Kipling on Character

This is one of the most famous of Kipling's works -- and one of my most favorite poems. It explains what character looks like in daily life.

In the concrete, he describes such character traits as humility, cool-headedness, trustworthiness, perseverance, courage and risk, resignation and fortitude.

Poetry Foundation link

If—

    

If you can keep your head when all about you

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, 

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, 

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, 

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, 

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: 

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster 

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken 

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, 

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, 

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings 

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, 

And lose, and start again at your beginnings 

    And never breathe a word about your loss; 

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew 

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you 

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ 

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, 

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, 

    If all men count with you, but none too much; 

If you can fill the unforgiving minute 

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Last Day

It's 10:30 pm on a Friday night and I'm about to clap shut my laptop. Today is my last day as a homeschooling mom.

I have taught anywhere from one to three of my kids at home for the past 12 years. (And none of them have ever been in five-day school.) All three are headed to a regular, brick-and-mortar, five-day-a-week school next year for 8th, 9th, and 12th grade. Radical.

Like all big endings, it has been a little anticlimactic: hassling one child to finish one final test, shuffling through files, last minute grading, an impromptu grocery store run, realizing transcripts will be polished up next week rather than today. Not with a bang but a whimper.

But it feels momentous to me.

Thank you, and goodnight, to homeschooling's curious, wild, busy, funny, angsty, peaceful, "lovely, dark, and deep" ride.

Our family has been viewed as kooky and offbeat.

We been viewed as conservative and authoritarian.

We've been viewed as rebels, madmen, and saints.

Of course we are none of these -- or perhaps all of these. Just like any family trying to creatively "do" life in the way that seems to fit with our lifestyle, resources, values, and needs.

I've been a terrible mom, I've been an amazing mom -- sometimes all in the same hour.

My children are quirky in some ways, brilliant in some ways, regular in most ways. Just like yours.

I have a shrewd, natural test-taker, and one who used to bomb standardized tests.

I have kids with different learning styles, different strengths, and different test scores. I have a math avoider and one who "hates" reading. (Though lately this kid has started talking animatedly about his reading.) One has been in learning therapy pretty regularly (and benefited greatly).

I have a philosopher, an engineer, and a pragmatic businesswoman. I have a child who carefully lines up pencils and ruler in the workspace and keeps a detailed calendar; I have one who can't find homework.

I've taught my kids in China and America, on the east coast and in the southwest. In the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the library, in the car.

I've used material from the internet, from neighbors, from friends, from books.

I've personally seen and experienced the kind of resources and co-ops that spring up in freedom-rich cultural and legal environments (Texas!) -- and the dearth of same in educationally narrow-minded and culturally parochial parts of the country.

Some of my best friends are other homeschooling moms. And some of my other best friends are not. I have gained wisdom from both about parenting.

The kids and I have worked so closely together, with all of our flaws and strengths. I have learned some basic things.

It's counter-intuitive, but start work each day with the youngest before you work with the older kids. Make sure everyone reads aloud each day. Let each do math at the time of day when they are mentally fresh. Take a short break every 30 minutes. Pick the curriculum that appeals to you as much as it appeals to them. Encourage each kid to study in his own way (eg, one kid may study by orally telling you all about what is going to be on the test, one kid may study by making flashcards. Both ways are fine and I only figured that out this year). Three words: Saturday morning chores. Have a short family devotion every morning -- ie, reflect on the forest before you head for the trees. Laughter really is the best medicine. Laugh easily, pray hard.

Most of these things I learned the hard way. And so many other things I still have not figured out. Homeschooling did not come naturally to me.

Somehow, the kids are alright. Not amazing. Not terrible. Like yours.

Gooodnight, homeschooling. I'm going to miss you.

And tomorrow I am finally going to catch up with the laundry.

"He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace at home." Goethe

"O Judgement, thou hast fled to brutish beasts and men have lost their reason..."

More on Shakespeare. The Guardian has done a series of actors reading lines from Shakespeare called Shakespeare Solos.

Zawe Ashton's presentation is brilliant.

And this famous monologue from Shakespeare is performed really beautifully by Damian Lewis. It's short. "Lend" him less than 3 minutes, will you?

Damian Lewis as Antony

Happy Birthday, Will (Shakespeare)!

"All the perfumes in Arabia cannot sweeten this little hand....what's done cannot be undone." Dame Judi Dench as Lady MacBeth

Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet

‘To Be Or Not To Be’: Words Spoken by Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 1

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.–Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.

Stopping by Woods

...written and read by Robert Frost -- read when he was an older man.

Whose woods these are I think I know

Mark Twain

The only footage of Mark Twain known to be in existence

"Thomas Edison once said, 'An average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain.'"

Stories Make You Smarter and More Empathetic

Reading fiction is good for you.

http://blog.theliteracysite.com/how-reading-fiction-improves-intelligence/?utm_source=twc-twcfan&utm_medium=social-fb&utm_term=090915&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=how-reading-fiction-improves-intelligence&origin=

The [Trollope] Diamonds

Anthony Trollope's The Prime Minister.

Finally getting around to reading this book -- the 5th of the 6 Palliser novels (and one praised by Tolstoy) -- which parallels our hero, the now-older Duke of Omnium and his final political challenge as the liberal head of a coalition government, with the marital fate of an earnest girl of good family named Emily Wharton.

It is the middle-late 19th century in England.

Will England's greatness be advanced? Will the coalition government be a good suitor to Albion? Will the Duke's warm and ambitious wife's social excesses on his behalf help or hurt him? She is political and he is scrupulous.

And in the other story: Will young, noble Emily Wharton marry a stranger and foreigner who is involved in shady dealings, against the wishes of her father, who is wise and loving, but whose arguments against the man are marred by blind prejudice? Will she be led by her vulgar aunt or her beloved family friends?

All of this marked by Trollope's shrewd and sometimes-funny commentary on human public and private behavior in the House and in the house. Trollope was a dissector of human foibles and greatness, though with a light touch, and his characters can be more complex and less tragic than some Victorian writers'. His heroes have imperfections and his villains sometimes have something to admire, but it is always clear who and what is right.

[Addenda 9/14/15: Finished. Oh, the noble example of the tragic loyalty of Emily Wharton Lopez! The author lost control of his secondary story line and it becomes the meat of the book in theme and pathos if not word count.]

The question the book addresses is: What is a true gentleman and Englishman like?

Some quotes from the first quarter of the book:

"The man, certainly, was one strangely endowed with the power of creating a belief."'

"Though the thing had been long a-doing, still it had come suddenly."

"And it was not the way with her Grace to hide such sorrows in the depth of her bosom."

"I remember dear old Lord Brock telling me how much more difficult it was to find a good coachman than a good Secretary of State."

"It'll be best in the long run." "I'm sometimes happy when I think I shan't live to see the long run.'"

"She knew him to be full of scruples....unwilling to domineer when men might be brought to subjection only by domination."

On political alliances: "I don't want a man to stick to me. I want a man to stick to his country."

On young, rich men with political ambitions: "He had the great question of labor, and all that refers to unions, strikes, and lock-outs, quite at his fingers' ends. He knew how the Church of England should be disestablished and recomposed. He was quite clear on questions of finance, and saw to a 't' how progress should be made towards communism, so that no violence should disturb that progress, and that in due course of centuries all desire for personal property should be conquered and annihilated by a philanthropy so general as hardly to be accounted a virtue. In the meantime, he could never contrive to pay his tailor's bill regularly out of the allowance of 400 pounds a year which his father made him, and was always dreaming of the comforts of a handsome income."

"There is such a thing as a conscience with too fine an edge that it will allow a man to do nothing."

Who Cares about Homer and Shakespeare?

David sent this along to me today -- sensible reasons and practical ways for all students to read and study the classics -- even business majors. But I posted this mainly for the stories about Catholic school (which I attended in high school).


The Suicide of the Liberal Arts

"The Two Uses"

Even the workaday and practical arm
Becomes all love for love's sake to the lover.

If this is nature's thrift, love thrives on it.

*The Two Uses

The eye is not more exquisitely designed
For seeing than it is for being loved.
The same lips curved to speak are curved to kiss.
Even the workaday and practical arm
Becomes all love for love's sake to the lover.

If this is nature's thrift, love thrives on it.
Love never asks the body different
Or ever wants it less ambiguous,
The eye being lovelier for what it sees,
The arm for all it does, the lips for speaking

-Robert Francis (American, born 1901)

Seeing Jesus Christ in Poetry

But you,
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry,
Or anything that's honest and good, an eye
That makes the whole world bright. 

*The Confirmation

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face.
I in my mind had waited for this long,
Seeing the false and searching for the true,
Then found you as a traveller finds a place
Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong
Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry,
Or anything that's honest and good, an eye
That makes the whole world bright. Your open heart,
Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,
The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,
The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea,
Not beautiful or rare in every part,
But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

-Edwin Muir (1887-1959)


*Everything Promised Him to Me

Everything promised him to me:
the fading amber edge of the sky,
and the sweet dreams of Christmas,
and the wind at Easter, loud with bells,

and the red shoots of the grapevine,
and waterfalls in the park,
and two large dragonflies
on the rusty iron fencepost.

And I could only believe
that he would be mine
as I walked along the high slopes,
the path of burning stones.

-Anna Akhmatova (Russian, 1889-1966)

Fine China, Fat Televisions, and Ordinary Coffee

My sister-in-law sent me this poem, and I love it.

My Grandparents’ Generation

by Faith Shearin

They are taking so many things with them:
their sewing machines and fine china,

their ability to fold a newspaper
with one hand and swat a fly.

They are taking their rotary telephones,
and fat televisions, and knitting needles,

their cast iron frying pans, and Tupperware.
They are packing away the picnics

and perambulators, the wagons
and church socials. They are wrapped in

lipstick and big band music, dressed
in recipes. Buried with them: bathtubs

with feet, front porches, dogs without leashes.
These are the people who raised me

and now I am left behind in
a world without paper letters,

a place where the phone
has grown as eager as a weed.

I am going to miss their attics,
their ordinary coffee, their chicken

fried in lard. I would give anything
to be ten again, up late with them

in that cottage by the river, buying
Marvin Gardens and passing go,

collecting two hundred dollars.

“My Grandparents’ Generation” by Faith Shearin from Telling the Bees. © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

Tweets and Satire Don't Go Together

and other morals-of-the-story.

Interesting NYT article on ill-advised tweets and modern and historical public shaming.

"Centireading"

"After a hundred reads, familiarity with the text verges on memorisation – the sensation of the words passing over the eyes like cud through the fourth stomach of a cow. Centireading belongs to the extreme of reader experience, the ultramarathon of the bookish, but it’s not that uncommon. To a certain type of reader, exposure at the right moment to Anne of Green Gables or Pride and Prejudice or Sherlock Holmes or Dune can almost guarantee centireading. Christmas is devoted to reading books we all know perfectly well. The children want to hear the one story they have heard so many times they don’t need to hear it again."

On reading a book 100 times -- a good writer writes about reading Hamlet and Wodehouse,

Centireading Force:why reading a book 100 times is a great idea

As a Navy kid who attended 10 schools, I found reading and re-reading and re-reading certain books formed a groove in my mind of friendly kinship and "place" that eluded me in my constantly-changing school social circles. These books helped me translate my experiences from the vantage point of a wanderer in good company.

I saw myself as the adventuring outsider, watching mountains and plains and woods and cities roll by the car window on 80 or 95 or the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Though a skinny American girl living in the 1970s and 80s, I felt I related directly with the Pevensies and the Ingalls of Narnia, Cambridge, and the woods and prairies of 19th century America -- not the Middletons of Charleston or the Donovans of Maine or the Smiths of Virginia. I can quote the Narnia books and the Little House books like I can quote the Bible, yea, in time of need.

Later, as an adult living in Shanghai, when the strangeness of that glittering and odd city felt heavy and chemical, and like walking in a backwards world upside down, I turned frequently to Wodehouse to recall something warmly organic, a comfortable friendship, the mollifying lightness of old jokes shared again. And also therein recalled a world that presumes we are all, occidental and oriental, at least a little bit nuts.

In this except from the article, the author reflects on Jeeves and Hamlet (and why not?) as an expat Canadian boy in England: 

"Every Sunday, my family would load ourselves into a car – my father, my mother, my kid brother and I – and drive out more or less randomly to see what England had to offer. In western Canada where I grew up, it had been perfectly standard to cross three or four hours of prairie to visit a relative for lunch. From Cambridge, an hour in any direction would land us in a church from the reign of Queen Anne, unspeakably ancient to our new world eyes, or some grand estate, the luxury of the residence always offset by the cheapness of its gift shops, always reeking of scones and plastic guidebooks, or the ruin of some abbey, the stuff of mossy legends. During these trips, in the tiny English car, we would listen to cassettes of The Inimitable Jeeves, read by Jonathan Cecil.

The psychology of my love for The Inimitable Jeeves isn’t exactly hard to understand. As we rolled through that strange country, laughing at the English with the English, the family was both inside and outside. My associations with The Inimitable Jeeves are as powerful as they could possibly be, a fused sense of family unity and childhood adventure. The book is so much more than just a happy childhood memory. In such ways, books pick us, rather than the other way around.

The main effect of reading Hamlet a 100 times was, counter-intuitively, that it lost its sense of cliche. 'To be or not to be' is the Stairway to Heaven of theatre; it settles over the crowd like a slightly funky blanket knitted by a favorite aunt. Eventually, if you read Hamlet often enough, every soliloquy takes on that same familiarity. And so 'To be or not to be' resumes its natural place in the play, as just another speech. Which renders its power and its beauty of a piece with the rest of the work."

"By Water, Wood, and Hill"

I stumbled upon this letter (on theonering.net) to Peter Hastings from J.R.R. Tolkien describing Tom Bombadil, my favorite character. (Emphases below are mine, as are paragraph breaks; it's a long chunk of text) 

“I don’t think Tom needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it. But many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient. In historical fact I put him in because I had already ‘invented’ him independently (he first appeared in the Oxford Magazine) and wanted an ‘adventure’ on the way. But I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out. 

I do not mean him to be an allegory – or I should not have given him so particular, individual, and ridiculous a name – but ‘allegory’ is the only mode of exhibiting certain functions: he is then an ‘allegory’, or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with ‘doing’ anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture. Even the Elves hardly show this : they are primarily artists. 

Also T.B. exhibits another point in his attitude to the Ring, and its failure to affect him. You must concentrate on some pan, probably relatively small, of the World (Universe), whether to tell a tale, however long, or to learn anything however fundamental – and therefore much will from that ‘point of view’ be left out, distorted on the circumference, or seem a discordant oddity. The power of the Ring over all concerned, even the Wizards or Emissaries, is not a delusion – but it is not the whole picture, even of the then state and content of that pan of the Universe.”

Robert McCloskey

McCloskey is the writer of Caldecott-winning children's books from decades ago. I loved them as a child and my children loved them, too. Blueberries for Sal, One Morning in Maine, Make Way for Ducklings, and others

All are available on amazon. Don't buy the story tapes. Enjoy the illustrations and chuckle over the story together.

Sarah used to try to put her little foot on the page and step into Sal's mom's kitchen. I wanted to go there, too.

-Anne

The Art of Saying Thank You

The New York Times' Guy Trebay discusses Jimmy Fallon, emoticons, and thank-you notes.

It's hip to write on a little paper square.

"'What they want...is to draw a distinction between the tossed-off, compressed nature of electronic messages and a form of ritualized communication that gives material evidence 'that the person really did appreciate something.'”

Spring Poems: Emily Dickinson, "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass"

A narrow fellow in the grass 

BY EMILY DICKINSON

A narrow fellow in the grass

Occasionally rides;

You may have met him—did you not

His notice sudden is,

The grass divides as with a comb,

A spotted shaft is seen,

And then it closes at your feet,

And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,  

A floor too cool for corn,

But when a boy and barefoot,

I more than once at noon

Have passed, I thought, a whip lash,

Unbraiding in the sun,

When stooping to secure it,

It wrinkled and was gone.

Several of nature’s people

I know, and they know me;

I feel for them a transport

Of cordiality.

But never met this fellow,

Attended or alone,

Without a tighter breathing,

And zero at the bone.

Spring Poems: Robert Frost, "The Pasture"

The Pasture

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

Spring poems: AE Housman, "Loveliest of Trees"

"Loveliest of Trees"

LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,	5
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,	10
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.