Topical Guide 189
Mark Dorset
Traits, of Personality: Decisiveness, Boldness, Recklessness
Certainly Rocky impressed Larry and the reader with his strength, his predisposition to act, to do something about whatever situation arose, even if he did not often take the time to consider whether what he was doing was in every respect, in all its ramifications, right.
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
The words you’ve bandied are sufficient;
’Tis deeds that I prefer to see: …
What need to talk of Inspiration?
What’s left undone to-day, To-morrow will not do.
Waste not a day in vain digression:
With resolute, courageous trust
Seize every possible impression,
And make it firmly your possession;
You’ll then work on, because you must.Goethe, Faust, “Prelude at the Theatre,” the Manager to the Dramatic Poet and Merry Andrew (translated by Bayard Taylor)
School, Attitudes Toward
Teachers, Attitudes Toward
Knowledge: Practical and Experiential versus Academic and Postulatory
Rocky also admired Larry’s academic talents. He never ceased to be amazed at how quick and clever Larry was, not that Rocky was less quick or less clever, but Rocky’s talents and knowledge were more restricted to practical areas: he could overhaul the engine in the Jeep with only a nail file and a can opener as tools, and he could find the best place to get a cheap and decent meal in most of the world’s ports; yet Rocky, although he was older than Larry, seemed to know a lot less about the things one might be expected to learn in school than Larry did. This shortcoming of Rocky’s wasn’t explained, but I decided that it must have to do with that past of Rocky’s about which we knew so little. I supposed that in his past there had been a reform school, from which Rocky had run away before he’d had a chance to pick up much long division or world history.
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
So, Friend (my views to briefly sum),
First, the collegium logicum.
There will your mind be drilled and braced,
As if in Spanish boots ’twere laced,
And thus, to graver paces brought,
’Twill plod along the path of thought,
Instead of shooting here and there,
A will-o’-the-wisp in murky air.
Days will be spent to bid you know,
What once you did at a single blow,
Like eating and drinking, free and strong,—
That one, two, three! thereto belong.
Truly the fabric of mental fleece
Resembles a weaver’s masterpiece,
Where a thousand threads one treadle throws,
Where fly the shuttles hither and thither.
Unseen the threads are knit together.
And an infinite combination grows.
Then, the philosopher steps in
And shows, no otherwise it could have been:
The first was so, the second so,
Therefore the third and fourth are so;
Were not the first and second, then
The third and fourth had never been.
The scholars are everywhere believers,
But never succeed in being weavers.Mephistopeles (disguised as Faust) to a student, in Goethe’s Faust (translated by Bayard Taylor)
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.
I hated learning. I hated doing anything anyone else’s way but my own—and my way was not to do it at all. I hated the grown-up world of joyless rules and regulations, where art appreciation classes turned art into algebra, formulaic and funless, and required reading turned literature into the pleasureless pursuit of what was termed “comprehension,” which meant “We don’t expect you to like books. We, your teachers don’t like them either. But if you don’t read, you can’t get a job, so we make you read writers we, ourselves, would never read a line of if we didn’t have to teach you, and we resent it so much we pass on our dislike to you.”
Another central experience of Balzac’s childhood was his exile to a Spartan boarding school at the tender age of eight. The brutalities of boarding school can routinely maim sensitive children for life; occasionally they may also breed a genius. Numbed by sorrow and fear, the child Balzac fell into a stupor; his teachers, unable to draw any intelligent response out of their lethargic pupil, bombarded him with punishments. Detention meant being locked for hours or even days on end in a tiny cell, and the little boy ended up spending up to four days a week in the solitary gloom of the school prison. To escape from this desolation, mere dreaming was not enough: he had to invent for himself another world, more real than this unbearable environment. Relying on his memory, he began to re-create in his mind scenes he had read about in books; he developed a visionary imagination that enabled him to conjure entire worlds with near hallucinatory power.
Simon Leys, “Balzac’s Genius & Other Paradoxes,” New York Review of Books, January 12, 1995
Successful replacement of broken flap valve in toilet:
[more to come on Monday, February 7, 2022]
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