Category Archives: education

Books became the only reality.

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Scene from Leningrad after seige.

Joseph Brodsky was born in St. Petersburg, what was then Leningrad, in 1940. He writes in the first, title essay of his book, about his generation in postwar Soviet Russia, how they were “somewhat spared” the full experience of what their country had become: a “drab hell, with a shabby materialist dogma and pathetic consumerist gropings.”

“We emerged from under the postwar rubble when the state was too busy patching its own skin and couldn’t look after us very well. We entered schools, and whatever elevated rubbish we were taught there, the suffering and poverty were visible all around. … The empty windows gaped at us like skulls’ orbits, and as little as we were, we sensed tragedy. … The amount of goods was very limited…. we didn’t develop a taste for possessions. Things that we could possess later were badly made and looked ugly. Somehow, we preferred ideas of things to things themselves….”

I can’t help comparing the cultural environment in which Brodsky came of age to that of the generation currently in their teens and twenties. When those young people in Leningrad were trying to survive the privations at every level of their being, they didn’t have the option of comforting themselves with marijuana or escaping to the metaverse. Their daily life didn’t include such diversions as shopping at the mall for the current fashions in jeans or phones. What they did have was books:

“If we made ethical choices, they were based not so much on immediate reality as on moral standards derived from fiction. We were avid readers and we fell into a dependence on what we read. Books, perhaps because of their formal element of finality, held us in their absolute power. Dickens was more real than Stalin or Beria. More than anything else, novels would affect our modes of behavior and conversations, and 90 percent of our conversations were about novels. It tended to become a vicious circle, but we didn’t want to break it.

“In its ethics, this generation was among the most bookish in the history of Russia, and thank God for that. A relationship could have been broken for good over a preference for Hemingway over Faulkner; the hierarchy in that pantheon was our real Central Committee. It started as an ordinary accumulation of knowledge but soon became our most important occupation, to which everything could be sacrificed. Books became the first and only reality, whereas reality itself was regarded as either nonsense or nuisance. Compared to others, we were ostensibly flunking or faking our lives. But come to think of it, existence which ignores the standards professed in literature is inferior and unworthy of effort. So we thought, and I think we were right.”

-Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One

This passage gives me a clue as to a question I’ve had about Brodsky: How, born a Jew and growing up under atheist Communism, did he come to be a “Christian poet”? Not only does he say (quoted in a previous post about him) that he tries to be a Christian, but Wikipedia tells us:

Daniel Murphy, in his seminal text Christianity and Modern European Literature, includes Brodsky among the most influential Christian poets of the 20th century, along with T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova (Brodsky’s mentor for a time), and W. H. Auden (who sponsored Brodsky’s cause in the United States). Irene Steckler was the first to categorically state that Brodsky was “unquestionably a Christian poet”.

What the writer tells us about this education he and his friends got for themselves shows the power of the vicarious experience that can be had from reading good stories. The best books helped them to endure  the “nonsense or nuisance” of totalitarian society, and at the same time gave them a broad, universal understanding of Reality. What a blessed bookishness; as Brodsky says, Thank God for that.

To think is to create.

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“If people must not be taught religion, they might be taught reason, philosophy. If the State must not teach them to pray it might teach them to think. And when I say that children should be taught to think I do not mean (like many moderns) that they should be taught to doubt; for the two processes are not only not the same, but are in many ways opposite. To doubt is only to destroy; to think is to create.”

-G.K. Chesterton

Closest to the child comes the woman.

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I’ve long been familiar with the thing that G.K. Chesterton is reported to have said, that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly… “While you practice” was the explanatory clause to tack on if necessary; but it doesn’t seem to me likely that Chesterton would have added it. Because it makes a false distinction between the present and some future time, assumed to be qualitatively different… But who decides if you’re doing the thing for real or just practicing?

My son’s Suzuki violin teacher used to beg us not to use the word practice at all. She would ask her students, “Did you play your violin every day?” and we parents were supposed to speak after the same fashion. Even if no one saw evidence of improvement in musicianship on a given day, we were all  encouraged to be satisfied nonetheless, because “You played. That’s good.”

What Chesterton did say, which is included in the whole article linked at bottom, is that “Somebody must renounce all specialist conquests, that she may conquer all the conquerors.” He calls the uproarious amateurishness of the universe “true sanity,” which sounds good, because it’s essentially how I myself approach life.

His hearty approval of what he sees as the way of women confirms to me that G.K. and I have the same personality style. But I’m not sure all of us women are alike in this… Do you think that some women actually prefer to be more focused, or specialized, in their pursuits? To the women reading this, I wonder if you feel that his statements below ring true of you. Chesterton has a very high opinion of the female sex, but how many women did he really know that well?

“There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to God; so that even now the color of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a flower (or a firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or features of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes the woman—she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me; save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as run.

“To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up forever. This is that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female, drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it. She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable. She was maintaining the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

— G.K. Chesterton, from What’s Wrong with the World, the chapter on “Folly and Female Education.” 

Our tiny playground in the city.

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Nearly every day Raj and I spend quite a bit of time on the balcony of the 13th-floor apartment where his family lives. It’s above a major intersection with a couple dozen lanes of traffic meeting and surging with cars, trucks and buses most of the day. To the east between the high-rises we can see a slice of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. When my grandson sees a jet take off he squeals; a few seconds later we see it emerge from behind tall buildings to the north, and much smaller to the eye. But he is still watching it.

Emergency vehicles sound their sirens in the neighborhood at least a couple of times every day, and sometimes we will hurry out and try to spot them. If not, we’re sure to see one or several of Raj’s favorite Metro buses waiting at a stop light just below. We’ve shared the delights of cement mixers, dump trucks, car transports and motorcycles. Once it was three police cars in a line, lights flashing. On the balcony itself is Daddy’s bicycle, a vehicle he can  even put his hands on, and examine small parts like wheel, reflector and pedals.

All of that transportation stuff would be exciting enough for a toddler, but there are a surprising number of experiences of flora and fauna as well. Pigeons and sparrows land on the rail. Spiders spin webs during the night and in the morning the birds swoop down and eat the spiders. One day we watched a slender and elegant fly as it crawled along the edge of the balcony for several feet, and as it made a left turn to cross the span and continue up the wall of the building. We watched it go all the way to the top of a window and disappear into a crack, and Raj waved good-bye. Then it came out of the crack again! He never lost his focus on that creature until it vanished again for good.

Raj doesn’t talk yet, but he uses many signs to communicate; some of these are standard sign language that many parents nowadays teach their babies, and others he has invented himself. By signs he can say “please,” “thank you,” “more,” “all done,” “Daddy,” “hot,” “cold,” “I like this food,” and at least several other things I can’t think of or that he doesn’t use as often. One experience he can indicate is of the wind.

Many times when we are looking over the balcony, a breeze will come up, and a few times when that happened I have mentioned it to him. One day we were standing at the railing in silent contemplation, punctuated by the occasional “Hmm!” from Raj that seems to be his    comment on anything positive. This time, when the wind came up, he was the one who first noted it, by making sweeping, large and circular movements with his arms.

The balcony is the place to experience (and “talk” about) the heat of the metal wall at one end, when he runs the length of its patio and bangs on it with both little hands. There is an overhang above — perhaps the balcony of the next apartment up? — but not extending so far that one can’t stretch an arm into falling rain, or find very shallow puddles to splash in. Even with many high-rise buildings all around, the sky is huge and ever changing, often with clouds that are well worth talking about.

Our boy is never on the balcony without an adult companion, and from my first time out there with him we have enjoyed and refined our game of copy-cat. First, he would merely run full speed from one end to the other and back, and I would follow exactly. Raj added a certain arm-swing to his choreography, and the next day dance-y hops. Lately he likes to lead me in walking backward the whole way, sometimes stopping suddenly to line up our feet just-so, so that we can look at our toes side-by-side.

I’ve been impressed with the richness of this child’s life overall — full of stimulation and human warmth and at the same time very ordered and routine. Having a nanny to push you to the park almost every day is a boon, and currently several adults to make sure that you can eat and sleep at regular times even when there is a new baby in the house.

For a short time in his life, his days will include this simple balcony with no furniture typical of a patio area. His parents don’t want any items that he might learn to climb up on. Until this week when a larger plastic fire truck came into the household, no toys were allowed out there, because they could fall through the spaces or be thrown over the top.

For an even shorter time Raj has this grandma to play our particular balcony games with him. That space is simple and plain, and many adults not carrying a phone wouldn’t know what to do there. But it’s a fun playground where a toddler can exercise not only his short legs but his attention span. He can tune his senses to the life of the city and participate in a vast world.