All posts for the month June, 2009

What’s in the Past?

I have to do a practicum on teaching the simple past. We have to teach it inductively, the course being geared toward the communicative approach. The idea is that a deductive approach, so beloved of engineers, is more of an approach that emphasizes reading and writing, and most people learning English nowadays are not doing it in order to afford themselves the pleasure of Shakespeare. It stands to reason when, after all, the pleasure of Shakespeare is lost on the average native speaker. People want to learn English because people who know English are more likely to be rich. And so I am doing a practicum on the simple past, and since most people are learning English because people who know English are more likely to be rich, then I must have communicative goals and approach the whole business inductively.

So my objective will not be that when I am done with the lesson, the students will know the simple past tense, but rather that they will be able to talk about the dead.

And what could be more congenial? Really, without the simple past history would be awfully confusing; it is an extremely useful tense. And when you speak about the dead you can speak of:

Johann Sebastian Bach
Georg Frederic Handel
Ludwig van Beethoven
Carl Maria von Webber
Dimitri Shostakovich
. . . and any number of chaps.

Lets try some actions!

“Handel was a genius, I kneel at his grave,” said Beethoven.
Bach composed the best music.
Beethoven triumphed over silence.
Shostakovich flouted Stalin.
Pavarotti sang better than all the present company bar none.
Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and precipitated the second world war.
Richard Weaver wrote a book, and I read it.
Yeats languished because he pined after Maud Gonne.
C.S. Lewis loathed The Wasteland, and disapproved of James Joyce.

Of course, I could talk about regrets instead, and work in some of the poetry of W.B. Yeats. That could be the semi-structured activity, find all the past tense verbs in this poem:

When You are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

—W. B. Yeats

. . . perhaps a little bit too difficult, but it has a wonderful review of the present tense in the first stanza.

Next I’ll have them work in pairs telling each other about missed opportunities, and I can teach them that missed opportunities are a special form of regrets.

Ah the past tense! So full of opportunities.

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by unknowing on June 30, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Observations

Posted by unknowing on June 30, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/what%e2%80%99s-in-the-past/

Not Overmuch, It Seems to Me

I recently read an essay by Joseph Epstein on George Santayana, The Permanent Transient. What is enjoyable about Joseph Epstein is the broad and liberal humanism of his letters, tinged with the sense of discreet intimacy of the personal essayist along with what seems to me so particularly a Jewish touch—as if you’re getting a glimpse of his neurosis to understand where he’s coming from. If Epstein is free and tolerant to a fault, his writing is nevertheless not without its proper learning and usually comes with an insight of satisfying penetration. Santayana was of a broad and liberal humanism as well, though, as Epstein points out, tinged with traces of anti-semitism, but not in such quantities as spoils the overall enjoyment of the collection of letters Epstein reviews.

In contrast to this, I have been reading another of the works of Iain Murray, and of a character as similar in outlook to Murray as Santayana was to Epstein; I am reading Murray’s biography of David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. There is in Murray’s account of the young Lloyd-Jones an earnestness that is completely foreign to Epstein, but also something of a childishness of which Epstein is entirely free. I may not have characterized this accurately as childishness, but I have wondered about it again because in reading the books of Iain Murray—always with profit if not always with pleasure, though I suspect Murray would smile gently and point out that perhaps pleasure was not his aim so much as profit.

How exactly to characterize the fault I find in Murray, the sense of lack of breadth I find in his writing? What gave me a glimmer of light was Epstein’s mention of Santayana’s word on Puritans, that they were people always busy applying first principles to trivialities. Granted, Santayana had the Puritans Lloyd-Jones read and admired wrong, but not entirely. The world of learning which chaps like Epstein, Santayana and even Scruton inhabit has not entirely done justice to the Puritans of old, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got them all wrong (that last is the colloquialism it seems to me the personal essay thrives on, so I allow myself the liberty). I think modern admirers of Puritans such as Murray could profit from the perspective of the broad learning of men like Epstein and Santayana.

I am, incidentally, reading about Lloyd-Jones because the library most available to me at the moment is one that might have been built exclusively from the catalog of the Banner of Truth Publishers—and probably was—over the years. It has been my experience—though not unvaried—that in circles such as venerate Puritans there is often such a veneration as renders people blind to a broader interest. In other words Reformed people usually are as insular as many fundamentalists, the only difference being that the Island of the Reformed is more hospitable to genuine piety. I would prefer a library with more of the mystics, the Quietists and Pietists, Thomas Aquinas and Augustus Hopkins Strong, along with the severities of Thomas a Kempis instead of the severities of John Calvin exclusively. (And what is interesting about Lloyd-Jones is that in a way he combines these two severities, being Reformed and early in his career on record for opposing daily bathing as a frivolity and a symptom of the decline of Christianity in Wales—the latter something I can readily imagine a Kempis seconding with dour intensity.)

This is where I want to go: the idea that Puritans want to apply first principles is laudable, and the idea that they tend to apply first principles to trivialities is not. It ought perhaps to be said without a capital P: a puritan is one whose grasp of first principles has somehow led him to persist in applying them to trivialities. One might further amend the statement by saying Pharisee instead of Puritan, but that would distort the focus. I do not want to talk about people whose cup is dirty on the inside, but of people whose concern is always the cup to the exclusion of the rest of the table settings, and indeed, the meal itself. Granted, this distorts the focus on clean implements because it takes in more, but if your only concern in setting the table is the important but not exclusive concern of clean implements, then I’m not sure I want to attend your banquets all the time. One wants to have meals in circumstances characterized by good hygiene, but one also wants to enjoy the meals on principles such as the atmosphere, the congruence of things served, and perhaps even the pleasing flavor of the food.

It is similar with modesty. I went to a school where some of the rules were concerned with modesty to the exclusion of grace. In other words they required unattractive habits of dress in the name of modesty. It is easier to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, but the result is limited and often, because of that, silly. Or the result is that you make out the truth to be ugly, creating a conflict between ontology and aesthetics, or between ethics and aesthetics, which seems to me a sign of an inferior culture (and it seems to me this false conflict is what some serious people think when they think of Calvinism—I have in mind the vague references you get when George MacDonald’s upbringing comes up—sometimes understandably).

It seems to me an apt warning whether it applies to puritans or not. Applying first principles to trivialities shows a ready earnestness about first principles, an eagerness to put them into practice in every circumstance, especially if first principles are being applied in serious and weighty matters. It does not exhibit a well-developed breadth of judgment, and I think it is because earnestness is not seriousness: it is a good harbinger of seriousness to come and for that reason a sign of immaturity. Perhaps I can call earnestness seriousness in the bud. Seriousness, in a way, is earnestness matured by a sense of proportion, and earnestness about everything absolutely is disordered by the lack of proportion it exhibits. Not that in our present age there is overmuch concern with first principles to begin with, but that in our present age a concern for the breadth of perspective liberal learning affords is not overmuch in demand.

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by unknowing on June 29, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Observations

Posted by unknowing on June 29, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/not-overmuch-it-seems-to-me/

Odd Associations

In the evening the sun shone through the shimmering needles of the pines. I watched, waiting for the coming of what Borges called our mutual night. I have been enjoying Borges read aloud softly on the Transmileno. I am not sure I’m at the point where I can characterize him, other than urbane, learned, tragic and of ghostly symbolism. I have the feeling that in order to learn how one lives an examined life here in South America Borges will make a good master.

* * *
Lots of promise on the front of books in Spanish. I’ve found many little book stores not so promising, but then found a couple of big ones—one down by the Cathedral on the main plaza especially, with the longest philosophy section I have seen anywhere ever. Ortega y Gasset there in abundance, and even a bilingual volume with a bunch of Plato’s Dialogues. I was unable to see—they wrap most of the books in plastic here,—but I assumed it was Spanish-Greek. Saw a Spanish-Hebrew, Hebrew-Spanish lexicon. Saw a small, small table with Ciencia-Ficcion—all translations and mostly Stephanus Rex. No buying books till we have a job and a place though.

* * *
Ate a portion of the toughest cow that ever lived, today. In the zone of high density restaurants I managed to pick what is probably the worst—though it had a charming interior in a little old house with thick walls and a covered patio. Meat is not high on the list of things that is done really well in Bogota. You have to go to the coast or to the eastern plains for that, or Buenos Aires. I think I’m going to quit trying after this, at least having any meals consisting mainly of beef. I have never heard a knife make such noises upon a piece of meat.

* * *
Speaking of noises, in the same area of the bookstore we found one of the concert halls, perhaps where one of the orchestras plays, though I did not bother to ascertain. The main, central bank, El Banco Nacional, has some sort of major library attached to it—very deep in its holdings, as opposed to the shallow holdings of the public ones, according to the woman at the information place. We discovered it and in exploring came by the entrance to the concert hall. I’m not sure what it all has to do with the central bank, but what a gesture: don’t just save money, save books and treasure up your classical music. I like it.

* * *
Found a place down there that roasts the coffee in the shop. It smelled of burned coffee, but the coffee served was good and the almojabanas more delicate than those we have had elsewhere, and there is nothing like an almojabana with coffee unless it is an arepa Boyacense with café con leche. I bought a pound ground—most things are sold by the pound here, not the kilogram—and now to see if it can rival the coffee of Don Juan.

* * *
Did I mention I discovered Eduardo Caballero Calderon? Writes compellingly, Colombian, of the previous century and now alas deceased. He was a journalist but his prose is rich and descriptive and the book moves languidly. I’m going to work on this little book of his on Monday: Tipacoque. My Spanish I can feel returning to me, and with chaps like Borges and Caballeros, my vocabulary can expand—though having a dictionary would definitely help.

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by unknowing on June 27, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Unexamined Life

Posted by unknowing on June 27, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/27/odd-associations/

A Nice Beginning

Colombia still has very little in the way of interesting English language blogging, but that is being worked on. One of the best blogs I found was this one: Medellin Living, with useful information, links, and curiosities. If you go to Medellin you should check that blog first. By way of Dave, who runs it, I found out about Colombia Reports. They are new and looking for contributions. Happily, the editor was not unwilling to take my recent chronicle of La Vega & Villeta. If you click on Travel in Colombia Monday morning, you will probably find it there.

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by unknowing on June 26, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Colombia

Posted by unknowing on June 26, 2009

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Saturday Morning in Bogota

The skies are troubled over Bogota. The mountains—sometimes so clear the sight appears a miracle, and you can count the individual pines—are overrun with fog. Under the skies the jungle waits attentive in the rampant grass that listens for the rain; the white and yellow and orange flowers in the trees and bushes and ascending creepers mark and emphasize in the uncertain light; above the brooding, shaggy eucalypti slightly sway and seem to wait. The pines alone do not expect; they guard their shadows behind green cataracts, impassive in the quiet air.

A light sprinkle begins, a gentle and dismissed descent of acid drops to wash away our clothes and skin and leave behind the urban bones.

* * *
In the bakery the tables are occupied or rest uncleared: all bottles with protruding straws and baskets with their rumpled, wadded napkins and scattered plates and crumbs. A Lada crosses into traffic in front of a Renault annoying a Hyundai followed by a Chevrolet. The usual Nissan in the space before the door was gone and left a momentary Skoda. In a jumpsuit and tall rubber boots a man on a bicycle threads his way around pedestrians on uneven, dirty sidewalks full of buying, selling, going, coming.

The concrete jungle in these tropics passively resists and rises out of the vegetable jungle. Black diesel smoke engulfs the sidewalks and the trees in toxic, evanescent clouds, but from the hills come cool, damp winds, and the quiet invasion of the rain, to wash and rinse and nurture growth.

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by unknowing on June 20, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Unexamined Life

Posted by unknowing on June 20, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/20/saturday-morning-in-bogota/

Holy Father, cheer our way

Holy Father, cheer our way
with thy love’s perpetual ray;
grant us every closing day
light at evening time.

Holy Savior, calm our fears
when earth’s brightness disappears;
grant us in our later years
light at evening time.

Holy Spirit, be thou nigh
when in mortal pains we lie;
grant us, as we come to die,
light at evening time.

Holy, blessèd Trinity,
darkness is not dark to thee;
those thou keepest always see
light at evening time.

—Richard Hayes Robinson

_____________________
You can find words and music examples here: Oremus Hymnal. Exactly.

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by unknowing on June 20, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Poetry

Posted by unknowing on June 20, 2009

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At Evening

“Also known,” he observed to me, “as the Day of Doom.”

I nodded. We had somehow gotten on to the topic of the last judgment, a topic one does not merely get on to, and his remark startled me. Then I realized it had been meant to startle me and I wondered.

“So you believe it?” I asked.

“Do I believe there will come a day of doom? Oh yes.” He knocked back his brandy and sat gazing into the empty tumbler.

“Have you ever thought what it will be like?”

He looked at me, after I had asked that question, with a speculating look.

“I have—” he said, and I waited for him to go on. After some time he did: “I don’t know how you envision the Day of Doom, but I envision it as a moment of light and pain and cleansing.”

He paused again, so I said, “I imagine many envision it as a moment of pain—chaos perhaps.”

“Yes. I’m not sure I mean a moment in the same way though. There are fleeting, temporal moments and then—at least I think so—there are the moments of eternity: endless and somehow transitory, or . . . complete afterward and with no sense of elapsing time when they occur.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

“Well, I’m not sure I follow myself,” he said with a smile. “It is something of an intuition; perhaps it is a sense I’ve picked up from some place or another, from some book or a poem . . . the sort of think you get from reading E.R. Eddison.”

I shook my head to indicate I had never read Eddison, hoping he wouldn’t discern the fact that I’d never heard of what appeared to be an important author.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I envision the Day of Doom as a day of Revelation.”

“Revelation of what?” I supposed, too late, I might have suggested: a revelation of judgment.

“Many things, the first being the glory of God in the face of Christ. In that terrible moment he will look on us . . . and we shall see him as he is.”

The light outside had been gradually failing, and suddenly I was aware we were sitting in twilight in that room. I stirred in my seat and glanced at a lamp, but he went on.

“In that light . . . in that light only that which has been sanctified can survive—and the rest will be consumed.”

“I suppose I always had the idea,” I offered, clearing my throat which had become dry all of a sudden, “that there would be some mutual scrutiny involved . . . of the events of life—played back like a movie, you know? Pretty embarrassing and drawn out—”

“Yes, I know what you mean. I don’t think it will be that way, though. I think there will be a realization of the completeness of Beauty, Goodness and Truth in that on which we gaze, or of the completeness of something better, and a realization—utter and perfect, even to the affect of it—of our flaws, failures, shortcomings, sins and iniquities. Iniquities,” he repeated, looking at the darkness on the floor. “A realization of the perversity and meagerness of our desires.

“And in that moment of perfect realization, and exact, exquisite pain, we will at last know enduring joy, since we will be transformed by the loss of all the dross. And only the presently forming better being will remain.”

He paused once more and picked up his glass, peered into it, and then put it down again. “Only that which presently enjoys union with God can in the end enjoy beatitude, which is union with God.”

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by unknowing on June 19, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Stories

Posted by unknowing on June 19, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/at-evening/

A Brief Note

No rain, lots of homework, too many places to explore, so not much on the blogging front. We have a four day weekend coming up, and that will come in handy. Yesterday we were quite busy with all the things we did and the cooking it takes to maintain us.

Whatever happens, we’ll look back on these days with no little fondness. I think we’re pretty comfortable here now, and very jolly.

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by unknowing on June 18, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Unexamined Life

Posted by unknowing on June 18, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/a-brief-note/

New every morning is the love

I have a small Church of Ireland Book of Common Prayer with a hymnal that I brought along for devotional reading. I like it because the poems aren’t spread out at the mercy of the tyrannous music but rest in neat stanzas. I also like it for its shape and because, it being an old Anglican hymnal, the hymns are good ones.

I like this one especially for the way the thought is developed from stanza to stanza and for things like the list in the second stanza which he brings to a conclusion with the subtle switch in the internal rhyme of the O’s and F’s in ‘forgiven’ and ‘of heaven.’ Or the W’s and LL’s in the second line of the third—music it is almost an insult to set to other music. It is the kind of poem one can keep finding things to notice—not neat things to gawk at—that illuminate the meaning. This chap knew how to write poetry perhaps better than your average hymn writer (except the third line of the last stanza is pretty average, but by then one can forgive him and the meaning is sound), and he obviously had a pretty good grasp of practical theology.

New every morning is the love
our wakening and uprising prove;
through sleep and darkness safely brought,
restored to life and power and thought.

New mercies, each returning day,
hover around us while we pray;
new perils past, new sins forgiven,
new thoughts of God, new hopes of heaven.

If on our daily course our mind
be set to hallow all we find,
new treasures still, of countless price,
God will provide for sacrifice.

Old friends, old scenes, will lovelier be,
as more of heaven in each we see;
some softening gleam of love and prayer
shall dawn on every cross and care.

The trivial round, the common task,
will furnish all we ought to ask:
room to deny ourselves; a road
to bring us daily nearer God.

Only, O Lord, in thy dear love,
fit us for perfect rest above;
and help us, this and every day,
to live more nearly as we pray.

—John Keble, 1822

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by unknowing on June 17, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Observations, Poetry

Posted by unknowing on June 17, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/new-every-morning-is-the-love/

Ah Weather, Oh Fruit

I love the rain in Bogota. I love to see it splashing in the courtyards more than anything, but I love to see it dripping from the plants and to hear it rattle on the skylight.

I also love the afternoon sun. We were home early, having finished with the exam, and I sat in the cheerful sun reading Yeats slowly and having misgivings about living in a city—Yeats will do that to you.

The sun here is strong; you really have to put on sunscreen or you’ll burn. When you’re walking briskly in the cool of an overcast day and the sun breaks forth, you are quickly overwarm. The temperature fluctuates very little so they feel hot when it gets around and above 70, and they feel cold when its below 60. I suppose after a while we’ll get that way too. It is not as bad for us now as at first to walk in the sun—you learn to vary your pace.

* * *
Nice to be in the tropics though. On one corner they have four different little vegetable stores. We went to a bigger one a little further away. It is probably as big as an Aldi only its all fruit and vegetables save for the meat counter in the back. The sheer abundance is just baffling: three kinds of tree tomato, green plantain and yellow, small and big papaya, oranges, onions, seven kinds of potato, yucca, huge squashes rolling on the floor, enormous and useless zuccini–we think, long onion (not entirely unlike green onion because they harvest it a lot later, or perhaps it really is a different thing), mangoes, Chilean peaches, kiwis, apples, and about seven kinds of fruit I do not recognize, beside passionfruit and lulo, lemons, small bananas and regular bananas, pineapples–which are wonderful cheap, all of it in great mounds and greens of every description, including fresh chamomile and peppermint.

I suppose they are greengrocers. It is not uncommon for the greengrocers to have a butcher’s counter in the back, if they can squeeze it in. And many times you can watch soccer while your wife picks through things, though at the one we attended they had lively music.

Katrina is experimenting with maracuya—passionfruit—which is used to make a sort of juice, like lemonade. I want to her to learn to handle the guanabana because there is no juice like the juice of the guanabana (guanabanas are large though, the size of a bloated football, more or less). We tried raw guavas and that kind of bombed; maybe we didn’t get good ones but as far as I can tell, the only thing they’re really good for is bocadillo—and that is enough for me.

She got some grapes a few days back and was surprised to find seeds in them. It was kind of startling to see her taken aback by the fact that a grape had seeds (they are kind of a pain to eat, and brought back memories of the bitter taste of an accidentally bitten grape seed). Now she’s trying some kind of really coconutty pound cake with her hot chocolate.

Saturday we’re going to the big bakery on the corner to have arepas and tamales. The arepas are supposed to be the best in the neighborhood. And they serve the coffee there in ceramic cups, rather than flimsy plastic ones. It should be a fine occasion.

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by unknowing on June 16, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Colombia, Unexamined Life

Posted by unknowing on June 16, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/ah-weather-oh-fruit/

The Music of Poetry

I once asked Mr. William Morris if he had though of writing a play, and he answered that he had, but would not write one, because actors did not know how to speak poetry with the half-chant men spoke it with in old times. Mr. Swinbourne’s Locrine was acted a month ago, and it was not badly acted, but nobody could tell whether it was fit for the stage or not, for not one rhythm, not one cry of passion, was spoken with a musical emphasis, and verse spoken without a musical emphasis seems but an artificial and cumbersome way of saying what might be said naturally and simply and prose.

—William B. Yeats

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by unknowing on June 16, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Poetry, Quotations

Posted by unknowing on June 16, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/the-music-of-poetry/

But I Want to Travel!

Part of being responsible is looking for a job. Everybody tells me I should look for a job now. It is responsible, so I am: I send out one inquiry a day. The thing is, I wanted to spend some of the money from my parting with my library on a sort-of remunerative trip to some Colombian place I had not seen, or to revisit places in Boyaca.

I may be employed by the end of the week! I already turned down a bad job offer but talked to a guy visiting the church on Sunday, an American who runs a business teaching English. He seemed keen and I told him the main thing I’m after is a work visa, which he said he’d check his contacts at the US Embassy to see if he can swing that. He says he can never get enough native speakers and the pay is better than most places . . . maybe you should think about teaching English in Colombia? I’m not sure how to feel about the prospect of working for a guy who was a marine.

Too much good luck! I’ll have a good job and no end of work if all works out. The nice thing is that if I get a steady job lined up, then we can find a place to live and begin settling in. When you rent a place, it comes with a stove, but no refrigerator or washer. I’m hoping the dollar strengthens before I have to purchase so that I can save big money. I suppose the consolation is that I can afford to start having the essential library I have kept shipped down.

I have at least three libraries and two bookstores to visit. Two of the three libraries are English language lending libraries, apparently, and the other is the rather famous Colombian public library system of which I expect much. No end of reading here, it seems—if only I had the leisure!

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by unknowing on June 15, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Colombia, Unexamined Life

Posted by unknowing on June 15, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/but-i-want-to-travel/

On Being Interesting

More of my notions, at least more of me trying to work them out. I’m grateful to the lilrabbi for his curiosity, whatever it bodes. I did this last year, but I have to work on it if it is going to fit in the whole thing on teaching, so here it is perhaps better, perhaps ruined.

If the world is made by God then there is no reason why anything other than perversions and heresies (“Strange without heresy,” the chap says in Love’s Labor’s Lost, and rightly even though the chap is a chump and says it to a pedant) should be uninteresting. Scripture teaches that Christians should not pay attention to heretics and should be able to refute them and excommunicate them, and I cannot help feeling that part of the poetic gesture of the proper biblical treatment of heresy is to communicate to the heretic a great, holy yawn. “Nobody, my dear ass, is interested in your silly and repugnant innovations since reality is much better and far more interesting.” Pay no heed to heresies for they are, at very least, tedious; and heretics would not be dangerous were people never to pay attention to them. One cannot help feeling that even in the absence of disgust toward heresy, if the heresy were received with ordinate boredom then more heresies would dry up and go away; one feels that heretics want nothing so much as they want attention—which is why they set themselves up as teachers.

Nevertheless, people will be fascinated by heresies and heretics will get attention. In this respect there is no greater antidote to heresy and the tedious reasonings of heretics than a proper, or orthodox, or ordinate sense of wonder. Nothing is more wonderful and strange than revealed religion, the glory of the supernatural, and one cannot help feeling that the next thing in wonder is the creation itself which is full of the glory of Lord.

Being interesting has to do with the practical application of this realization. No Christian can take too much delight in his Father’s world but must learn to delight in it as fully as is possible. This involves finding it interesting, for there is no delight in a thing that does not search that thing out, and there is no searching a thing out without interest, and there is no true interest but one that has discovered something interesting.

Now there are tedious persons who do not believe that fundamental reality is a mystery. This is why I say heretics are tedious: they believe reality is susceptible to explanation, and other persons like them do as well. Reality is not susceptible to explanation, it is ultimately mysterious. Nature is only a representation of supernature, and the order of daily experience is built upon a transcendent order. Christians who are not presuppositionalists know this because Christianity teaches that reality is first supernatural. Explanations are of the realm of nature and not of the realm of supernature. The very essence of supernaturalism is that it is not susceptible to explanations since explanations are nature and nature is that to which we are habituated; we are not habituated to supernature as it is too strange—and in a way must always remain strange even though our searching is for the purpose of making it familiar. It is of the nature of a mystery to remain inexhaustible: the moment it is exhausted it is no longer a mystery, merely a former secret. So when I say that the fundamental reality is a mystery, I mean that whatever underlies all things is altogether strange and is infinitely so.

What is more mysterious about the fundamental mystery of ultimate reality is that we are made with its pattern in us (though it is always infinitely strange) and by a strange sympathy we can know it, experiencing at the same time the sympathy of familiarity and the allure of something strange. “Strange without heresy,” since really, for anything to be interesting it has to have something of the familiar and something of the unrecognized. That is what it is for anything to be interesting. If something is completely familiar it is hard for it to be interesting: what is there to search, to compel, to draw the gaze again? For something to be completely unrecognized is for it to be almost unnoticed. You can ignore that which you do not recognize until you become haunted by that unrecognized thing, and I think the moment it haunts you so that you gaze on it is the moment in which there is a dawning recognition, it is not what goes before the naming of the thing but the process that culminates in that first familiarity, that sympathy which is naming.

So, little children, keep yourselves from those tedious and unmysterious idols of which every heretic is a type, and look on that which is interesting, on the unexplained but apprehended by the sympathy of personal knowing, on the mystery of ultimate reality which is God who is unknowable in his essence and who is the Deep to which the deep made in that pattern within us answers. Faith is the knowledge of the supernatural.

The next part of the subject of being interesting is learning to communicate that which is interesting, but for this essay, this is enough. I will only add that some seek to find denials of the immanence of God in the assertions of his transcendence. These logicians are not far from the drab borders heresy. Orthodoxy wildly asserts both immanence and transcendence simultaneously and calmly, with interestingness unsurpassed. Nevertheless, while we begin to understand being interesting by considering the transcendence of God, without his immanence the world would not be interesting. And it is in the discovery of his immanence that we begin a proper consideration of what it is to communicate anything of interest.

Uncertainties:

1Is that which is familiar really uninteresting? Uninteresting even in the sense of having no wonder? When I think of familiarity and wonder I think of The Hobbit, and then my reply is that familiar things, thank God, are without wonder in the sense that they are without danger. Something is familiar because it is comfortable; one can become complacent about familiar things, and in this sense a heresy is familiar: it is a complacency, a perversion of comfort or an unexamined comfort. Bilbo was complacent surrounded only by what was familiar, but he became interesting—and his life became interesting—after the danger, which added wonder and put his familiar comforts into perspective. Perhaps it has to do with the relationship of danger and comfort. Heretics are unaware of a danger but are dangerous. Orthodoxy properly orders the dangerous so that there can be a comfort of familiarity in relationship to it.

2 If something is familiar won’t fondness draw the attention? Serve to make it interesting? What is fondness anyway? Surely fondness makes the thing interesting and it has something to do with familiarity. (When I think of the good I tend to think of the smell of baking bread which everybody enjoys but toward which none suffers any inordinate cravings. I think fondness must belong to the realm of the good the same way danger belongs to the realm of the true.)

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by unknowing on June 15, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Mystery, Teaching

Posted by unknowing on June 15, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/on-being-interesting-2/

Art & Beauty

Roger Scruton

It is therefore plain that the culture of transgression achieves nothing save the loss that it revels in: the loss of beauty as a value and a goal. But why is beauty a value? It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction. That is the message of such early modernists as Eliot, Barber, and Stevens, and it is a message that we need to listen to.

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by unknowing on June 13, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Observations

Posted by unknowing on June 13, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/art-beauty/

Colombia: A Nation Reborn

If you’re interested, Standpoint has a nice long article on Colombia.

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by unknowing on June 13, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Observations

Posted by unknowing on June 13, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/colombia-a-nation-reborn/

Reflections on Teaching

What happens in Bogota when we have a long, rainy Saturday, at least a half a pound of Juan Valdez Colina coffee, my wife fresh from shopping and getting into her stride cooking, a puente—holiday on Monday, and this month there are three Mondays in a row that are puente—some pent up, developing thoughts and a hiatus from any strenuous reading or writing? I think!

Whether the results are commensurate to the circumstances from which they arose is, I realize, as unlikely as that anybody will read anything so long. But I hate to post it in bits, even though it promises to have other bits swimming in the soup of this blog for some time to come.

On Teaching

It is becoming apparent to me that the church believes in mixing entertainment and worship because it believes that learning ought to be fun, and it believes that learning ought to be fun, in part, because theories of learning in the world in general stress the importance of making learning fun. I think this is due to a failure to make the distinction between what is fun and what is interesting. Teaching ought to be interesting and learning ought to be interesting, but that is something different from using fun to gain interest. I want to explore the idea that fun is something that aims to diminish boredom by distraction (and for that reason not really interesting, but instead distracting), and that what is truly interesting has something of intrinsic interest—that the subject has depths that beckon, full of wonder.

That teaching ought to be fun comes about for at least two obvious reasons: on the one hand there are lethal, old (but not old enough!) theories of learning which believed the task to be one of merely imparting information, that stressed quantifying learning and objective measuring, and in which abstraction prevailed; on the other hand are the bad teachers who do not believe in the mystery and wonder of what they are teaching. Grammar, for example, is taught abysmally (and it happens to be the thing I am learning to teach at the moment, and which provokes my thought) as a system of prohibitions and curtailments. It is not the living language that is taught, rather a system of intractable laws and recently deceased meanings.

Against Such Teachers

But grammar is mysterious, and powerful, and learning how things are and work is like discovering another world. I think in this case the failure is with the teacher who has no eyes for the metaphysical reality of language, is ignorant of poetry, and fails to relish the best possibilities and use of it. It is like Bible teachers who are boring because their aim is to impart information but not understanding. This teacher perhaps relishes a dead law because he has achieved an adequate mastery, having decided to take the easy way or, or being ignorant of the depths which constitute the reality of a thing. Or it just never occurred to this teacher that the language lives, is important, is the medium of our consciousness, contains wonders because the soul of said teacher is drab, and the reality said teacher inhabits is not one in which any wonder exists at all.

If we expect teachers to discourage complacency in the students, then we should not tolerate complacent teachers.

On Language

Language is wonderful the way other things that are wonderful are wonderful: they are wonderful because they are mysterious—they contain depths and possibilities. Language is wonderful because it is mysterious and it is mysterious because it is the gift of God, and so our mother language, which is a gift of God and a product of human culture takes on the awe of a thing in which a sort of hypostatic union has been achieved.

On Mystery

I ought to say that when it comes to poetry the best poets are those who have some sense of wonder about the world. Here my thought is not sufficiently developed, but I would point to poets such as Blake and such as Yeats who had strange systems of belief but whose systems resulted in astonishing poetry, alive with depth and wonder. Their systems are dismissed by many, from what I can tell, and this is due to an inability to take those systems poetically, as mythical expressions of something true. We don’t have to agree with Blake or Yeats in order to learn from their systems of belief things that are true about reality, and things that are essential to poetry, anymore than we have to know what Anton Bruckner believed in order to receive an insight into the true nature of things whenever we hear the first movement of his Fourth Symphony.

On Hardness and Discipline

I do not want to leave the impression that I think there is nothing hard in learning grammar and that there is no discipline. For the first time in my life (at least for the first time that I remember that I’m going to prepare for it) I am going to have a comprehensive test on English grammar, not only filling out a whole chart on the tenses of the verb describing their meaning, form, the auxiliaries they use and the common time expressions usually associated with them, not only filling out another chart with modal verbs, but also listing what sort of information is crucial prior knowledge to teaching, for instance, the future perfect continuous. This will take some work.

But I’m eager for it, not because of all the games I can play, but because of the descriptive powers it will give me for handling discussion more precisely, for thinking with greater clarity at the level of grammar, and because it will allow me to speculate on the nature, or reality, of English itself, to understand it as a whole more intelligently. When you understand the details you are ready to synthesize, to make observations based on a better view in which more distinctions—and better distinctions—are present to your consciousness. If learning is about anything, in a way, it is about making increasingly refined distinctions without losing the organic coherence of . . . everything. Or perhaps one should say it is about making such refined distinctions that the organic coherence becomes clarer.

I don’t know what the point at which a student learning a second language catches some of this. But I think the teacher of every subject has the power to gesture at it. I do not play the piano nowadays, but one of the most important teachers in all my life was my piano teacher who not only taught me many things about playing the piano, made me a more intelligent listener than I would have been otherwise, but above all taught me the true meaning of the discipline of a discipline and that there are wonders to be discovered in the learning of anything serious. She scorned the fun little piano books Americans used (and generally disparaged the powers of American musicians in general—she was wonderfully prejudiced), asking me why if Beethoven’s disciple Czerny wrote basic piano music, if Bach wrote music for learners, if serious composers wrote the curriculum . . . etc., why anybody would seriously consider using anything else?

Old fashioned? Decidedly, and still in my memory one of the best teachers I had: to teach me not only about the subject, but to open up a window onto a real world after which I have ever since longed. My only regret is not that I had to leave her lessons because I departed Mexico (I have no musical talent and to stay with her might have ruined what I truly learned), but that all my teachers weren’t more like my piano teacher in Mexico. I have seldom since worked as hard for any teacher as I worked for her for those two years.

And that is my point about discipline: I did the hard practicing, laboring the careful way she wanted me to not only because I wanted to please my teacher, not only because I trusted her since she convinced me she knew what she was doing, but because she was showing me the way out of Plato’s cave. I don’t think the subject has to be music, I think it can be grammar, because the purpose of grammar and syntax and vocabulary is speech and the glories of literature, just as the purpose of scales and theory and technique is music and Anton Bruckner’s inexhaustible vistas of reality.

Observations on Present Circumstances

Preface: my observation of the present circumstances is limited in that material is actually in short supply in Bogota, or I am ignorant of the location of said material. My observations about the present circumstances are also limited being based on a class I am taking and very little other formal, pedagogical instruction. Nevertheless, one can’t help getting a feeling for the systems of thought prevailing in our times if one is a part of any serious conversation about culture, politics, the arts, etc. I believe I am adequately informed about such matters, and even if my observations are not precise—and are certainly open to correction—they are sufficient for making a beginning. I mean to find out more, and research more, and think more carefully about this now that it appears I’ll be immersed in the world of teaching.

From the way things are presented is seems to me that the postmodern condition, resting as it does on the same assumptions of modernism while refusing its conclusions, is the condition in which approaches to learning are made. Many of the approaches to teaching English that we reviewed were based on a rejection of inadequate former notions. Part of it was that people were feeling their way forward in a world where more of the common people traveled and the likelihood of encountering a foreign language increased. Merchants and politicians have always had the dilemma of Babel forced on them, and when a society becomes more mercantile and now as government swells to unimaginable proportions, the need to speak in other languages, and now especially in English, increases. Old methods of learning—the Grammar Translation Approach, in which you learn paradigms, do not focus on communicating but rather reading and perhaps writing another language—start to appear inadequate. So you have people thinking how they can make the acquisition of a language more like the experience of a child learning his mother tongue, how they can use technology like the tape recorder, in the seventies how they can be anti-authoritarian and weird (the Silent Method of learning language, for instance, in which the teacher used gestures and colors and mime—no, it didn’t last too long, though Sugestopedia, another Method of the seventies, introduced the use of Baroque music in the classroom, so it wasn’t all loopy), and how they can make things fun.

Doesn’t it sound just like the modernist assumption about information being dry and boring when they try to make it interesting by adding things that are extrinsic? It is the postmodern abandoning of all order and system to say you can mix something serious with distractions and entertainments. And just as postmodernism really requires some assumptions the postmodern condition itself will not allow us to examine, so into the classroom come some assumptions about the seriousness of learning that are the salvation of the teacher who is serious about his subject.

The recognition that the student ought to be led by an internal desire is a crucial recognition. It is what will really make the discipline of a discipline the discipline of a willing student. As I said, I am in some doubt when this arises in a student, which is why I am eager to have the opportunity of teaching for at least a few years, if not the rest of my life, in the desire to put upon the foundation of this approach to learning (imparted to many of my readers in a class on Epistemology formerly known, rather disingenuously, as Teaching Methods, where it was imparted to me). The recognition is one that is made in contemporary theories, and the teacher who is serious about his subject has that same internal desire, but in an age where practical concerns tend to prevail, where the student is either a pathetic subject of therapy or a touchy customer, the recognition tends to be cast in terms of making the class interesting by way of extrinsic distractions. Inductive approaches serve as a way to camouflage the operating idea: distract them with some fun while quietly shoving information into their heads.

I think it is bad pedagogy because it is bad epistemology and because it is, in the long run, impractical. During WWII a system of learning languages called the Audiolingual, or the Army Method was formulated. It concentrated on listening and on quick results and one of the drawbacks discovered was that in focusing on short term goals it tended to stifle any curiosity in mastering the target language in the long run. This is recognized by people practicing other modern methods of learning. I think the same criticism can be made of methods which confuse what is intrinsically interesting about a subject and distracting fun.

But it has stopped raining and appears to be clearing . . . might be time to go out.

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by unknowing on June 13, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Language, Teaching

Posted by unknowing on June 13, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/reflections-on-teaching/

After the Rain

This morning it was the sound of rain that woke us. It rained steadily but cleared by the time we decided to leave early and get lunch downtown. By the waters of the canal we cross I saw a congregation (they don’t really go in flocks, it seems to me) of grim vultures, all black. I picked up a rock, and just the raising of my arm was enough to send those somber gentlemen flapping away. Then I noticed more of them, in the trees, and winging over the park. And then I saw them circling high above: many.

The rest of the day was clear, a bit more chilly (if I can use that word here), but the sun is so forthright one doesn’t notice until it departs. And I saw nothing more of the vultures. The rain, or the effect of the rain had brought them, and it was then I thought of Swift.

A Description of a City Shower

Careful observers may foretell the hour
(By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower:
While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o’er
Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.
Returning home at night, you’ll find the sink
Strike your offended sense with double stink.
If you be wise, then go not far to dine,
You spend in coach-hire more than save in wine.
A coming shower your shooting corns presage,
Old aches throb, your hollow tooth will rage.
Sauntering in coffee-house is Dulman seen;
He damns the climate, and complains of spleen.

Mean while the South rising with dabbled wings,
A sable cloud a-thwart the welkin flings,
That swilled more liquor than it could contain,
And like a drunkard gives it up again.
Brisk Susan whips her linen from the rope,
While the first drizzling shower is born aslope,
Such is that sprinkling which some careless quean
Flirts on you from her mop, but not so clean.
You fly, invoke the gods; then turning, stop
To rail; she singing, still whirls on her mop.
Not yet, the dust had shunned the unequal strife,
But aided by the wind, fought still for life;
And wafted with its foe by violent gust,
‘Twas doubtful which was rain, and which was dust.
Ah! where must needy poet seek for Aid,
When dust and rain at once his coat invade;
Sole coat, where dust cemented by the rain,
Erects the nap, and leaves a cloudy stain.

Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down,
Threatening with deluge this devoted town.
To shops in crowds the daggled females fly,
Pretend to cheapen Goods, but nothing buy.
The Templar spruce, while every spout’s a-broach,
Stays till ’tis fair, yet seems to call a coach.
The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides,
While streams run down her oiled umbrella’s sides.
Here various kinds by various fortunes led,
Commence acquaintance underneath a shed.
Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs,
Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
Boxed in a chair the beau impatient sits,
While spouts run clattering o’er the roof by fits;
And ever and anon with frightful din
The leather sounds, he trembles from within.
So when Troy chairmen bore the wooden steed,
Pregnant with Greeks, impatient to be freed,
(Those bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do,
Instead of paying chairmen, run them through.)
Laocoon struck the outside with his spear,
And each imprisoned hero quaked for fear.

Now from all Parts the swelling kennels flow,
And bear their Trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all hues and odours seem to tell
What streets they sailed from, by the sight and smell.
They, as each Torrent drives, with rapid force
From Smithfield, or St. Pulchre’s shape their course,
And in huge confluent join at Snow-Hill ridge,
Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn-Bridge.
Sweepings from butchers stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats and turnips-tops come tumbling down the flood.

—Jonathan Swift

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by unknowing on June 12, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Colombia, Poetry, Unexamined Life

Posted by unknowing on June 12, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/after-the-rain/

Aqui Se Camina

When we were first married I always wanted to walk more than Katrina did. Even recently I would have more success getting her out for a walk if we first drove somewhere.

Here we don’t have a car (and I like very much the walking we do) and we still have this neighborhood to explore, so she comes more readily (and shopping will get her out on a walk too). We walk fifteen minutes to the Transmilenio and then another fifteen or twenty from the end of our ride to where we have class. Not great for when it rains, but we’ve only had rain during that time one day so far.

After we get home, if we haven’t walked in the morning, I like to walk in the night. The sidewalk food chaps get going around 6 when it’s getting dark and they stay out till about nine when things all start to shut down. We had a slow morning and so tonight we went for a walk and found the Carrera 55 north of Calle 170. Lots of places there and a few better restaurants than we have here.

I’m getting ready to try the pizzas here (again, after 22 years) and also the hamburgers. I had a Colombian chap fond of eating tell me about the really great hamburgers at this one place along the way. You have to understand: its probably not altogether like a hamburger in the US, and I’m not sure about the pizza. So we are looking and thinking about it. (Katrina has settled in to figuring out how to cook good things pretty quickly—with the exception of the potato which still baffles her.)

We had tried the Chinese and bombed out, so we were still looking for a good place that has some comfortableness nearby. We saw another Chinese one and it also was empty, so we aren’t going to try that genre anytime soon; we should know something strange is up when both Chinese places advertise specials like this: Chinese rice, French potatoes, soda for 5500, and 6500 if you want chicken; which reminds me that if you want an empty restaurant you should try one of the chicken places—the roasted chicken is just very common.

After that, however, we are pleasantly tired from walking.

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by unknowing on June 11, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Colombia

Posted by unknowing on June 11, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/aqui-se-camina/

One Down

Well, I learned a few things about getting a job here in Colombia. One of the things we’re learning in our class is the concept of Realia. It’s the notion that people learn better from real situations: so when you’re teaching you have them pretend to go to the bank, to face one of the dreadful immigration officers at the US embassy, shop, and perhaps greet an alien.

That is how I’m helping Katrina learn Spanish: she gradually does more of the talking when we shop. Today she even went out on her own and bought stuff.

We buy stuff every day, and I think today we bought things three or four times. I’m not used to being part of the shopping–other than getting gas once a week.

Anyway, Realia is helping me understand how to get a job here. I went to the interview this morning and was offered a job. It sounded wonderful to me, but when I talked to my teacher and some classmates, they found pros and cons both. And then I got a long letter from the Lines (we’re staying at their house) really discouraging it. So here are the lessons:

1 They should provide benefits. There are places hiring for decent salaries plus benefits.

2 The matter of getting a work visa should be unambiguous. What I need from a job more than anything at this point, is a work visa so I can stay. They have to be committed to having me get that.

3 $1000 is a decent monthly salary here. You can live on it comfortably. Less actually, at least for the moment: two million pesos.

I actually am more interested in being a high-school teacher in English, at this point, but the benefit of being an English teacher is that your work is limited to the classroom, not all the hours outside. We’ll see. The former work would be more interesting (I was offered a job as a religion and social studies teacher) but the latter would probably give me more time and money.

Three months from now I might be kicking myself, but for now I remain blissfully unemployed.

3 Comments
by unknowing on June 9, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Colombia, Unexamined Life

Posted by unknowing on June 9, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/one-down/

Yikes!

On Sunday we met a lot of people at church, and the consensus of advice was that I should start looking for a job now, even before getting the TEFL/TESOL certificate. So this morning I began to send out email to the schools—they’re hiring right now because the school year will soon be over for them and then they’re all gone on holiday.

So now I’ve got an interview at 8 AM tomorrow morning with the principal of COLEGIO BILÍNGÜE PIO XII. Good thing I brought along a few ties. Now I’m downloading a driver to hook up to a printer to see about printing out the copies of my diplomas to show the person who might be my next boss that I’ve got the education I claim.

* * *
We went out to a Chinese restaurant. Every day we walk past the Chinese embassy which is large and largely unattended, and we were wondering how the Chinese here would be. What we had was not too thrilling, and the service was confusing—I think one order is sufficient for two people and we failed to realize it ordering and so what we got was a mixture of the two things we ordered on one dish with two plates, maybe. It might be we didn’t pick the best one in town. In the middle-class neighborhood in which we find ourselves, the best thing is to eat from the holes in the walls.

* * *
We’re reviewing English grammar in our class. It is interesting learning with four native speakers and four who not only have English as a Second Language, but make their living teaching it (we had a chap added to our class). They tell us all the places where students get hung up (uncountable nouns, for example, though such things also exist in Spanish = ganado). One of the difficulties that appears to be arising is that the approach to learning nowadays is a bit rigid in excluding native language from the classroom—which is why people knowing no Spanish can come down and teach. You apparently explain all the intricacies of the target language in the very language you’re trying to teach. One takes the approach the place hiring wants, of course, but if one has the choice, it seems to one that explaining grammar could be done in the native language so that the struggle is not to understand the concepts, but to put them into practice.

My teacher wanted to borrow the little grammar book I have. It is the way she builds her library, apparently. I told her she could borrow it but that if she copied it she would be stealing, it would be bad for her soul and that God would judge her. She is also the first person here I’ve met who is against el Presidente Uribe.

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by unknowing on June 8, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Colombia, Unexamined Life

Posted by unknowing on June 8, 2009

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2009/06/08/yikes/

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