Tag: Literature

Bulletin

The Transformative Power of Leisure and Literature 

Well-Read Mom’s mission addresses several pressing needs: combating loneliness, cultivating leisure, and fostering meaningful discussions. We encourage women to read without guilt, even when there is no immediate utilitarian purpose, because there is a higher “work” at play – to take care of one’s heart— and to rediscover the joy of engaging with transformative literature.

The Role of Introspection and Imagination

Readers who engage with literature thoughtfully—not just to “get through the story” but to seek meaning—activate their imagination to decipher the book’s relevance to their lives. This form of reading encourages critical thinking, cultivates the moral imagination, and trains aesthetic appreciation. By weighing the proposals of literature against one’s education, formation, and religious sensibilities, readers develop a deeper understanding of themselves and the world.

The Transformative Power of Leisure and Literature

Joseph Pieper, a twentieth-century German philosopher, highlighted a fundamental issue in modern culture through his prophetic essay Leisure: The Basis of Culture. He underscored a crucial truth: we lack genuine leisure time. However, leisure is not simply idle time; it is a “receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.” Leisure provides space to think about the origins of things and the deeper meaning of life. Pieper’s insights reveal the transformative potential of leisure and provide a framework for understanding literature’s profound role in our lives.

 Ratio and Intellectus: Two Types of Work

Pieper distinguishes between two types of work: ratio and intellectus. Ratio refers to work that is measurable, observable, and ordered toward productivity—the kind of work essential for keeping society well-ordered. On the other hand, intellectus is a higher form of work that is not primarily driven by productivity but by cultivating our humanity. This metaphysical aspect of human existence requires thought, insight, receptivity, and intuition.

Leisure, therefore, is not a luxury but a necessary commitment. It allows us to step outside the demands of the workaday world and connect with deeper aspects of our being. By nurturing thought and contemplation, leisure fosters an environment where intellectus can thrive.

Reading as a Gateway to Leisure

Reading great books is vital for habituating leisure in Pieper’s sense of the word. When we immerse ourselves in literature, we encounter moments of introspection that allow us to step into the characters’ lives, reflect on their actions and choices, and see our lives in a new light. Through these encounters, literature engages us with the good, the true, and the beautiful.

However, not all literature holds equal value. As readers, we should approach books as consumers seeking entertainment and individuals seeking transformation. Quality literature invites us to ask profound questions: Why am I here? How ought I to live? What does a good life look like? How does an experience of beauty change my heart? By proposing concrete examples of how others have grappled with these questions, literature becomes an avenue for self-reflection and growth.

Friendship and Leisure

Over the past fourteen years, Well-Read Mom has grown tremendously, now serving over 11,000 worldwide.  We provide a yearly companion, a curated book list, discussion questions, and a methodology inviting introspection, fostering friendship, and support to begin and sustain a deep reading practice. Well-Read Mom is for all women, not just biological mothers, as we understand motherhood in the broad sense of helping to nurture life. 

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics speaks of three types of friendship: friendships based on utility, pleasure, and the highest form—friendship based on the pursuit of a good life. Cultivating leisure creates the space for this highest form of friendship, as it prioritizes time not spent in utility but in contemplation and meaningful engagement.

Through the structure and support provided by Well-Read Mom, women have discovered how literature helps them form friendships rooted in the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness. Together, they explore literature that challenges and inspires them to live more thoughtful, intentional lives. We have discovered an interesting ripple effect: when women read more, men and children read more. These effects are not contained to the family but spill onto the larger community. 

Reclaim leisure

Joseph Pieper’s call to reclaim leisure as a cornerstone of culture remains profoundly relevant. By setting aside time for contemplation and engaging with transformative literature, we cultivate our humanity and foster deeper connections with others. Reading with introspection allows us to encounter life’s profound questions, opening us up to truth, beauty, and moral insight. By doing so, we take a significant step toward living richer, more meaningful lives.

Are you interested in learning more about Well-Read Mom?

Learn about our mission, vision, and method for reading literature to cultivate leisure and transform your life on our website: https://wellreadmom.com/

To find a community near you, click on our map feature: https://wellreadmom.com/find-your-community/

Colleen Hutt is the Director of Literary Evangelization for Well-Read Mom and Co-author of The Well-Read Life: Nourish Your Soul through Deep Reading and Intentional Friendship by Marcie Stokman and Colleen Hutt

Bulletin

Educating for Greatness: The Lord of the Rings as Cultural Epic

From a talk given at the Adeodatus Winter Forum: “Canonizing” Tolkien: The Case for Reading Tolkien at All Levels of Catholic Education

I often recommend that parents and students and donors who want to assess a high school should pay attention to its valedictory addresses, to get a sense of the spirit that motivates its best students. At the best schools, these express a conviction that, in words attributed to Benedict XVI, “We are not made for comfort; we are made for greatness.”

What elicits desires for greatness in our youth? What forms the image of greatness that will shape the efforts of their lives? Jane Forsyth, in her 2007 valedictory address at St. Augustine Academy in Ventura, dwelt on the power of the books they read together in English class. 

Our class has always loved English. We have been privileged to read many great works of literature, and our discussions of them have been lively; often they carried on after class. But among all the years of English classes, this last year, especially this last semester, stands apart.

We began the year in much the same vein as past years, reading two works that, though they had little in common with one another, were nonetheless elevating and magnificent: Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.  The second semester was different: we began with All Quiet on the Western Front, an agonizing story of a hopeless young man in the trenches of World War I who dies abandoned and disappointed by those in whom he had put his trust. We next read The Great Gatsby, a tale of decadence, betrayal and disappointment set in the 1920’s whose theme is the illusory and unattainable nature of man’s innate desire for happiness and goodness. This work was followed by Steinbeck’s famous The Grapes of Wrath which, through its twisted use of Biblical allusions and socialist propaganda, challenges Christianity, setting up a system of belief founded on human beings and manifested by a communist ordering of society to merely natural goods. 

We were all shaken by these books, so unlike any we had read in our many years at St. Augustine Academy. Their darkness and despair dampened our spirits, and their utter Godlessness was shocking and disturbing. Our souls rebelled against these works; and we realized all at once that everything we had been taught about the nature of man and the goodness of God had taken root within us. 

We closed the year with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and a peek at Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. These, too, dealt with decadence, ugliness, and sin. But they did not leave us with a bad taste in our mouths. Their steadfast hopefulness contrasted sharply with the despair of the other works we had read. They acknowledged the problems with fallen man and with the world, but then pointed to God as the one who can solve these problems.

These works struck a chord in us, teaching as they did that, to be sure, evil does exist; that a battle is raging between Satan and God; that the battleground is our souls; that the battle is to the death; but that, in spite of all this, we have nothing to fear because Christ is our Great Captain who will win the victory with us. Indeed, He has already won: by His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, He has bought us back from the devil and made grace, that necessary help of God, available to us. And if we open the doors ever so slightly, that grace will flood our souls.

Let me point out what a model their English teacher must have been. If you want to assess your English classes, begin by rating your students on the extent to which they found the books elevating and magnificent, that they were shaken and disturbed, that they found hope in the face of despair. Great literature is not meant to be dissected and left for dead, but to arouse and form our souls. As Arnold Bennett says in Literary Taste: How to Form It, “The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe.” 

But something is missing in Jane’s list. In previous years, she and her classmates would have read many of the great heroic epics of Western literature – The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Aeneid, the Divine Comedy. But where is the great modern heroic epic? Brideshead and O’Connor point to God and grace but do not exemplify for us how to live a life heroically. 

In classical times, epics, culture, and education went together. Ancient epics expressed and formed their cultures. Everybody had heard and read them so often that everybody knew them. They could be quoted and referred to without citing them. These cultural epics inspired youth and were a source of wisdom for the learned. The characters and events were an ideal that the young men, especially the leading young men of the time, wanted to live up to. Alexander carried around with him a treasury which included Homer’s Iliad. He saw everything that he did as living up to the glory of Achilles. He carried that with him as he overcame the entire Persian Empire. 

Epics not only express and form a culture, but they have traditionally been the focus of formal education. For the Greeks, formal education meant educating into the Iliad and the Odyssey. That was the whole goal. In the Socratic dialogue, Protagoras, Protagoras describes Greek education: “And when the boy has learned his letters and is beginning to understand what is written… they put into his hands the works of great poets, which he reads sitting on a bench at school; in these are contained many admonitions, and many tales, and praises, and encomia of ancient famous men, which he is required to learn by heart, in order that he may imitate or emulate them and desire to become like them.” 

Education into these works was considered sufficient education. Not only were you educated into the ideals, the language, and the mastery of the author, but it also prepared you to learn everything else. It provided a framework within which to judge. You had to incorporate everything else you learned into this framework.

The Lord of the Rings is an epic of a similar character and with a similar profundity of impact to the great epics of the tradition. Dr. Tekla Bude, Oregon State Associate Professor of Medieval Literatures, defines an epic as “a long story about a hero that serves as an organizing point of cultural or social identity.” She then identifies four aspects of a cultural epic:

  1. It is about heroes
  2. It involves universal settings
  3. It involves the supernatural
  4. It provides the foundation of a culture.

1. Epics are about heroes. We often call someone “a hero” who, in the moment and outside of their ordinary life, does something heroic, but that doesn’t make them a heroic character. A heroic character is prepared for heroic things and his life is led in expectation of doing these great things. 

Heroes are judged by and judge themselves by other standards. Aristotle identifies heroic virtue as a separate category from ordinary virtue. He uses Hector as an example. For an ordinary man to do some of the things that Hector did would be rash, but for him, they were right. Heroes are used to the fact that their peoples depend on them. The heroes know that and accept it. 

This doesn’t mean they are all good; when a hero falls, it is a 9.0 earthquake. 

“Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,

Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks

Incalculable pain.”

The Lord of the Rings is filled with heroic figures: Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, the Council of the Wise, Saruman, Denethor, Faramir, Boromir, and Éowyn. These are all heroic characters who have to deal with and make decisions that we don’t have to face. Aragorn is a great example. He knew from his youth he was meant to be a hero. He had prepared himself for the moment of trial for 70 years. At Parth Galen, when Gandalf had died, Aragorn becomes the leader of the company. The Orcs have crashed in on the Fellowship and taken Merry and Pippin. Frodo and Sam have fled. Boromir is dead. Aragorn says, “Now the company is all in ruin. It is I that have failed. Vain was Gandalf’s trust in me.” It’s almost impossible for us to imagine what a devastating moment that was for Aragorn. He felt that his whole life’s commitment had failed and he was the failure. Yet he went on.

2. Epics have a universal character. In The Lord of the Rings, we experience villages and agricultural land, as well as ancient forests of great danger and yet compelling beauty. We travel through mountains, caves, plains, devastated landscape, deserts, strongholds, and cities of ancient beauty and strength. My ability to picture what he described was very poor, but when I encountered these things in real life, I understood his descriptions, and his descriptions helped me experience them more fully. I recognized some of the devastation before the gates of Morgoth when I drove through the deserts of Utah. I recognized the mountains when I was in the Rocky Mountains for the first time. I recognized mountain strongholds when I visited Assisi, and Bree in rural villages in Iowa. 

In The Lord of the Rings, we encounter many different kinds of people. We encounter the Shire, the ordinary folk who have a home they love. We encounter Tom Bombadil, someone who is at home that way but in the natural world. We encounter the Last Homely House of Elrond, where memory and story are central aspects of life. We encounter Lothlórien, the Dream-flower where the past remains present. In Rohan, we find the the great grass swept plains up against the mountains and a people who are accustomed to both the plains and the mountains – the horse people, the semi-barbaric, who live in relationship with a civilized world like the way the Goths related to the Roman world. We encounter Gondor, an ancient civilization always living in relation to its past. We even encounter the Orcs with their very debased and violent way of life. 

3. Dr. Bude includes the supernatural as an important part of cultural epics. Christopher Dawson, the great British sociologist of the 20th century, said that religion is the basis of all culture. Tolkien, for various reasons, deliberately avoided explicit religion in The Lord of the Rings. ‘ But encounter with the religious is an important part of the education of the four hobbits. The Shire is without religion. As wonderful as the Shire is, there is nothing that looks beyond life in the Shire. The Travellers learned from the Elves to invoke Elbereth. During several months in Rivendell, the hobbits had heard the stories of the Silmarillion about Ilúvatar and the Valar; these later strengthened Sam and Frodo as they were about to enter Mordor. The Gondorians retained some religious practices, such as bowing to the west before eating. For them, this brought to mind Numenor and Elven home and the Valar who govern the world under the one God, Iluvatar. Frodo felt awkward that the hobbits had no such custom.

Still, for the most part in The Lord of the Rings, the divine is hidden. But it is powerfully at work. Providence is a central theme in the work. We see this especially through Gandalf. Gandalf is a wizard on a mission, literally. He was sent by the Valar to fight Sauron, and he was sent back after his death to finish the job. Central to Gandalf’s heroic wisdom is acute perception of Providence at work.  Early in the story, Gandalf speaks to Frodo of how Bilbo came to find the Ring in such an odd circumstance that nobody would have foreseen. He says, “Behind that, there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.” Gandalf is very serious about this. He sees that something incredible, something divinely surprising, has happened. So he doesn’t let Frodo give the Ring to somebody more powerful who could be really responsible for it. He seems to think, “Something has happened I didn’t anticipate. I need to understand its whole purpose. What is the One up to in this?” This is the way Gandalf rolls.

Trust in Providence allows Tolkien’s heroes to exemplify mercy, the chief spiritual virtue of the whole epic. Through the story, we are led to believe that having mercy on those who deserve punishment or death will be rewarded and that we should always in every possible circumstance offer mercy. True, it’s dangerous to be merciful to those who don’t deserve mercy. But Gandalf says Bilbo took so little harm from the Ring because he acted with pity by not killing Gollum. In the end, the Quest would have failed except for Gollum; Gollum would not have been alive if Frodo had not learned the lesson of mercy from Gandalf. Providence and mercy are the heart of the religious aspect of The Lord of the Rings.

4. Finally, an epic provides a foundation for culture by presenting its ideals in a way that shapes culture. I think that, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien united and expressed the ideals of Christian civilization in a purer and more heroic way than ever before, as love for the lowly, hope for its ennoblement. The story presents with a clarity of Christian moral vision – mercy, duty, freedom, choice, heart, will, love for the natural, love for the laborer. I also think that we imbibe from him the best spirit of Christendom, including the Greco-Roman, and Norse traditions it united and purified. We are prepared to love and learn from the cultural, theological, philosophical, and historical experiences of the Church that help us understand more deeply the spiritual vision he presents.

5. I will add one aspect of a culture epic to Bude’s list: a cultural epic invites and rewards thought. It is a repository of cultural wisdom. A cultural epic means more to you the older you get. You learn more from it. When you go back as a scholar, you discover more of its treasures. And you reinspired by it. When you go back and read it again as an older person, when you have yourself tried and failed, when have yourself experienced so much more of people and places and things, his works mean so much more to you. I now find it hard to read many passages aloud without crying.

Did Tolkien intend The Lord of the Rings to become a cultural epic? He did see that it would play that role in the Shire. At the end of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo gives the Red Book of the Westmarch to Sam before he goes over the sea. He says to Sam:

You will be the Mayor, of course, as long as you want to be, and the most famous gardener in history; and you will read things out of the Red Book, and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger, and so love their beloved land all the more. And that will keep you as busy and as happy as anyone can be, as long as your part in the Story goes on.

The Lord of the Rings as written by Bilbo and Frodo, passed on to Sam, becomes the cultural epic of the Shire. It leads them into a new relationship with the kingdom of Arnor and Gondor and ennobles the whole society. From then on, young hobbits would realize, “We are made for greatness.” 

Bulletin

Friendship, History, and Tradition: Three Criteria for the Development of the Canon

I was recently asked by friends in South America to help set guidelines for the establishment of a canon of great books. At first glance, this might seem a straightforward or even unnecessary task. Surely, everyone knows which books are the great ones! And certainly, we can almost all agree on Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, and a few others, but any student of the history of Great Books programs will know that the details quickly become murky —and show definite biases— once one moves much beyond those universal authors. As a Roman Catholic and medievalist, I have long felt that a great weakness of Adler’s Great Books in the Western World is its deemphasis of Roman authors and the almost complete lack of medieval authors. I also dislike the resulting overemphasis on nineteenth-century and anglophone authors. These faults in Adler’s canon can almost certainly be explained by his peculiar taste, formed as it was in New York City in the first half of the twentieth century. Almost a century later, and with a Great Books movement that is becoming increasingly globalized, we may need to work to form a new canon, and that means developing criteria for selecting those works that are of universal importance.

The first criterion I settled on was friendship. This was based on my experience that each of us has a private canon of favorite books, and we share that canon with our friends and relations, often whether they want us to or not. They then might like a few of the books we recommend, and then share them with their friends or relations, and in a generation or so, a subculture has formed, with its own canon. I imagine that, given a sufficiently long temporal span, this is how all canons came to be, and it is a good place for us to start as we work to form our list of the books that every educated person should read. For my part, I am working to ensure that all of my friends and students read the Tablet of Cebes, and I would trade all of twentieth-century fiction and poetry for The Lord of the Rings.

The next important consideration for canon formation is history. History is intimately tied up with identity,

with questions of us and them. My discussions with colleagues in both North and South America have led me to conclude that we can use basically the same list of books until we reach the sixteenth century. Such a list includes the Hebrew Bible, Hellenism, the New Testament and the Fathers, and the common legal, philosophical, theological, and literary inheritance of Latin Christendom. After that, religious difference in North America and ethnic difference (more marked in the past and diminishing rapidly) between the two Americas makes finding undisputed and universally great books more difficult. We ought probably all to read Shakespeare and Cervantes, but must every student in Buenos Aires and Santiago read Huckleberry Finn? Ought every student in Dallas and Detroit read Martín Fierro? We may need to accept different lists for these more recent authors, at least until another century (or two) has passed, and we have the benefit of hindsight.

The last criterion is tradition, which is more abstract than the other two, in that it cannot be reduced to a finite list of texts, and also more concrete, in that tradition is more fundamental and constitutive of the practices that animate our day-to-day experience. Our common traditions include the seven liberal arts, the historical connection to or continuing participation in Latin Christendom, and the controversial legacies of empire, colonialism, and mestizaje that make us Western but not European, and American whether we live north or south of the equator. In our new canon, I hope we will take inspiration from the wise, old ordo disciplinarum, which tells us that we read Aristotle’s Rhetoric more profitably when we have first mastered Cicero’s, we understand the Nicomachean Ethics better when we have already learned the habit of virtue from Seneca, and we may love Wisdom more if we meet her first in Boethius’ cell rather than in Plato’s cave. And of course, our path to philosophy will be straighter and narrower the more we have mastered the arts of language and number.

It takes a generation to destroy a tradition and three to build one. I think we are about halfway through the second generation, and I am full of hope. I look forward to navigating the next cycle of cultural renewal with friends in Europe and in both halves of America as we chart a path forward.

Bulletin

Gimli Eulogizes the Glittering Caves

by J. R. R. Tolkien

In this excerpt from The Two Towers, Gimli the Dwarf beautifully evangelizes his friend, Legolas the Elf, about the exquisite beauties he has discovered in a cave of refuge. The scene opens with their troop faced with journeying through a mysterious wood which suddenly appeared to turn the tide of the battle of Helm’s Deep.

In the afternoon the King’s company prepared to depart. The work of burial was then but beginning; and Théoden mourned for the loss of Háma, his captain, and cast the first earth upon his grave. ‘Great injury indeed has Saruman done to me and all this land,’ he said; ‘and I will remember it, when we meet.’

The sun was already drawing near the hills upon the west of the Coomb, when at last Théoden and Gandalf and their companions rode down from the Dike. Behind them were gathered a great host, both of the Riders and of the people of Westfold, old and young, women and children, who had come out from the caves. A song of victory they sang with clear voices; and then they fell silent, wondering what would chance, for their eyes were on the trees and they feared them.

The Riders came to the wood, and they halted; horse and man, they were unwilling to pass in. The trees were grey and menacing, and a shadow or a mist was about them. The ends of their long sweeping boughs hung down like searching fingers, their roots stood up from the ground like the limbs of strange monsters, and dark caverns opened beneath them. But Gandalf went forward, leading the company, and where the road from the Hornburg met the trees they saw now an opening like an arched gate under mighty boughs; and through it Gandalf passed, and they followed him. Then to their amazement they found that the road ran on, and the Deeping-stream beside it; and the sky was open above and full of golden light. But on either side the great aisles of the wood were already wrapped in dusk, stretching away into impenetrable shadows; and there they heard the creaking and groaning of boughs, and far cries, and a rumour of wordless voices, murmuring angrily. No Orc or other living creature could be seen.

Legolas and Gimli were now riding together upon one horse; and they kept close beside Gandalf, for Gimli was afraid of the wood. ‘It is hot in here,’ said Legolas to Gandalf. ‘I feel a great wrath about me. Do you not feel the air throb in your ears?’

‘Yes,’ said Gandalf.

‘What has become of the miserable Orcs?’ said Legolas.

‘That, I think, no one will ever know,’ said Gandalf.

They rode in silence for a while; but Legolas was ever glancing from side to side, and would often have halted to listen to the sounds of the wood, if Gimli had allowed it.

‘These are the strangest trees that ever I saw,’ he said; ‘and I have seen many an oak grow from acorn to ruinous age. I wish that there were leisure now to walk among them: they have voices, and in time I might come to understand their thought.’

‘No, no!’ said Gimli. ‘Let us leave them! I guess their thought already: hatred of all that go on two legs; and their speech is of crushing and strangling.’

‘Not of all that go on two legs,’ said Legolas. ‘There I think you are wrong. It is Orcs that they hate. For they do not belong here and know little of Elves and Men. Far away are the valleys where they sprang. From the deep dales of Fangorn, Gimli, that is whence they come, I guess.’

‘Then that is the most perilous wood in Middle-earth,’ said Gimli. ‘I should be grateful for the part they have played, but I do not love them. You may think them wonderful, but I have seen a greater wonder in this land, more beautiful than any grove or glade that ever grew: my heart is still full of it. ‘Strange are the ways of Men, Legolas! Here they have one of the marvels of the Northern World, and what do they say of it? Caves, they say! Caves! Holes to fly to in time of war, to store fodder in! My good Legolas, do you know that the caverns of Helm’s Deep are vast and beautiful? There would be an endless pilgrimage of Dwarves, merely to gaze at them, if such things were known to be. Aye indeed, they would pay pure gold for a brief glance!’

‘And I would give gold to be excused,’ said Legolas; ‘and double to be let out, if I strayed in!’

‘You have not seen, so I forgive your jest,’ said Gimli. ‘But you speak like a fool. Do you think those halls are fair, where your King dwells under the hill in Mirkwood, and Dwarves helped in their making long ago? They are but hovels compared with the caverns I have seen here: immeasurable halls, filled with an everlasting music of water that tinkles into pools, as fair as Kheled-zâram in the starlight.

‘And, Legolas, when the torches are kindled and men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! then, Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities. such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in

his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come. And plink! a silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in a grotto of the sea. Then evening comes: they fade and twinkle out; the torches pass on into another chamber and another dream. There is chamber after chamber, Legolas; hall opening out of hall, dome after dome, stair beyond stair; and still the winding paths lead on into the mountains’ heart. Caves! The Caverns of Helm’s Deep! Happy was the chance that drove me there! It makes me weep to leave them.’

‘Then I will wish you this fortune for your comfort, Gimli,’ said the Elf, ‘that you may come safe from war and return to see them again. But do not tell all your kindred! There seems little left for them to do, from your account. Maybe the men of this land are wise to say little: one family of busy dwarves with hammer and chisel might mar more than they made.’

‘No, you do not understand,’ said Gimli. ‘No dwarf could be unmoved by such loveliness. None of Durin’s race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the spring-time for firewood? We would tend these glades of flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap – a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day – so we could work, and as the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. And lights, Legolas! We should make lights, such lamps as once shone in Khazaddûm; and when we wished we would drive away the night that has lain there since the hills were made; and when we desired rest, we would let the night return.’

‘You move me, Gimli,’ said Legolas. ‘I have never heard you speak like this before. Almost you make me regret that I have not seen these caves. Come! Let us make this bargain-if we both return safe out of the perils that await us, we will journey for a while together. You shall visit Fangorn with me, and then I will come with you to see Helm’s Deep.’

‘That would not be the way of return that I should choose,’ said Gimli. ‘But I will endure Fangorn, if I have your promise to come back to the caves and share their wonder with me.’

‘You have my promise,’ said Legolas. ‘But alas! Now we must leave behind both cave and wood for a while: See! We are coming to the end of the trees. How far is it to Isengard, Gandalf?’

‘About fifteen leagues, as the crows of Saruman make it.’ said Gandalf: ‘five from the mouth of Deeping-coomb to the Fords: and ten more from there to the gates of Isengard. But we shall not ride all the way this night.’

‘And when we come there, what shall we see?’ asked Gimli. ‘You may know, but I cannot guess.’

‘I do not know myself for certain,’ answered the wizard. ‘I was there at nightfall yesterday, but much may have happened since. Yet I think that you will not say that the journey was in vain – not though the Glittering Caves of Aglarond be left behind.’

Bulletin

Rediscovering Classic Children’s Literature as an Adult

C.S. Lewis dedicates his classic The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to his goddaughter Lucy with the following words:

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. 

I’m not sure I ever reached an age when I considered myself “too old for fairy tales,” but there have certainly been seasons in which other things seemed more important. Pursuing an English major and Classical Education minor at a liberal arts college, I was up to my eyes in Aquinas and Aristotle, Faulkner and de Tocqueville. My dorm room was infested with Greek flashcards. Books that I had read, highlighted, and tabbed piled up—books that I hadn’t read piled up higher. (I used to joke that the only thing I got from my English major was a stronger grasp of how many things I had not read.)

Counterintuitively, it was around that time that I started picking up my childhood books again. Not only the fairy tales like The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but also the books that had taught me, as a girl, what girlhood was: Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon, A Little Princess, The Secret Garden. I developed a habit of reading a few chapters of these long-forgotten childhood classics before I fell asleep at night. Somehow, I knew it was precisely what I needed. Over the years, I have turned to children’s literature again and again, and developed more articulate ideas on why this practice was so fruitful.

Children’s literature is simple. 

I first started reading children’s books because they were the books I had on hand, and they didn’t feel intimidating. Their simple language was easy to read after a day of slogging away at a medieval theology paper in the library. I already knew what was going to happen in these books, and that was somehow soothing, making them perfect bedtime reading.

Many of us have favorite books from childhood we’d love to revisit, or childhood classics we never got to read. Unlike some other classics we may wish we had read (War and Peace is my personal nemesis), children’s literature is easy to “catch up on.” If you have your own children, you can even read books with them that you wish you had read yourself, enriching both your and their experience.

In its simplicity, children’s literature reminds us that literature does not need to be complex and wordy in order to have deep reservoirs of meaning. Especially those of us who dwell in lofty academic spheres sometimes need this reminder—the simplest way of saying something is often the best way.

Children’s literature is (or should be) moral. 

Admittedly, children’s literature, especially the classics, can be a tiny bit moralistic. Often the lessons meant to be drawn from it—being happy without wealth, for example, or caring for those around us—can be a little bit on-the-nose.

But when I returned to children’s literature as an adult, I felt that touch of moralism was a good corrective. Sara Crewe’s patience in A Little Princess, the healing powers of human connection as depicted in The Secret Garden, Anne Shirley’s indefatigable enthusiasm—I felt all these traits reawakening my desire for a beautiful life, just as they are meant to do for children. It was a fruitful moment to reflect on the woman I had meant to become when I had been formed by these incredible characters—and the woman I was actually becoming.

I certainly don’t think all literature should be as morally simple as these “fairy tales” and formative children’s books. But it can be helpful to return to the basic categories of good and evil as they are laid out in the books we read to children—if only because they can help us discern good and evil in other books, and even in our own lives. It’s easy for me, as an adult sophisticate, to justify my impatience or envy or discontent. But when I’m faced with a children’s book that explains in simple and compelling terms that it is better to be patient and kind and grateful, I have to feel a little silly. I knew as a child that these things were true, and I know it as an adult too.

Children’s literature awakens our wonder for life. 

When we are children, everything is new. It is always funny to me to revisit a book I read as a young child and understand a turn of phrase or description that I never understood before, because I didn’t have enough context for it. More frequently, though, reading children’s literature renews my wonder at life because it affords the perspective of a child who is experiencing it all for the very first time.

Whether it is Mary running all over the garden with Dickon and discovering that the rose bushes are alive underneath all their old, rotten branches, or Anne accidentally dyeing her hair green, or Polly and Digory exploring the rafters of a whole row of houses, children’s literature reminds me that life is extremely interesting, after all. It can be easy to forget this in the daily slog of adulthood, when one day seems very much like another. In a children’s book, every day is a new step in an adventure.

Over the years, my own adventure has led me through a master’s in theology and a Ph.D. in Theology, the Imagination, and the Arts, and now I’m lucky enough to be reading “fairy tales again” as part of my daily work.

As a reading guide for an app called Read With Me, I’m currently taking a group of people through Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, a classic I’ve read many times. Still, every day new things jump off the pages. If you want to make reading children’s literature a part of your life, you’d be welcome to join us. I’m also including a list of my favorite children’s classics, both those that are well-known and those that are a bit less well-known, if you want to build a children’s literature reading practice of your own!

  • The Hobbit
  • The Chronicles of Narnia 
  • Winnie the Pooh
  • An Episode of Sparrows 
  • Little Women
  • Little Men
  • Pollyanna
  • Caddie Woodlawn
  • Anne of Green Gables (and series) 
  • Emily of New Moon 
  • A Little Princess
  • The Secret Garden 
  • The Lost Prince
  • Swallows and Amazons
  • The Wind in the Willows
  • The Princess and the Goblin
  • A Girl of the Limberlost
  • Charlotte’s Web
  • Little House on the Prairie
  • Heidi
  • Peter Pan
  • Around the World in Eighty Days
  • Railway Children
  • Five Children and It
  • The Little Prince
  • Pippi Longstocking
  • The Great Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
  • Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales
  • The Blue Fairy Book
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Bulletin

Excerpts from Anne of Green Gables

From Anne of Green Gables, Chapter 35

Then, almost before anybody realized it, spring had come; out in Avonlea the Mayflowers were peeping pinkly out on the sere barrens where snow-wreaths lingered; and the "mist of green" was on the woods and in the valleys. But in Charlottetown harassed Queen's students thought and talked only of examinations.

"It doesn't seem possible that the term is nearly over," said Anne. "Why, last fall it seemed so long to look forward to — a whole winter of studies and classes. And here we are, with the exams looming up next week. Girls, sometimes I feel as if those exams meant everything, but when I look at the big buds swelling on those chestnut trees and the misty blue air at the end of the streets they don't seem half so important."

Jane and Ruby and Josie, who had dropped in, did not take this view of it. To them the coming examinations were constantly very important indeed — far more important than chestnut buds or Maytime hazes. It was all very well for Anne, who was sure of passing at least, to have her moments of belittling them, but when your whole future depended on them — as the girls truly thought theirs did — you could not regard them philosophically.

"I've lost seven pounds in the last two weeks," sighed Jane. "It's no use to say don't worry. I WILL worry. Worrying helps you some — it seems as if you were doing something when you're worrying. It would be dreadful if I failed to get my license after going to Queen's all winter and spending so much money."

"I don't care," said Josie Pye. "If I don't pass this year I'm coming back next. My father can afford to send me. Anne, Frank Stockley says that Professor Tremaine said Gilbert Blythe was sure to get the medal and that Emily Clay would likely win the Avery scholarship."

"That may make me feel badly tomorrow, Josie," laughed Anne, "but just now I honestly feel that as long as I know the violets are coming out all purple down in the hollow below Green Gables and that little ferns are poking their heads up in Lovers' Lane, it's not a great deal of difference whether I win the Avery or not. I've done my best and I begin to understand what is meant by the 'joy of the strife.' Next to trying and winning, the best thing is trying and failing. Girls, don't talk about exams! Look at that arch of pale green sky over those houses and picture to yourself what it must look like over the purply-dark beech-woods back of Avonlea."

"What are you going to wear for commencement, Jane?" asked Ruby practically.

Jane and Josie both answered at once and the chatter drifted into a side eddy of fashions. But Anne, with her elbows on the window sill, her soft cheek laid against her clasped hands, and her eyes filled with visions, looked out unheedingly across city roof and spire to that glorious dome of sunset sky and wove her dreams of a possible future from the golden tissue of youth's own optimism. All the Beyond was hers with its possibilities lurking rosily in the oncoming years — each year a rose of promise to be woven into an immortal chaplet.

From Anne of the Island, Chapter XIV. (Two young women face the reality of death.)

THE SUMMONS

Anne was sitting with Ruby Gillis in the Gillis’ garden after the day had crept lingeringly through it and was gone. It had been a warm, smoky summer afternoon. The world was in a splendor of out-flowering. The idle valleys were full of hazes. The woodways were pranked with shadows and the fields with the purple of the asters.

Anne had given up a moonlight drive to the White Sands beach that she might spend the evening with Ruby. She had so spent many evenings that summer, although she often wondered what good it did any one, and sometimes went home deciding that she could not go again.

Ruby grew paler as the summer waned; the White Sands school was given up—“her father thought it better that she shouldn’t teach till New Year’s”—and the fancy work she loved oftener and oftener fell from hands grown too weary for it. But she was always gay, always hopeful, always chattering and whispering of her beaux, and their rivalries and despairs. It was this that made Anne’s visits hard for her. What had once been silly or amusing was gruesome, now; it was death peering through a wilful mask of life. Yet Ruby seemed to cling to her, and never let her go until she had promised to come again soon. Mrs. Lynde grumbled about Anne’s frequent visits, and declared she would catch consumption; even Marilla was dubious.

“Every time you go to see Ruby you come home looking tired out,” she said.

“It’s so very sad and dreadful,” said Anne in a low tone. “Ruby doesn’t seem to realize her condition in the least. And yet I somehow feel she needs help—craves it—and I want to give it to her and can’t. All the time I’m with her I feel as if I were watching her struggle with an invisible foe—trying to push it back with such feeble resistance as she has. That is why I come home tired.”

But tonight Anne did not feel this so keenly. Ruby was strangely quiet. She said not a word about parties and drives and dresses and “fellows.” She lay in the hammock, with her untouched work beside her, and a white shawl wrapped about her thin shoulders. Her long yellow braids of hair—how Anne had envied those beautiful braids in old schooldays!—lay on either side of her. She had taken the pins out—they made her head ache, she said. The hectic flush was gone for the time, leaving her pale and childlike.

The moon rose in the silvery sky, empearling the clouds around her. Below, the pond shimmered in its hazy radiance. Just beyond the Gillis homestead was the church, with the old graveyard beside it. The moonlight shone on the white stones, bringing them out in clear-cut relief against the dark trees behind.

File:Highgate Cemetery London-Dierking.jpg“How strange the graveyard looks by moonlight!” said Ruby suddenly. “How ghostly!” she shuddered. “Anne, it won’t be long now before I’ll be lying over there. You and Diana and all the rest will be going about, full of life—and I’ll be there—in the old graveyard—dead!”

The surprise of it bewildered Anne. For a few moments she could not speak.

“You know it’s so, don’t you?” said Ruby insistently.

“Yes, I know,” answered Anne in a low tone. “Dear Ruby, I know.”

“Everybody knows it,” said Ruby bitterly. “I know it—I’ve known it all summer, though I wouldn’t give in. And, oh, Anne”—she reached out and caught Anne’s hand pleadingly, impulsively—“I don’t want to die. I’m afraid to die.”

“Why should you be afraid, Ruby?“ asked Anne quietly.

“Because—because—oh, I’m not afraid but that I’ll go to heaven, Anne. I’m a church member. But—it’ll be all so different. I think—and think—and I get so frightened—and—and—homesick. Heaven must be very beautiful, of course, the Bible says so—but, Anne, it won’t be what I’ve been used to.”

Through Anne’s mind drifted an intrusive recollection of a funny story she had heard Philippa Gordon tell—the story of some old man who had said very much the same thing about the world to come. It had sounded funny then—she remembered how she and Priscilla had laughed over it. But it did not seem in the least humorous now, coming from Ruby’s pale, trembling lips. It was sad, tragic—and true! Heaven could not be what Ruby had been used to. There had been nothing in her gay, frivolous life, her shallow ideals and aspirations, to fit her for that great change, or make the life to come seem to her anything but alien and unreal and undesirable. Anne wondered helplessly what she could say that would help her. Could she say anything? “I think, Ruby,” she began hesitatingly—for it was difficult for Anne to speak to any one of the deepest thoughts of her heart, or the new ideas that had vaguely begun to shape themselves in her mind, concerning the great mysteries of life here and hereafter, superseding her old childish conceptions, and it was hardest of all to speak of them to such as Ruby Gillis—“I think, perhaps, we have very mistaken ideas about heaven—what it is and what it holds for us. I don’t think it can be so very different from life here as most people seem to think. I believe we’ll just go on living, a good deal as we live here—and be ourselves just the same—only it will be easier to be good and to—follow the highest. All the hindrances and perplexities will be taken away, and we shall see clearly. Don’t be afraid, Ruby.”

“I can’t help it,” said Ruby pitifully. “Even if what you say about heaven is true—and you can’t be sure—it may be only that imagination of yours—it won’t be just the same. It can’t be. I want to go on living here. I’m so young, Anne. I haven’t had my life. I’ve fought so hard to live—and it isn’t any use—I have to die—and leave everything I care for.” Anne sat in a pain that was almost intolerable. She could not tell comforting falsehoods; and all that Ruby said was so horribly true. She was leaving everything she cared for. She had laid up her treasures on earth only; she had lived solely for the little things of life—the things that pass—forgetting the great things that go onward into eternity, bridging the gulf between the two lives and making of death a mere passing from one dwelling to the other—from twilight to unclouded day. God would take care of her there—Anne believed—she would learn—but now it was no wonder her soul clung, in blind helplessness, to the only things she knew and loved.

Ruby raised herself on her arm and lifted up her bright, beautiful blue eyes to the moonlit skies.

“I want to live,” she said, in a trembling voice. “I want to live like other girls. I—I want to be married, Anne—and—and—have little children. You know I always loved babies, Anne. I couldn’t say this to any one but you. I know you understand. And then poor Herb—he—he loves me and I love him, Anne. The others meant nothing to me, but he does—and if I could live I would be his wife and be so happy. Oh, Anne, it’s hard.”

Ruby sank back on her pillows and sobbed convulsively. Anne pressed her hand in an agony of sympathy—silent sympathy, which perhaps helped Ruby more than broken, imperfect words could have done; for presently she grew calmer and her sobs ceased.

“I’m glad I’ve told you this, Anne,” she whispered. “It has helped me just to say it all out. I’ve wanted to all summer—every time you came. I wanted to talk it over with you—but I couldn’t. It seemed as if it would make death so sure if I said I was going to die, or if any one else said it or hinted it. I wouldn’t say it, or even think it. In the daytime, when people were around me and everything was cheerful, it wasn’t so hard to keep from thinking of it. But in the night, when I couldn’t sleep—it was so dreadful, Anne. I couldn’t get away from it then. Death just came and stared me in the face, until I got so frightened I could have screamed.”

“But you won’t be frightened any more, Ruby, will you? You’ll be brave, and believe that all is going to be well with you.”

“I’ll try. I’ll think over what you have said, and try to believe it. And you’ll come up as often as you can, won’t you, Anne?”

“Yes, dear.”

“It—it won’t be very long now, Anne. I feel sure of that. And I’d rather have you than any one else. I always liked you best of all the girls I went to school with. You were never jealous, or mean, like some of them were. Poor Em White was up to see me yesterday. You remember Em and I were such chums for three years when we went to school? And then we quarrelled the time of the school concert. We’ve never spoken to each other since. Wasn’t it silly? Anything like that seems silly now. But Em and I made up the old quarrel yesterday. She said she’d have spoken years ago, only she thought I wouldn’t. And I never spoke to her because I was sure she wouldn’t speak to me. Isn’t it strange how people misunderstand each other, Anne?”

“Most of the trouble in life comes from misunderstanding, I think,” said Anne. “I must go now, Ruby. It’s getting late—and you shouldn’t be out in the damp.”

“You’ll come up soon again.”

“Yes, very soon. And if there’s anything I can do to help you I’ll be so glad.”

“I know. You have helped me already. Nothing seems quite so dreadful now. Good night, Anne.”

“Good night, dear.”

Anne walked home very slowly in the moonlight. The evening had changed something for her. Life held a different meaning, a deeper purpose. On the surface it would go on just the same; but the deeps had been stirred. It must not be with her as with poor butterfly Ruby. When she came to the end of one life it must not be to face the next with the shrinking terror of something wholly different—something for which accustomed thought and ideal and aspiration had unfitted her. The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must be begun here on earth.

 

Bulletin

Literary Taste: How to Form It

Chapter 1 The Aim of Literary Taste: How to Form It by Arthur Bennet

File:Fragonard, The Reader.jpgAt the beginning a misconception must be removed from the path. Many people, if not most, look on literary taste as an elegant accomplishment, by acquiring which they will complete themselves, and make themselves finally fit as members of a correct society. They are secretly ashamed of their ignorance of literature, in the same way as they would be ashamed of their ignorance of etiquette at a high entertainment, or of their inability to ride a horse if suddenly called upon to do so. There are certain things that a man ought to know, or to know about, and literature is one of them: such is their idea. They have learnt to dress themselves with propriety, and to behave with propriety on all occasions; they are fairly "up" in the questions of the day; by industry and enterprise they are succeeding in their vocations; it behoves them, then, not to forget that an acquaintance with literature is an indispensable part of a self-respecting man's personal baggage. Painting doesn't matter; music doesn't matter very much. But "everyone is supposed to know" about literature. Then, literature is such a charming distraction! Literary taste thus serves two purposes: as a certificate of correct culture and as a private pastime. A young professor of mathematics, immense at mathematics and games, dangerous at chess, capable of Haydn on the violin, once said to me, after listening to some chat on books, "Yes, I must take up literature." As though saying: "I was rather forgetting literature. However, I've polished off all these other things. I'll have a shy at literature now."

This attitude, or any attitude which resembles it, is wrong. To him who really comprehends what literature is, and what the function of literature is, this attitude is simply ludicrous. It is also fatal to the formation of literary taste. People who regard literary taste simply as an accomplishment, and literature simply as a distraction, will never truly succeed either in acquiring the accomplishment or in using it half-acquired as a distraction; though the one is the most perfect of distractions, and though the other is unsurpassed by any other accomplishment in elegance or in power to impress the universal snobbery of civilised mankind. Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete living. I am extremely anxious to avoid rhetorical exaggerations. I do not think I am guilty of one in asserting that he who has not been "presented to the freedom" of literature has not wakened up out of his prenatal sleep. He is merely not born. He can't see; he can't hear; he can't feel, in any full sense. He can only eat his dinner. What more than anything else annoys people who know the true function of literature, and have profited thereby, is the spectacle of so many thousands of individuals going about under the delusion that they are alive, when, as a fact, they are no nearer being alive than a bear in winter.

I will tell you what literature is! No—I only wish I could. But I can't. No one can. Gleams can be thrown on the secret, inklings given, but no more. I will try to give you an inkling. And, to do so, I will take you back into your own history, or forward into it. That evening when you went for a walk with your faithful friend, the friend from whom you hid nothing— or almost nothing...! You were, in truth, somewhat inclined to hide from him the particular matter which monopolised your mind that evening, but somehow you contrived to get on to it, drawn by an overpowering fascination. And as your faithful friend was sympathetic and discreet, and flattered you by a respectful curiosity, you proceeded further and further into the said matter, growing more and more confidential, until at last you cried out, in a terrific whisper: "My boy, she is simply miraculous!" At that moment you were in the domain of literature.

Let me explain. Of course, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, she was notFile:Godward The Old Old Story 1903.jpg miraculous. Your faithful friend had never noticed that she was miraculous, nor had about forty thousand other fairly keen observers. She was just a girl. Troy had not been burnt for her. A girl cannot be called a miracle. If a girl is to be called a miracle, then you might call pretty nearly anything a miracle.... That is just it: you might. You can. You ought. Amid all the miracles of the universe you had just wakened up to one. You were full of your discovery. You were under a divine impulsion to impart that discovery. You had a strong sense of the marvellous beauty of something, and you had to share it. You were in a passion about something, and you had to vent yourself on somebody. You were drawn towards the whole of the rest of the human race. Mark the effect of your mood and utterance on your faithful friend. He knew that she was not a miracle. No other person could have made him believe that she was a miracle. But you, by the force and sincerity of your own vision of her, and by the fervour of your desire to make him participate in your vision, did for quite a long time cause him to feel that he had been blind to the miracle of that girl.

You were producing literature. You were alive. Your eyes were unlidded, your ears were unstopped, to some part of the beauty and the strangeness of the world; and a strong instinct within you forced you to tell someone. It was not enough for you that you saw and heard. Others had to see and hear. Others had to be wakened up. And they were! It is quite possible—I am not quite sure— that your faithful friend the very next day, or the next month, looked at some other girl, and suddenly saw that she, too, was miraculous! The influence of literature!

The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. And the greatest makers of literature are those whose vision has been the widest, and whose feeling has been the most intense. Your own fragment of insight was accidental, and perhaps temporary. Their lives are one long ecstasy of denying that the world is a dull place. Is it nothing to you to learn to understand that the world is not a dull place? Is it nothing to you to be led out of the tunnel on to the hill-side, to have all your senses quickened, to be invigorated by the true savour of life, to feel your heart beating under that correct necktie of yours? These makers of literature render you their equals.

File:Jan Brueghel the Younger - Snowy Landscape, after 1625.jpgThe aim of literary study is not to amuse the hours of leisure; it is to awake oneself, it is to be alive, to intensify one's capacity for pleasure, for sympathy, and for comprehension. It is not to affect one hour, but twenty-four hours. It is to change utterly one's relations with the world. An understanding appreciation of literature means an understanding appreciation of the world, and it means nothing else. Not isolated and unconnected parts of life, but all of life, brought together and correlated in a synthetic map! The spirit of literature is unifying; it joins the candle and the star, and by the magic of an image shows that the beauty of the greater is in the less. And, not content with the disclosure of beauty and the bringing together of all things whatever within its focus, it enforces a moral wisdom by the tracing everywhere of cause and effect. It consoles doubly— by the revelation of unsuspected loveliness, and by the proof that our lot is the common lot. It is the supreme cry of the discoverer, offering sympathy and asking for it in a single gesture. In attending a University Extension Lecture on the sources of Shakespeare's plots, or in studying the researches of George Saintsbury into the origins of English prosody, or in weighing the evidence for and against the assertion that Rousseau was a scoundrel, one is apt to forget what literature really is and is for. It is well to remind ourselves that literature is first and last a means of life, and that the enterprise of forming one's literary taste is an enterprise of learning how best to use this means of life. People who don't want to live, people who would sooner hibernate than feel intensely, will be wise to eschew literature. They had better, to quote from the finest passage in a fine poem, "sit around and eat blackberries." The sight of a "common bush afire with God" might upset their nerves.

Bulletin

Providence and The Lord of the Rings

This article is adapted from Dr. Seeley’s Russell Kirk Paideia Prize acceptance speech at the Circe Institute Conference last July.

ProvidenceFile:El Señor de los Anillos lectura.jpg is often difficult to see, especially in the present, especially in the midst of great evils, especially for those fighting what JRR Tolkien called “the long defeat.” In similar times, Boethius needed consolation: his major complaint as he sat in prison facing death was that it seemed that the Lord who ruled the heavens and the earth did not rule in the affairs of men.

For me it has not been so difficult to believe. Even before I had faith in the Almighty, I received daily consolation of heart and imagination from The Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion were for me what the Iliad and the Odyssey were for the Greeks, what the Scriptures were for the medieval monks. As a teenager, I read The Lord of the Rings continually, to the extent that I had it practically memorized. I judged my life by its characters – Would Sam and Gandalf and Aragorn be friends with me? In their eyes, I wouldn’t look so pretty, which led me to conviction, contrition, prayer, and eventually mercy. Over the years, its words and scenes have come spontaneously to my mind to help me interpret the living world around me.

I have found over the years that I am not alone, I am not the only one who could say he was saved in part by reading Tolkien. It is hard to overestimate the influence of this work on those who have spawned the Christian classical renewal. It is easy to underestimate the wisdom and the art and the thought about art contained in Tolkien’s works.

The Lord of the Rings is a song of merciful Providence. The wise in its stories are models of leaders who use all their wit to follow the guidance of Providence. Gandalf, when speaking of the crazy fact that the Ring was found by Bilbo of the Shire, told Frodo, “Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the ringmaker. I can put it in no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.” “It is not,” said Frodo.

I have witnessed great things. Beth Sullivan and I were reminiscing about the crazy things that the Lord has accomplished through us nobodies. Ten years ago, we organized our first conference of Catholic classical schools. 72 people participated. Ten years later, over 400 will participate next week in our National Conference, with a waiting list and a large live-streaming contingent. I estimate there are over 300 schools that share similar visions of education. Greater things are to come. We have formed a network of over 50 diocesan superintendents representing a quarter of all the dioceses in the country.

I am sure many of you  have similar stories to tell! It is not easy, following Providence, though it can be exciting. How many of you have thought like Frodo: 'I am not made for perilous quests. I wish I had never seen the Ring! Why was I chosen?' 'Such questions cannot be answered,' said Gandalf. 'You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for power or wisdom, at any rate. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.'

With Gandalf's help, Frodo determined that he had to leave the Shire; with Elrond's counsel he determined that he was meant to undertake the Quest to destroy the Ring. How ridiculous that a halfling should be chosen for something so important. Who was he? What did he know? He was no hero, not one of the Wise. But he accepted it, with deep reluctance:

A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by Bilbo's side in Rivendell filled all his heart. At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice. ’I will take the Ring,' he said, `though I do not know the way.' 

Thomas Aquinas CollegeHow many of us have felt this way? “Small hands do them because they must.” My wife, Lisa, and I never expected to do anything great. In Thomas Aquinas College and the community that grew up around it – faith-filled, family-centered, fun and talented – we had our Shire. Our greatest aspiration was to be boring. Great enterprises were for different folks. To try to change the downward spiral of Church and society was for the wiser and stronger. But I came to think I heard the call of the Lord, that the Church wanted me to share my experience of beautiful Catholic education. After discussion, prayer, reflection and consultation, we chose to respond, though we did not know the way.

Every trip filled me with dread; often I wondered why I was flying to this place or that. Like Frodo, I wished someone wiser and stronger would take the burden; I would have been happy to help them. But it was not without its rewards. Elrond foretold to Frodo,  “You may find friends upon your way when you least look for it.” Andrew Pudewa, Andrew Kern, Brian Phillips, Martin Cothran, Chris and Christine Perrin were among the early friends. Their generous encouragement, advice, and help at a time when ICLE was just a cell phone in my pocket were gifts from God. Companions had been prepared for me, though neither they nor I knew it – Beth, Mary Pat Donoghue (now Secretary of Education for the national Bishops Conference), Chris Weir, Colleen Richards, and more.

“Posterity shall serve Him. Men shall tell of the Lord to the coming generation, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, that He has wrought it.” We must share the stories of our adventures in the Lord with the younger generation. For better or worse, we are now for them the Wise and the Great. They will live, as the Chinese curse says, “in interesting times”. Even ordinary life is requiring more and more heroism: fidelity to our Lord, raising our children well, fulfilling our duties, serving our communities. We must encourage them to maintain in the midst of this the spirit of Abraham. When God called him every few decades, Abraham always answered, “Here I am,” in our idiom, “Ready!” We must prepare them to see that difficulties, problems, oppositions, even disasters are not in themselves signs to turn back.

We must also help our children to appreciate their unique gifts asFile:Southington, Connecticut. At an early age school children learn about the meaning of the American flag (LOC).jpg Americans. It is hard to overestimate the importance of Americans for the Christian classical renewal. It is easy to underestimate the goodness found in the American regime. It is no accident that the renewal of liberal education has begun, is flourishing, and becoming ever more fruitful in America. We are particularly suited to actively undertake great things for the Lord. We are a free people – free in our laws, our institutions, our customs, our traditions, our spirit. Our heroes are those who, though small and insignificant in their origins, undertook great challenges and made great sacrifices to bring something great into the world that had never been before. Our forefathers did not want to rebel, but they cherished freedom with a manly spirit and did what they judged God called them to do: “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Our liberty is a great gift from the Lord and from them. John Adams said to us, “Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.” Let us never disappoint him.

 “We're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?” Sam came to this realization in the cleft of Cirith Ungol. We are in the same tale as the Psalmist, as the Church, as America, even, essentially, as Sam. It has been a great tale so far. But it is all too likely that some young ones in the future will say at this point: "Shut the book now, dad; we don't want to read any more." But I will latch on to Andrew Kern’s optimism, and hope that the end, at least for our children, will be: And they lived happily ever after till the end of their days. It is a good ending, and none the worse for having been used before.

We should always be open to the extraordinary.. Often tell God, “I am open to your will.” If you begin to suspect that God is calling you to something crazy, no need to rush. Open yourself to the idea in prayer, asking God to help you know His will. Think it through. Take counsel with those close to you, especially those who seem spiritually wise, and those who will be most affected. Pay attention to weird signs – they shouldn't lead you in the discernment, but they do confirm, or encourage you to keep discerning. Try to stay as peaceful as possible through the whole thing – agitation is often a bad sign.

Once you decide as well as you can that God is asking something of you, or you begin to want to do it yourself, trust Him that, if you begin, He will bless you and others through you. Ask Him to tell you “No” if you aren't supposed to do it. This can be difficult, because we know that difficulties, problems, oppositions are often not signs that you are supposed to drop it. Often disasters are God's way of saying, “I wanted you to attempt this, but that was to prepare you for something else.” Boethius thought his gift to the world was to translate the works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin and show how they were in fundamental agreement. A noble enterprise! But then he was imprisoned, and eventually martyred. Yet he gifted the West with his Consolation of Philosophy, which had a more profound effect. Above all, remember that in difficulties, when God's will seems completely hidden, Wait! He is always at work, and will reveal His will in time.

To you I lift up my eyes,Illuminated Psalm

    O you who are enthroned in the heavens!

2 As the eyes of servants

    look to the hand of their master,

as the eyes of a maid

    to the hand of her mistress,

so our eyes look to the Lord our God,

    until he has mercy upon us.

Bulletin

Teaching Shakespeare to the Young: An Interview with Megan Lindsay

I enjoy attending conferences, especially when I have no responsibilities, and am just free to attend talks of interest, reconnect with old friends, and make new ones. At last year’s National Classical Education Symposium in Phoenix, I was free to feed my passion for Shakespearian drama by attending 3 workshops by Globe director/actor/teacher, Nicholas Hutchison. They were wonderful, but I came away more excited to have made the acquaintance of Megan Lindsay, a drama instructor and director at Cicero Preparatory Academy, who introduced all three sessions. I discovered that we shared not only a common love of Shakespeare but also a conviction of the formative effects that performing his works can have on the young.

Like many involved in the liberal arts renewal, Megan stumbled into involvement because of her kids.  She visited her child’s third grade classroom at a classical Christian school, where they were being taught Shakespeare as a grammar stage activity in connection with Renaissance history. Megan had loved acting when she was young so much that she wanted to study acting in college. (“My parents said, ‘No. That has no future.’ So I studied philosophy and history to spite them!”)

Megan was deeply disturbed by what she saw. The teacher seemed to have no idea how to teach Shakespeare to the young. It was obvious that the kids had no idea what Shakespeare was saying. They had no idea the drama was about real people. “I am the kind who raises their hand to solve a problem before I think it out. I asked the school whether I could stage Shakespeare scenes to show parents? ‘Ok, on your own time.’ As I left I gasped to myself, ‘What did I just do?!”

File:Macbeth consults the three witches; an apparition appears of Wellcome V0025890.jpgMegan didn’t really know what kids that young could do. But she thought, ‘I’ll throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks.” She  started with some scenes that she thought could be really fun for the kids – the  witches’ cauldron scene from Macbeth, and the scene featuring the drunken sailors and the monster, Caliban, from The Tempest. It was daring – imagine third graders at a Christian school playing as witches and drunkards. But the kids had a great time!

She decided to begin by having them just experience Shakespeare’s language. She had them say the words in different ways, playing with their sounds. “‘Double, double’ is full of assonance and big vowels. They enjoyed saying the words though they didn’t know what a lot of them meant. As I watched them, I realized how natural this approach is for kids – they are used to learning from listening to adults although much of the vocabulary is beyond them.”

Then she had them act out the scene according to the way the words sounded to them and what they could get of the words. She supplied meanings for a few of the words, but for the most part she let them develop the story without direction from her. “They discovered the story! This was so freeing for me as a teacher. I discovered that my role was less to tell them the meaning than to help them discover that meaning through acting it out.”

Megan also saw how they began to learn about themselves through the process of discovering the story through Shakespeare’s words. “Caliban the monster was played by a lovely little boy. He struggled to understand Caliban’s anger, he couldn’t feel it himself. I asked him, ‘Do you ever feel your parents are unfair? Like some time when your mom said no to you?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘when I really wanted the gum in her purse.” ‘Did you take it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How did you feel?’ ‘Guilty, but I was still mad at her for being unfair!’ ‘That’s how Caliban felt,” I said. Mowing the lawn when he thought his brother should have done it helped him connect with Caliban who had to carry logs. I never told him, but I was teaching him the acting technique of substitution.”

She has applied this technique to learning Shakespeare and to many other kinds of literature. Sound it out, act it out, then add meaning. This works, she believes because it is so natural. “Kids come to language in a pre-rational way. Language lies in the human heart. It is our way of making meaning.”

Megan also has found that acting contributes to forming what Vigen Guroian has called the moral imagination, and so influences how they live their lives. Through acting, students discover that thoughts (The True) carry emotions (The Beautiful), which make us want to act (The Good). Likewise with the false, the ugly, and the bad. She once heard a Junior who had played Macbeth trying to help his little sister, who was struggling with playing a giddy girl in another play. “‘We struggle,’ he said, ‘with characters because we are judging them; we are not seeing things as they would see them. I had to understand Macbeth’s pride. And I realized that I am like him.’”

It takes time for an actor to experience his character as real.  “New actors have to begin with external representation, until the performance starts to come from within and feel more authentic.”  As a director, Megan conveys to her actors that they have a responsibility to the characters they are creating. “You must be true to your character, who is just words until you incarnate him. If you portray him truthfully, he will become real. And this might affect your life.”

Megan experienced this herself recently while playing a narcissistic controlling mom. “Classical education allowed me to enter into her while still maintaining separation. I made her so real that audience members said afterwards, ‘I hate you.’ Then I went backstage, and took the whole mask off. Yet this woman has influenced me. I was humbled, I could see the beginnings of her character in myself. I became more sensitive to conflicts with my daughters as they went off to college, less willing to sweep things under the carpet, even with my husband.”

Megan fosters this experience with her students by having them, after a performance, articulate what they learned. “They will go into life knowing many kinds of people. And they will have been trained in the art of moral imagination.”

A giant spider

Megan has adapted this technique for Shakespeare works for all literature. She tried it with the chapter, “Shelob’s Lair,” from The Lord of the Rings.” She read it herself, and put together a list of great quotations. She then noticed patterns. “In this chapter, Tolkien focuses on the sensible. He highlights the loss of all the  senses except smell, which is heightened. He chooses gross words like ‘foul’ and ‘reek’. Darkness becomes a thing destroying all senses, and even the memory of sensations. This is a great description: ‘a shadow that being cast by no light, no light could dissipate.’” She wrote out the best quotations and put them up around the room. As with Shakespeare, she had her students read them, say them, and act them out, even if they didn’t yet understand. Then they talked about them, starting generally with, “What did you notice?” eventually moving to “What is darkness? Is it fitting to portray darkness as evil? Why is it Sam who remembers the light, not Frodo?”

Megan was extraordinarily generous with her time and her resources. Her advice helped me have one of the most delightful experiences of my professional career – a two-day Shakespeare workshop with elementary students. The success of today’s  classical education movement comes from having aroused thoughtful, passionate, generous teachers like Megan.

Bulletin

Only the Lover Sings: The Secret to Teaching Literature

I have spent my twenty-five years as a teacher further and further refining my purpose, to its present obsessive focus. My animating ambition, the one I live, sleep, and breathe, is to help people learn to love – to love – great literature.

In the span of that time, the task has become only tougher, primarily because of the omnipresence of technology. The quick and ready entertainment, meme and soundbite style content, and constant din of calls for our attention that come with a smartphone in every hand mean it has become increasingly difficult to get anyone to read.

Nevertheless, when my students are in the classroom, held as a captive audience, their devices all turned off and set aside, and we have in our hands one of the beloved books of my carefully chosen curriculum, I still feel an almost infallible power to turn them into thoughtful, eager, and passionate lovers of books.

While I myself am always learning more about what it takes to teach literature well – whether that means conceptualizing techniques that come to me as instinct, or gaining new insights from the world’s great teachers, present and past – I am confident I can name the fundamental principle behind my (perhaps immodest) boast of infallibility.

To be an effective guide and mentor, you must be in love with literature yourself. 

I say “be in love with” rather than “love” to give emphasis to the personal and passionate form the attachment has to take. If familiarity with great books feels to you like some duty of cultural literacy, if the experience of reading is more cerebral than it is of the soul, if the books you teach do not reverberate in the very core of your being, then you are not “in love with” literature.

Most of my memories of studying books in school involve, at best, dry discussions of literary devices, and, at worst, no discussion at all, but only multiple-choice tests to prove I’d done the reading. Almost never do I recall a teacher modeling an earnest emotional investment in the work, and rarely did I myself come to feel that kind of intense and personal connection.

By contrast, someone recently described to me how, as a boy, reading Lord of the Rings had made him desire to be good. He found himself unable to abide the thought of doing anything that, in his mind, would make him a disappointment to heroes like Frodo and Gandalf. That is what it means to be in love with a book. He saw the novel’s theme, he felt its import, and he made it a part of himself.

One of the problems endemic to education is that this love of literature has been lost. We cannot teach that which we are not capable of ourselves. So, if our capacity for that love has atrophied, or was never properly developed, what are we to do?

It is important for me to note here that I myself did not learn to love books until I was in my mid-twenties, and already working as a teacher. I have a vivid memory from my youth of watching a performance of The Miracle Worker and finding it painfully dull. Today, it is painful for me to confess that, because this play has come to stand in my mind for what it means to awaken a child’s soul to “a consciousness of her immortal nature” – to be a teacher, in the truest sense of the word. And after teaching this play every year for two decades, I still cannot read the climactic scene without crying.

My own eyes were first opened when I read Victor Hugo’s novel Ninety-Three aloud to my little group of homeschooled students so many years ago. We were wholly absorbed and focused. We were riveted by the plot. We gasped in chorus at the sudden twists and sighed over sentimental passages. We discussed our reactions as we read, and we worked to decipher Hugo’s message. The experience was as much a life-altering one for me as it was for them.

The point is, even if a passionate approach to literature does not now come naturally to you, it is a skill that can be revived or learned afresh.

  • Connect again with that classic that really made you feel – in love with the aloof Mr. Darcy, awed by the integrity of Atticus, pitying of poor Jane Eyre.
  • Find a mentor. When I discovered a great literature teacher, I consumed every word of his I could, and, afterward, strove to emulate his process. I am now trying to offer mentorship myself through a program called Read With Me, whose mission is “to help people connect emotionally with the classics.”
  • Take a close look at Mark Edmundson’s Why Read? or Arnold Bennett’s Literary Taste. Hear the former tell you in impassioned tones why “real reading is reincarnation,” and let the latter explain how literature helps us raise the plane of our existence “to the top level of the peaks.”
  • Recall that reading great books is meant to be a pleasure – not an idle one, but the profoundest kind we can know. Don’t consider a book part of your personal repertoire or eligible for your curriculum until you are able to consume it as a life-enhancing pleasure yourself.

Now, in one sense, a love of literature is only the precondition of effective teaching; it doesn’t give you a process. But it another sense, it is necessary and sufficient.

If you yourself have mastered a book’s meaning, felt its import, and made it a part of yourself, then you will know that all your efforts must be integrated around helping your students do the same. You won’t allow yourself to be distracted by too much talk of literary devices, you won’t be content for your students to prove only a rudimentary grasp of the content, and your discussions won’t be soulless and cerebral. You will be better able to trust your instincts, because you will know, deeply, the purpose you hope to achieve.

With my own faithful repertoire of books I dearly love, I can now be sure that every year a student will, for example, beg to keep her copy of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House so she can share it with a sister, or create a year-long calligraphic log of favorite literary quotes, or declare indignantly that I have ruined her for romance because no man will ever be a Cyrano de Bergerac, or weep with me more than once over scenes in Les Misèrables, or ask for keepsake versions of the books we read for Christmas.

I am in love with these books, and they learn to love them too.