it right now? Here on this blog?
Deschooling Society struck me as a prophetic work that was ahead of its time. Now, the economics of our current schooling model give us many broke, frustrated teachers and many indebted, frustrated students. Now, postmodernism has run its course and we have entered a new realm of info tribalism with its “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and various other memes and scripts that saturate both our news and our curricula. Finally, now we finally have an Internet which can facilitate Illich’s model of learning webs. Now is the time to read this book again.
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire is many things: a poem, a commentary on the poem, a detective story, a memoir, a history of a fanciful kingdom. Above all, it’s a maze of allusions and illusions. Depending on your disposition, this will either be enticing or frustrating. Personally, I found it to vacillate between both. That being said, many people I trust have recommended this novel to me for years; effusive in their love this work, some have called it a “perfect novel.” That being said, it has a very imperfect narrator.
Our Charles Kinbote is an obsessive and impish person. Again, depending on your personality, this can either be an entertaining or grating narrative experience. And again, I personally found it to vacillate between both. Perhaps that was how Nabokov intended it. In any case, his prose is always a treat, even when it meanders into the tiresome preoccupations of Kinbote (or perhaps Nabokov himself).
As a stunning achievement in metafiction, your experience of the novel will depend largely on the perspective you take. Reading the work from the standpoint of the poem or the standpoint of the commentary result in two very different experiences. (You can even read it from the perspective of the index!)
While being a man of “Strong Opinions,” Nabokov could come across as exacting, magisterial, or even dogmatic in his explication of literary works. Contrary to all of that, the real art of Pale Fire is how it invites various perspectives on not only the nature of the work but the nature of life itself and the world we find ourselves within.
Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse—I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.
The Professor & the Siren (and Other Stories) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
When I read The Leopard by Lampedusa last month, it immediately became one of my favorite books of the year. After such a masterful novel, I wanted to discover how Lampedusa fared in his small collection of short stories. As far as I can gather, these came before his novel, and they often come across at fledging attempts at what will come to full form in The Leopard: elegant descriptions of a character’s emotional states, personifications of landscapes, and—of course—an acute sense of the comings and goings in Sicilian society.
What I wasn’t expecting, however, was his capacity for magical realism. One shouldn’t be surprised that The Professor & The Siren describes exactly what his story contains. That being said: having a living, mythical creature pull herself up from the waters into a dusty Greek professor’s boat still came to me as a surprise. This flight of fantasy didn’t seem to square with the mundane realism I often saw Lampedusa use to describe Sicilian aristocrats and peasants.
But the more I thought about it, the more I questioned that assumption. Instead, the professor’s transcendental love for the siren reminded me of so many of Lampedusa’s casual musings on the edges of The Leopard: Don Fabrizio’s infatuation with the cycles of the stars in the heavens; Don Fabrizio’s feeling the sands of time slipping away to be reconstituted in some other infinity. Lampedusa is never mundane.
Rather than distracting me from what I loved about him, The Professor & The Siren cast Lampedusa’s work in a new, shimmering light—refracted through an otherworldly, underwater realm. He savors his thoughts and becomes intoxicated with ideas.
We spoke of those magic summer nights, looking out over the gulf of Castellammare, when the stars are mirrored in the sleeping sea, and how, lying on your back among the mastic trees, your spirit is lost in the whirling heavens, while the body braces itself, fearing the approach of demons…
And in truth, the sun, the seclusion, the nights passed beneath the wheeling stars, the silence, the scant nourishment, the study of remote subjects wove around me a spell that predisposed me to marvels…
They’re dangerous as all gifts from the sea are; the sea offers death as well as immortality.
The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton
Chesterton often draws parallels between triumphs, and then triumphs in the parallels he draws. If one has no patience for triumphalism or parallelism, one will probably not have much time for Chesterton. And what a sad state that must be.
Among all of his works, I consider The Everlasting Man his magnum opus, because in this work, his parallelism and triumphalism have moved beyond the level of individual sentences to the entire structure of the whole work—and indeed the entirety of human history itself.
The first triumph in this story is our finding man drawing pictures of animals in a cave. The second triumph in this story is God being born as a man among animals in a cave. The final triumph is God rising from his cave to bring new life to us men who so often find ourselves acting like animals.
Between these events we find civilizations. While many civilizations are born of a given triumph, the longer they survive the more wicked they tend to become. While I have a full review of this work forthcoming—one thing I found insightful this time around was how a civilization’s wickedness comes less from its being evil but more from its simply becoming tired.
In the end, every civilization’s progress is like the sun progressing towards a horizon, a laborer progressing towards the hour he can clock out, or an evening progressing toward the sleepy glasses wine after dinner. Thus it makes sense that God would come to man as a child; there’s nothing interrupts an adult’s sleep more than a baby.
If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.
Links
Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
The Professor & the Siren (and Other Stories) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton
Also noted:
Strong Opinions by Vladimir Nabokov
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa