T. S. Eliot forgot what he wrote and what he meant.
Near the forks of the Grand River in present-day Perkins County, in August 1823, while scouting alone for game for the expedition’s larder, Glass surprised a grizzly bear mother with her two cubs. Before he could fire his rifle, the bear charged, picked him up, and threw him to the ground. Glass got up, grappled for his knife, and fought back, stabbing the animal repeatedly as the grizzly raked him time and again with her claws.Glass managed to kill the bear with help from his trapping partners, Fitzgerald and Bridger, but was left badly mauled and unconscious. Henry (who was also with them) became convinced the man would not survive his injuries.
Henry asked for two volunteers to stay with Glass until he died, and then bury him. Bridger (then 17 years old) and Fitzgerald stepped forward, and as the rest of the party moved on, began digging his grave. Later claiming that they were interrupted in the task by an attack by “Arikaree” Indians, the pair grabbed Glass’s rifle, knife, and other equipment, and took flight. Bridger and Fitzgerald incorrectly reported to Henry that Glass had died.
Despite his injuries, Glass regained consciousness. He did so only to find himself abandoned, without weapons or equipment, suffering from a broken leg, the cuts on his back exposing bare ribs, and all his wounds festering. Glass lay mutilated and alone, more than 200 mi (320 km) from the nearest American settlement at Fort Kiowa on the Missouri.
In one of the more remarkable treks known to history, Glass set his own leg, wrapped himself in the bear hide his companions had placed over him as a shroud, and began crawling. To prevent gangrene, Glass laid his wounded back on a rotting log and let the maggots eat the dead flesh.
All of these approaches can help achieve Lahey’s aim of giving shy students the confidence to speak up for themselves. But none of this necessarily means we should grade students based on their class participation, since that effectively penalizes children for their fears. In other words, shy kids should be helped with a carrot, not a stick.I’m also old-fashioned enough to believe that grades should assess a child’s proficiency at math or science or history, not their ability to speak in front of a large group. Knowledge matters. Deep thought matters. Mastery of a subject matters — even in a world that can’t stop talking. It is not irrelevant that American schools, which value verbal confidence at least as highly as quiet study, are falling behind their international peers.
You don’t have to look very hard for the determinism in Dan Slater’s Love in the Time of Algorithms. It’s right in the subtitle: “What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating.” This follows in the tech-pundit tradition of book titles like Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Into Collaborators and Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, titles which grant anthropomorphic agency to technology, taking us all off the hook for what it has “made” happen. Readers of these books are absolved of having to do anything in particular to address the way technology is developing; they let us kick back and fantasize about how much our lives are going to change while we make no effort to change much of anything. They let us have our status quo and eat it too.
Teju Cole on the civilizing function of literature, and the disparity between Obama’s bookshelf and his use of targeted killings:How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief? What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became?Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/WYUGMz
Photograph: Pete Souza/The White House/Getty.
It’s so strange to me that there is still anyone anywhere who think that there is any connection whatsoever between a given person’s reading preferences and his or her moral stature. There is no “civilizing function of literature”; people will only benefit morally from reading literature if they already have a strong moral formation. As Terry Eagleton wrote many years ago about the deeply cultured officers of the Third Reich, “When the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps … to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do.” Cole mentions this uncomfortable fact, but, reluctant to draw the obvious conclusion from it, remains puzzled that the President’s political and military decisions could somehow be at odds with what Cole imagines that a reader of Derek Walcott’s poetry would be likely to do. This is misbegotten in more ways than I can even list.
No deus ex machina waits in the wings; no man behind the curtain. We have no Maxwell’s demon to help us filter and search. “We want the Demon, you see,” wrote Stanislaw Lem, “to extract from the dance of atoms only information that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines, blueprints, historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or how to clean and iron a suit of asbestos, and poetry too, and scientific advice, and almanacs, and calendars, and secret documents, and everything that ever appeared in any newspaper in the Universe, and telephone books of the future.” As ever, it is the choice that informs us (in the original sense of that word). Selecting the genuine takes work; then forgetting takes even more work. This is the curse of omniscience: the answer to any question may arrive at the fingertips — via Google or Wikipedia or IMDb or YouTube or Epicurious or the National DNA Database or any of their natural heirs and successors — and still we wonder what we know.
Fables de Florian, on Bibliodyssey
Partly, I use [the word beauty] politically because it’s a taboo word for architects – it makes them twitchy, and I quite enjoy that. I think they are unfairly nervous about it, but it eases right in with what ordinary people look for from architecture, and it’s a nicely homespun word that hits the target. I’m also attracted to the way it’s used particularly in Christian aesthetics, and the concept that beauty is a moral entity, but far from being a superficial luxury, is connected to goodness. Generally, that it is the material manifestation of goodness, so that a beautiful object, house, painting displays many of the same qualities you find in goodness in other areas, in other things.That seems really important and it can hit back against the postmodern idea that we don’t know what is beautiful, because people are much more able to say that we know what’s good than what’s beautiful. There’s a broad agreement about what is good: human rights, fairness, justice, community, friendship. Our society is chemically ill yet we disagree about beauty or aesthetics. So, connecting up aesthetics with beauty and then beauty with goodness seems a way out of a kind of postmodern morass, where essentially the free market ends up deciding and then you get horrific skylines, cities and developments.
The disaster unfolded slowly. The professors and students were diplomatic, but a pall of boredom fell over the seminar table when my work was under discussion. I could see everyone struggling to care. And then, trying feverishly to write something that would engage people, I got worse. First my writing became overthought, and then it went rank with the odor of desperation. It got to the point that every chapter, short story, every essay was trash.I could not imagine why; conditions were ideal. It took me a long time to realize that the utter domination of my consciousness by the desire to write well was itself the problem. Monomania, a 19th-century malady to which my 21st-century immune system had developed no defenses, had crept into my soul, like gout into a poet’s foot, and spoiled it by degrees.
When good writing was my only goal, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth. For this reason, I wasn’t able to read my own writing well. I couldn’t tell whether something I had just written was good or bad, because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane. I lost the ability to cheerfully interrogate how much I liked what I had written, to see what was actually on the page rather than what I wanted to see or what I feared to see.