Nursery Rhymes

And yet there is an irony. For with all the frightening march of contemporary life, we still read of Little Miss Muffet and Wee Willie Winkie to our children, and sing "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" and "Sing a Song of Sixpence". But this is all wrong. What are we doing? Are we trying to cozen them by leading them to believe that there are joy and naïveté and rhythm in life, when all the time we know that their whole experience of life will be a relentless dashing of all these notions? Aren't we deceiving them with these pictures of simplicity and quaintness, setting up the conditions for disenchantment? Why not be honest with them? Why not Sing a Song of the Devaluated Pound, or of Little Herr Hitler? Better yet, why sing a song of anything? Why not read a column from the Times? Wouldn't it be more realistic, to say nothing of more merciful, to begin early to brace them for what life is really all about, rather than beguiling them with all this trumpery, knowing full well it is fraudulent?

...The argument of this book is that there is in nursery rhymes a case in point of what the human imagination suspects—that the formal disposing of common things may not be misleading.

-Thomas Howard, Chance and the Dance, 51, 53

Poetry

It is as though poetry laid a hand on our arm and said, "Now steady. You are missing this in your prosaic dash past experience, and it is worth not missing."

...

This is part of the business of poetry, from the nursery rhyme to the Divine Comedy. It addresses our imagination and, with everything that is at its service, it tries to beguile us into the intense awareness of experience. It knows that our attention is cudgeled by functional concerns morning, noon, and night, and it suspects that this not the desideratum. But it does not call us away from the "real" world of function into a garden of fancy that never existed anywhere. Rather, its high office is to ransom us from thrall to the deadly myth that life is cluttered and obstructed by necessity, and to return us to life with the awareness that is packed with glory.

-Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance?, 72-73.

Tending the Garden

Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."

-J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Rate This Post

The best guide I know to readerly judgment is our old friend Auden, who graciously summed up a lifetime of thinking about these matters in a single incisive sentence: "For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don't like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see this is trash and I don't like it."

-Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 133.

Totally Hosed

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannopt exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

-David Foster Wallace, quoted by Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 85.