An Update

A bit of unexamined life in case you’re interested:

I’ve been substituting for a chap at work. His students have had a rough history—not his fault—and I’ve been trying to pick up some of the pieces for him. They are at a pretty high level (A6, we call it, out of ten total levels) and are pretty fluent in speaking and listening. At that level I like to talk to them a lot, and at that level they like to talk a lot because they can and it is more interesting. The second test in that level includes Conditionals and Gerunds & Infinitives, which I think I’ve mentioned before. We have almost exhausted all the resources I can come up with in (note: three prepositions in a row like that is something that you would still have to stop and explain to most A6 students) rehearsing both things, and have discovered some complications along the way: things they misunderstand by neglecting one seemingly insignificant bit of information. For example: remember + Gerund means the action took place and is now the object of memory; remember + infinitive means the memory ought to lead to the action. That is an awfully small rule affecting the use of only one verb, but it can be important in conversation and in life, and if you don’t have that rule, good luck trying to explain to an inquirer why we operate that way in English. There was an exercise in which I saw the past tense of that verb and they got the subsequent gerund or infinitive required wrong, and at first I was tempted to find the reason in the tense of the verb which would have been a dead end. Nice to see the lights come on after the explanation (and sometimes we struggle a while for me to understand what their difficulty is, which is the first thing the teacher ought to make sure of if he doesn’t wish to waste time going in circles), but sometimes the rule is so minor it almost makes it worse in the end. It has been good for the mind, however.

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Especially it has been good for the mind considering I’ve not been reading like I was during the break. I’ve got a novel and I’ve got Hardy for poetry but I’m working at establishing the rhythm of teaching, traveling, resting before I take up any further lucubrations. I’ve got Scruton’s Aesthetics of Music to finish and Barzun on Berlioz as well besides my researches into the criticism and appreciation of poetry.

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This may not interest you even more than the above, but I have also been relishing versing. I started my Unexamined Life—as opposed to this; it is all probably a bit confusing, I realize, but I think I’ve got it mostly straight in my own mind—as an attempt to work toward final participation. This, naturally, lead into poetry, as Barfield has since shown me, and as a result I began taking my Unexamined observations and trying to reduce them into metrical compositions. Now I have been taking those and with pleasing if not outstanding success have been subjecting them to rhyme so that I learn to do that and feel it better. It is most instructive.

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It is my dream one day to write a novel about final participation. It is very difficult to envision, however, and I have a feeling that I ought to read more of Goethe’s later, scientific works in order to it. Well, in the meantime there is a lot of plodding to do.

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It was with pleasure I noticed the Oxford Standard Authors’ Henry Vaughan was available to me. There is some work for the untroubled calm of the nights of the day of rest. In this sense also it is good for me to read chaps like Thomas Hardy who draw all the wrong conclusions and yet write good poetry while coming under the influence of a certain positivism (now who was I reading that was mentioning that sort of thing? Maybe Barfield again). I’m very curious about the poetry of mystery, but as dull as Hardy and Frost sometimes get (I am not saying Frost is under the grip of positivism the way Hardy seemed to be), it is true that they wrote very excellent poetry without the same fascination as those who really fascinate me, and I think it is good to keep in mind.

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It reminds me, for those who are so oddly distributed as still to be reading, that the blogs that I follow have been mostly at an ebb of late—low posting and low comments. I mentioned to my wife that the only person who seems still to blog regularly is Tozer, and he’s dead. My blog father, however, is back, though he does not appear to be keen on getting involved in comments. I forgot I had a comment pending here, by which I conclude not that I was negligent but that perhaps there is a general spirit thereof emanating through all of cyberspace, haunting it.

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Now—that I’m sure nobody is paying attention—the retractations: it is probably more accurate to say it was negligent of me to comment and fail subsequently to follow up. One feels a bit like a troll. I had little fortune with some comments elsewhere earlier, which I meant to administer mostly as a joke but seem to have clogged up the entire blog, much to my dismay. When one comments and then there are no subsequent posts at the place, one can’t help feeling one has perhaps crossed a line of one sort or another.