It has been three weeks at least since the last letter. There was no sudden catastrophe, no horror-story, no problem at all. Indeed, life is pretty dang good right now. But things are changing in our world, and I no longer intend to write to you all as regularly. I figured I would explain. (And no doubt explain at unneeded length, which is my wont.)

With Our Fathers

            As our children’s summer birthday’s approach (including the literal day-of-birth for the fifth member of our family, more about that here), a father’s (or at least this father’s) mind trespasses into the realm of remembrance and nostalgia. I know our children are still very young, but we put Gremlin #2 in shorts and a shirt yesterday and our baby suddenly looked like a big girl, more three than not-yet-two. Meanwhile our four-year-old has made us intimately familiar with that venerable parental adage ‘She’s four, going on fourteen’.

            I’m reminded of that ‘Lean In’ movement a decade ago, the ‘How to Have It All’ push for women to join the workforce more completely. The best argument against it I remember wasn’t, ‘Women shouldn’t have to work harder than men to have it all’, which was probably the loudest argument against it (at least in my circle). The best argument against it I remember was, ‘Men don’t have it all. No one can have it all, at least not at once.’ We are limited creatures, and there are seasons in life.

            And that reminds me of something I’ve written about before (back in my letter “Four Happy Years”). Early in having two children, when I was flogging myself half-to-death trying to do everything, my wife talked to me about glass balls and wooden balls. This is how I described it in “Four Happy Years”:

            My wife talks about glass balls and wood balls. However much we might want to juggle the wood balls, if we drop one it’s no big deal. We can just pick it up later, when we have time or energy or what-have-you. If we drop a glass ball, it’s game over. That ball’s gone. I would add a third ball-type here: the iron ball. This is the one that will not break if we drop it but it will damn well hurt. Keeping up habits is an iron ball, in our children as well as in ourselves. One can pick up the habit of putting books away after a month of letting them lie wherever the child is moved to toss them, but it’ll be a lot harder than just keeping the habit up to begin with.

            I still think this is the right way to think about the world. We have glass balls, wooden ball, and iron balls. Working out and eating well, in all honesty just health generally — physical, intellectual, spiritual — are iron balls. Keeping up relationships, keeping finances together, keeping one’s deadlines and responsibilities to others, those are glass balls. (And even there, most finances are probably just — “just” — iron balls which would really, really hurt if they landed on your foot). Wooden balls are basically everything else. Though often we try to “escalate” (to use a modern piece of jargon) wooden balls to something more.

            Man, O man do I want to wish I could write five hours a day. I wish I could read three hours a day. I can barely do either for more than one, though. And that being the case, I have to make fine and delicate decisions as to what I shall attend to for what time I have.

            I don’t know why people say ‘You can have it all’. Maybe they’re rich and have others do for them what most of us mortals have to do for ourselves. If we had twice our income, we could pay a governess to attend to our children and I could have those hours to write and to read.

            And yet, if we did — that wouldn’t give me more time but simply reallocate my time.

            Watching our children grow is the ultimate glass ball. I will never get back the time I watch our not-quite-two-year-old put on her shoes for the first time, that moment when our four-year-old straps her younger sister into the carseat without us asking. If we were to hire a governess, I wouldn’t be the one reading them Mother Goose and Winnie the Pooh. I wouldn’t get to see my wife teach drawing, or practice piano, or make bracelets with them.

            Something has to give, and I’m afraid it will be these letters. Not completely! But they will no longer be weekly, probably not even monthly. I’ll explain what I’m doing instead in THE SHED.

Flowerbeds

            Hubert Robert (1733-1808) was a Romantic painter, noted for his semi-fantastical landscapes and his capricci. “Capricci” are architectural paintings with some fantastical element. In the first picture, we have the Louvre’s Grand Gallery, expanded and beautified. In the second picture, we have the Louvre’s Grand Gallery in ruins. Both are capricci.

            These are the options that seem to lay before us. It’s arrogant in the extreme, but one of the reason I’m laying my keyboard down in these writings is because I believe my work is the work of civilization. There are others far more important in this struggle (indeed, almost everyone is), but I have a part to play. And I intend to play it without shirking.

Projet d'aménagement de la Grande Galerie du Louvre (Project from the Expansion of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre), Hubert Robert, 1796

Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre en ruines (Imaginary View of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre in Ruins), Hubert Robert, 1796

The Schoolroom

            This year, I’ve written twice (here and here) about teaching our four-year-old to read. Let’s make that thrice! And then something, as Monty Python says, “completely different”.

                We have abandoned the book we were using, though by that I mean no slight on the book. In all honesty, I continue to think the girl is just too young to read, but certainly the ‘lessons’ as outlined were too fast or complex for her.

            I suspect it was too fast. While there was a good deal of review, as much as older children need and more than most anyone gets, I think it was simply too much for a girl who didn’t really understand how any of it worked. After she’d perfectly explained that ‘c’ says /k/, ‘a’ says /ah/, and ‘t’ says /t/, I’d ask her to ‘now put the sounds together’, and for weeks she’d say a kid version of ‘I don’t know what that means or how to do it’. And though I could demonstrate, she neither remembered it next day nor could extrapolate my demonstration of reading ‘cat’ to any attempt to say ‘mat’, though she knew the /mm/ sound just as well as any of the others.

            So I dropped the book and have been running her through “her blocks” several times a week now. What that looks like is me taking out those child blocks with the letters on them and picking out ‘A’ and ‘T’. I put them together to make ‘AT’. Then I put other letters before it. I run through them several times on their own with her, and then I place them together to get her “reading” all the ‘-at’ words in a sentence like, ‘The fat rat sat at the mat next to a cat who wore a hat, and the fat rat pat the cat with a bat.’ This seems to be working, in that she’s remember each word more often and even recognizing them in books we read together (her excitement upon seeing Cat in the Hat!!!).

            I got this strategy from the inestimable Charlotte Mason, whose life I continue to mean to write for you all (now a great deal further off than I originally thought). What’s striking about reading Miss Mason is that she would often prevent mistakes we as parents seem intent on making, like making our children cry because they can’t figure out ‘f’, ‘e’, ‘e’, and ‘t’ make ‘feet’.

            One of her maxims, of sorts, is to deal with “living books” and “living ideas”, or, in other words, that much of the artificiality we manufacture to make things “easier” on children actually has the effect of deadening them to the world. I saw this recently.

            For the same four-year-old (poor girl, the eldest, who gets all our experiments and ignorance and mistakes thrust upon her), I’ve been trying to find good Catholic podcasts for her to listen to. The one she does like has stopped publishing new episodes, and the others she could give or take. My desire here isn’t only because I want to induct her into a culture which we’ve joined but which is foreign to the rest of our family, but because she has been asking many questions which I can only half-answers. The easiest of these was ‘What’s the difference between an Apostle and a Disciple?’ Good question!

            Anyway, while I was trying to find a proper podcast for her, I also looked for resources for myself so that I could answer future questions. One of those sources I went to was the Baltimore Catechism. And — lo and behold — as I was listening to it on my own while washing the dishes, I turn to find my daughter standing on her tower and sort of staring off into space. So I pause it, ready for her questions.

            “Can we play the podcast more, Papa?”

            “Eh… you want me to just play the Catechism?”

            “What you were just paying, can we play that again?"

            “… Sure.”

            It’s child-sized without being childish. It mades none of the funny sounds, playful noises, sing-songy voices of the various Catholic Kids podcasts. In fact, its “production value” is rather extraordinarily low. I could do better on this computer, with my full sound recording experience being poems I’ve recorded for family and friends (and you all, the other week).

            And yet that’s what she’s glommed onto. She doesn’t want or need the fancy phonics system I learnt with a fancy, “100 Million Children Taught” book. She wants to play with blocks and spell out silly sentences. She doesn’t want the fancy podcasts, she wants more Baltimore Catechism. I think I can accommodate her.

The Amphitheater

            Jerry Seinfeld is getting a bunch of flak for some of the stuff in this graduation speech. But, then again, when (now especially but ever in history really) do public figures escape flak. Whatever’s “being said” about this, I found the talk clever and funny, which I suspected, but also touching and wise, which I did not.

            I found it touching when he said, about giving advice to them, “I’m done”. He was saying he’s 70, and his race has been run. But he wants them to prosper and thrive. “I’m done. You’re just beginning.”

           And I found his three rules for life, which I won’t spoil, wise. Nothing earth-shattering exactly. He hasn’t opened a virgin vein in philosophy which will redefine our understanding of eudaimonia, but he’s expressed what we all know (and yet always do seem to forget) well. May we remember it.

The Shed

            I almost excluded this section as unnecessary, and you all may wonder why I’m so chatty in these letters. Partially it’s because that’s my nature, but partially it’s because I believe I ‘owe you’. You are all my investors, as it were. Not in money; none of you pay me (you cheapskates!). But you do give me your time, and that (as I talked about in WITH OUR FATHERS) is more precious.

            You all have given me your time, and so I feel I owe you some explanation for what I am doing, what I will be doing, and why. Since the New Year, I have been taking classes with the House of Humane Letters. So far I’ve taken a Fairy Tale class, and then with several friends from that class and elsewhere we’ve been going through Northrop Frye’s Bible and Literature lectures. In August (within two months of our son’s birth!) I will start the House of Humane Letter’s How to Read Literature course, and I will be doing it live, for a year. All of these have taken a good amount of time, time I will not have to spare when we have three children on our hands (and our legs, our feet, our arms, hanging from our necks).

            On top of that, these letters I started to write so as to force myself to finish my book have taken on a life of their own and become an interference with writing. I have written only a couple new chapters of my book. I have edited few short stories and written none. I have taken no further steps into writing the screenplay for The Song of Roland. I have a rough draft of a novel mouldering in cyberspace.

            As I’ve said again and again (and again, and surely more times than those besides), I talk big in these pages with very little to show for it. I would like to take some time over the next several years to see if I can show something for it. Thither shall I set my bow and sail as best I can.

            Which doesn’t mean I’ll be sending you no more letters. I certainly shall send you all a letter if any other work of mine gets published. Be not surprised, however, if these letters come much more seldom (though as likely as not at no shorter length — let’s be honest here). Thank you for the attention so far; I hope to do more and more to deserve it.

Reviso et Peroratio

            The other day, I wrote on Twitter:

            And while I was writing most of the above, there was a freak-out in this house. Gremlin #1 did not want to wear pants.

            Now, to save her honor a little, I shall say she did want to wear clothes. She wasn’t arguing for dancing about naked all day. She wanted to wear a dress, and that’s normally great. Except we were getting ready to go to my dad’s “farm” (animal-less since some tenants had chickens in the 90s), and the last time we went without pants on she acquired two- or three-dozen ticks. We did not want a repeat performance of that. So we told her she had to wear pants, and she cried.

            My wife and I had also been fighting. Nothing serious, and we’re perfectly over it, but it was just one of those ‘Let’s not talk to each other until the end of the day, shall we not’ fights. So we didn’t. And then at the end of the day, she realize she hadn’t felt baby move for hours, maybe all day. Indeed, she noticed right when he is usually the most active during the day. And yet he wasn’t moving at all.

            (Now, obviously if something had actually been wrong with him, I wouldn’t be sticking any of that here, or likely talking about it at all. He’s fine, and my point lies elsewhere.)

            We were concerned enough to message my mom (she lives about a mile from us) so that she could be prepared, and instead of just waiting by her phone she drove to my aunt’s (my aunt lives next door to us) so she could walk over at a word. And she did, for after another forty-five minutes of still not feeling him, we went to the hospital.

            Describing our trip to the hospital would likely be even more boring than it would be unnecessary. Yet it was almost a perfect end to the day, for a call to the hospital, even one assuring us All Is Well, puts the petty fighting of our marriage or the petty anger at our daughter’s silly crying (we compromised, by the way, and she wore pants under her dress) into rather sharp perspective. It always does. And yet we never remember. The trap (the crime!) of being human.

            It reminds me of what Chesterton says about Original Sin:

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin -- a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument.

            And I think I’ll leave you there. God bless you and keep you. I’ll be around again occasionally.

What book must I read? Is it a book everyone must read or just for me? This is your excuse to praise an obscure book which needs more love, and praise it to the skies. So please do

Leave a comment

            Or if you don’t want to post publicly, you can

Email Me

            If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click

Here

            If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor

Subscribe now

            And you’d be doing me a favor if you would, on any social media available to you,

Share

           Until next we meet, I remain your fellow,

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

            It’s wild to me how fully a compelling show can alter an age’s aesthetic. Back in 2006, I first become conscious of how complete could be the change, as Daniel Craig’s chic and sleek Casino Royal Bond ushered in a whole new look. The next year, Mad Men filled the sails cultural ship, filled its sales just in time for it to crash upon the rocks of the 2008 collapse.

            Despite some lean years where we (most of us) lost the hats, this aesthetic held but became rougher, more comfortable with how ‘old’ and ‘vintage’ it was. By 2012 the Hipster flannel garden had fully flowered and was ready to be shown and adopted by normies (or the “basic” poeple, as we used to call them). This was the year of Girls. Mumford and Sons came out with Babel and Macklemore had “Thrift Store” (“No, for real, ask your grandpa — can I have his hand-me-downs?”).

            This was a boon for me, for I (cool kid that I was) had continued wearing the fedora through the ravine of the post-collapse years, but by 2012 it was back in style. (Though, in fairness, probably not the way I wore it.) What’s striking to me is how unconscious all of this is. We go ‘that looks good’, without paying attention to the tributary rivers of our taste.

            By early 2013, Vikings arrived in America, and the aesthetic changed again the year after when the show became popular. Long hair, tight pants, close and open shirts, which moved afterward towards “workwear” and (hated phrase as it is) “athleisure”. Starting around here, I largely retreated from the world and became unconscious of its sartorial undulations. So, for example, I wonder how the worldwide sensation of Game of Thrones (which ran this whole time) affected clothes.

            This is where the world seemed to be heading into March of 2020. Then the world exploded. And I haven’t a clue what’s happening on this side of Covid, except that I’m trying to move towards a more formal style. Suit pants, button-down shirts, layering. But whether that’s me catching the zeitgeist again or just me making the transition into (what I hope to be) a dignified middle age — I haven’t a clue.

            One of these days I plan to read René Girard and see if he truly opens this world up as his proponents claim.

Hortus Proprius

            Y’all get a special treat, by which I mean I’m experimenting on you all. Today I’m sharing with you not only a poem but my reading of that poem. Y’all can tell me at the end if I can get away with saying ‘y’all’ (I almost certainly can’t). I’ve been told I have a good reading and declaiming voice, so we’ll see if that holds true over the internet, to those who aren’t family.

Harp Song of the Dane Women
Rudyard Kipling

“The Knights of the Joyous Venture” — Puck of Pook’s Hill

What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

She has no house to lay a guest in—
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you—
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken—

Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.

You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables—
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.

Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.

Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

The Amphitheater

            I’m about to share a video from Postmodern Jukebox. What’s funny is that I have been following Postmodern Jukebox on YouTube for almost their entire career, so I remember when this song first came out. Their setup looked so plunky back then compared to what they can show us now. Many of these early videos don’t have 1080p either, much less 4K.

            (And how young they all look!)

            I think in adulthood, we can forget how much our world has changed. We remember our-childhood-selves getting excited about cordless phones and DSL (or even just dial-up! AOL chat rooms!), but we take such advances in adulthood for granted. At least, I do. 4K YouTube on my phone? No big deal!

            Except my first several phones in adulthood had no YouTube. They didn’t even have email. The power one felt with his first BlackBerry!

Reviso et Peroratio

            There’s been a kerfuffle on Twitter again about the cost of the living. There always seems to be such a kerfuffle, to the point where it may be better to say the kerfuffle is always active and that it recently erupted. I neither need to nor (likely) would you want me to rehash the arguments going around and my reaction to them, but there’s something I realized in all the debate over the cost of food, childcare, houses, &c.

            Despite 66% of Americans owning a house (about 20% higher than the 1940s and 1950s and the highest it’s ever been except right before the ’08 crash), despite how just one moment contemplating Spotify would blow the mind of someone from 2005 let alone 1965 (‘you mean I can get hundreds, thousands, hundreds-of-thousands of my favorite albums on a supercomputer I keep in my pocket all for about an hour of work a month!?), and despite the fact that what used to be a luxury item (steak) can now be had by the pound for half-an-hour’s work (depending on the steak, of course, depending on the work, but even Ribeye is often less than $15/pound now), despite all that, no matter how much team Overpriced and team American-Dream-Maxx (and bet you can’t guess which team I’m on after those examples) throw data at each other and no matter how much data we throw, we’re both talking about the price of goods and services.

            That is, we’re all Marxists now.

            One can make the argument all day that we’ve always cared about money, that the Peasant’ War was about money (‘When Adam delved & Eve span, who was then the gentleman’), that the French Revolution was about immiserating inflation (‘Let them eat cake’), that the American Revolution was about commerce (‘No taxation without representation’), but when the American Fathers talked about the ‘good life’, it wasn’t one with running water, air conditioning, and a freezer. They didn’t talk about how they wanted widespread antibiotics, or birth to cost nothing (birth did cost nothing, and you got what you paid for), or about artificial valves for the failing hearts of their stout-hearted fellows.

            They talked about leisure, about being one’s own man. And when they pledged themselves to each other, they pledged their fortunes — sure. They pledged their fortunes as something to lose. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. That last bit was by ells and miles the most important.

            I make no broad claims for this theory; I just thought of it this week. Nor do I think there is nothing to the economic complaint; telling a whole generation they must go to college only to notice that what we need now, what is paid now, are the trades — that has to sting. But I can’t help noticing how like luxury our forefathers would view our now supposed poverty. And I can’t help noticing that we talk about comfort, cars, interest rates and not feasts, fêtes, faith, fellowship, and virtue.

            Have you noticed how little we hear now of Benedict Arnold? He was a stock character of my childhood. And I’m really not all that old. There’s a lesson there, for those with ears to hear.

            I’ve shared with you one of my weird theories. Do you have any you’d like to share with me? I’d love to hear them, so please

Leave a comment

            Or, if you don’t want to post publicly, you can

Email Me

            If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click

Here

            If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor

Subscribe now

            And you’d be doing me a favor if you would, on any social media available to you,

Share

           Until next we meet, I remain your fellow,

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

             “Speak Softly and Carry Nothing in Your Hands” is one of my favorite letters from last year. It has a bit of everything & yet is cohesive all through. As you shall see when you read, I was then, on February 24, 2023, mapping out the path I still navigate, one I talked about recently and indeed almost exactly a year later, on February 23, 2023.

            It is funny how much and yet how little changes year to year.

             Last month, I went on a tear about the need for schools to eschew teaching higher math and advanced biological systems as if High School students were little scholars. I get uneasy after such rants, for, though I usually still agree with myself after wanting, I never make the allowances I ought, never give all the caveats I should. This is an inevitable weakness of even long-form writing (and at 4,000 words a pop, these newsletters are longform writing), but I do too little to correct it.
            Advanced math and the functioning of a cell are part of the liberal arts, so why not teach them?
            Simply because we don’t teach the foundational subjects well enough. An account I follow on Twitter, a woman who is a counselor at an elementary school in the South, said that many of her students don’t know what consonants and vowels are. Some can’t even spell their names. The crisis is deep, and though it is unlikely to fall so catastrophically on those of us who write or read letters like mine (or, rather, our children), the degradation affects us too.
            So I’d like to introduce you all to another part of this garden, The Schoolroom. Like the Hortus Proprius, it will be one of our main sections. I mean to think through the problems of education not simply by way of stories, as I have done in The Courtyard and With Our Fathers, but in detailed argumentation with what reason I can muster. Having a place and a space to be direct, without a need to tie my argument to a specific story, will allow me to work through these ideas with greater delicacy. Thus I will present no more rants, except… I probably will.
            For by nature and education, I am particularly susceptible to rants.

The Courtyard

            Even before I went to law school, I’d been trained as a lawyer. I remember a pert middle class Catholic girl I dated in college once came with me to Seder at my cousins’ house. There was laughter and hugging as we entered and smiles and laughter as extended family caught up while my cousins assembled the Seder plate in the kitchen. And we were all jokes as we went through the Haggadah.
            As soon as our last prayer had been said and the children had been loosed to find the Afikomen (and I’m sorry if this is making no sense to those of you who have never been to a Seder), the whole family descended into shouting. I remember distinctly one aunt raising herself half out of her chair to point a shaking finger at her nephew while yelling that he was ‘thoughtless and juvenile and too old to be so naïve’ because they disagreed over something to do with public schools.
            While we shouted at high volume, I noticed my then-girlfriend slowly, slowly backing up, pushing her back high into her chair as if to fade away. My Uncle also noticed, so he gently got her attention and quietly asked, ‘Now what do you think about all this?’
            Hours later, as we were leaving for the night, everyone was hugging and laughing and saying goodbye as if there had never been an argument in the world. Because the yelling had been (for my family) just part of the fun. As we left my cousins’ house, she turned to me and said, ‘I guess you aren’t that argumentative after all.’
            On a visit to my best friend’s parents’ house half a decade later (and ago), some of their family was over. I can’t for the life of me remember what we were talking about, but it too got heated. At the end, as before, everyone was laughing and hugging and slowly heading to the door. My friend’s father said, ‘You know you’re with good friends and family if you’re shouting at each other and not having a fight.’
            I used to think that the sentiment showed great virtue, an ego-lessness which manifested in not holding a grudge. And while that is a true virtue, it’s a virtue which stands in the shadow of a towering vice. There is no virtue in being contentious, tendentious, or loud in face of opposition. One need not yell to make his point. Interruption is rarely useful and never pleasing.
            My natural and home-grown argumentativeness was nothing but exaggerated by my education. Both in school and at home, I grew up being invited to have an opinion on… well, just about everything. I was encouraged to reason ex nihil, as if reason were divinely granted into the minds of men.
Now, of course and in a way, it is. But men must have something to reason about, and that requires knowledge. In Charlotte Mason’s philosophy (from which mine borrows heavily), children must have ideas.
            Or, to quote the inestimable (but impossible for me to read) Flannery O’Connor:

Flowerbeds

            Maximilian Albert Josef Liebenwein was an Austrian book illustrator who reminds me a great deal of Arthur Rackham. They both have crisp and clean styles, with Mr. Liebenwein’s tending towards the Art Nouveau, and yet they both dealt in ancient, medieval, and eternal designs.
           I once read an art critic argue Art Nouveau wasn’t a modernist movement. He said modernism was a wholesale abandonment of the fine arts’ patrimony but Art Nouveau partook of that inheritance freely. Without getting into a linguistic game about this, it’s clear that Art Nouveau is a different animal from contemporaneous movements like Expressionism and Cubism.
            Here is a Liebenwein illustration; I don’t know its name. I found it floating about on Twitter, and if you do an image search for it, my retweet is one of the first that shows up as a source. So… maybe it isn’t even Liebenwein’s, though it sure looks like one of his. Enjoy.

The Schoolroom

            One must dig down to bedrock. I usually assume that means we needs start with the simplest questions. The Schoolroom is for delineating my thoughts on classical homeschooling. But “classical homeschooling” or “homeschooling” or “traditional homeschool” or “Christian schooling” or “family schooling” are all phrases that throw us in the middle of the river. Where’s the source?
            Separating off “homeschooling” from “institutional schooling” isn’t particularly helpful, though it is somewhat further upstream. To dive into a logic chopping exercise at this point would be to drown myself, but definitions are useful, if only to assure ourselves we’re all talking about the same thing. So, for those interested:
            Homeschooling doesn’t mean my own studies at home, doesn’t mean adults taking remote college classes, doesn’t even mean children taking enrichment classes or supplementary tutoring, and again doesn’t even really have to do with the home (a parent who homeschools his children does not cease to do so when he takes them to the library). When I say “homeschool”, I mean a parent or tutor teaching a small number of mixed-age children generally of one family or a few intimate families, with the instructor remaining the instructor over several years and often the whole the education.
            But, as I said, this is still downstream from the source. Homeschooling is a species of schooling generally. And schooling generally is not just for children, not just for colleges, not just for lectures, but for you and me and everyone. Every time we take on a new art or technique at work and are trained in how we’re to do it, we (to use a now no longer quite apt formulation) are schooled. So too when the neighbor comes over to show us how to make a particular carpentry cut for a new table or a particular dough combination for a new bread. Schooling is the semi-formilized transfer of knowledge from one person to another.
            That definition satisfies at first glance but the more I look at it, the more uneasy I grow. When I assign an essay to a student, we engage in schooling and yet less than half of learning is anything like “knowledge transfer”. I might have to explain the assignment and correct his attempt when complete (both knowledge transfers), but the research and the writing are as equally times of learning, and in neither case is there any “semi-formalized transfer of knowledge”. And the writing isn’t even “from one person to another”. Yet it’s still schooling.
            If we return to the carpentry and baking examples, we see the same pattern, the same weakness. So long as our neighbors are good teachers, they may explain what we are to do, but then they will allow us to attempt it, watching us to correct our mistakes or adjust our technique.
           This is already how I teach my two-year-old. Whether putting on her clothes, doing the laundry, cutting carrots – whatever it is I’m allowing her to do, I watch her carefully, let her struggle through mistakes, and then correct those she cannot yet correct herself.
           So… schooling really isn’t a “transfer of knowledge” and we are not yet at its source. Now we could keep proposing these definitions, but they would likely equally fall apart under sustained questioning (as Socrates taught us). So perhaps we can get there another way, by looking at what people actually say about modern schooling.
            Anyone who says he’s going to homeschool his children will be familiar with the three generic criticisms – often expressed as ‘worries’. First, our worrier will worry that ‘while no doubt you can teach such-and-such better than most teachers, how about this-and-that?’ Said again, our homeschooling parent may know advanced math very well but be lost in history, or history might be his bailiwick but science is forever a mystery to him. Said a third time, the worry is for a well-rounded education.
            Second, the worrier will worry about our children being always alone. The arguments here range from ‘children need to engage with the world unsupervised in order to learn how to handle a world which is unsupervised’ all the way to ‘children need other children in order to learn how to be children’. It’s sometimes simply phrased as, ‘I knew some homeschooled children before; they were very strange.’
            Third, and especially if those appeals fail, the worrier will worry about the amount of time attending to our children’s education takes from us parents. ‘You say you never have enough time, and, you know, if you just put your children out to school…’; ‘Oh, when I had children I couldn’t have kept the house clean if I hadn’t put them in daycare’; ‘Just think – if they were at school, you could work twenty hours a week and still have so much time for side projects.’
            In sum, there are three broad arguments for schooling as we understand it: 1. Academic, 2. Socialization, and 3. Babysitting. Next time I’ll start to take a look at all three in hopes an examination of them will lead us to the source of our education conundrum.

A Bench Under the Trees

“If You Want Fewer Stupid Politicians And Voters, Promote Good Reading” by Mark A. Signorelli
            In this article, written about a month after the 2016 election, Mr. Signorelli argues our deteriorating discourse is the direct downstream effect not of ideological polarization but modern citizens’ inability to comprehend arguments made at length. He writes, “[T]he increasing viciousness of debate among our college students… is routinely regarded as the fruit of ideological fervor. But that fervor is a consequence itself of the inarticulateness and constricted views of these students. It is the immoderate rage that grows in souls not trained to habits of dialogue and reflection—habits nurtured through reading. The primary reason they are shouting is not because they are impassioned ideologues, but because they are not capable of doing anything else—certainly not capable of forming a tightly reasoned, lucidly expressed argument.”
            His whole argument too well buttresses one I’ve made before for me to be a disinterested analyst of its quality. So head on over and read it on your own.
 
“The Betrayal of an English Hero” by Alexander Palacio
            Have you noticed there are no Robin Hood movies about? In a world where they’ve made several Superman movies, seven or eight Spiderman movies with four actors, and six Batman movies with three actors plus about two-dozen animated or spinoff movies, Robin Hood is nowhere on the horizon. Well, Mr. Palacio believes he knows the reason.
            “The disappearance of Robin Hood can be stated simply. In the last few decades, writers keep making one or two mistakes when writing Robin Hood. First, they take a grim, gritty, realistic approach to the tone of the story and characters. Second, they interpret Robin’s outlaw status to make him transgressive in a way that is opposed to the medieval social order itself. These approaches are not compatible with Robin Hood as he exists in his archetypal form. They violate the valid expectations people have for a Robin Hood story.”
            A good article on theme and what it means to be faithful in franchise retellings.
 
 
“Episode 162: Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Horatius” from Critical Readings
            This is the first podcast recommended in Hortus Scriptorius. I listen to many (too many) podcasts, and it’s a constant struggle to know to what I ought attend. So though I’ve become a Twitter “mutual” with one of the professors running this podcast, and though it bills itself in every way designed to excite my attention, I hadn’t listened to a single episode. This past week I remedied that, and Boy Howdy am I glad I did.
            I once grabbed a random book of "Roman Lays" from a friend's (19th Century) house library and put my feet up at a coffee shop on a gloomy, spitting New England day. I found myself standing alongside Horatius at the Bridge. Impossible to put down until I'd finished, I felt as if an invisible hand kept my head bowed and my arms up.
           And Critical Readings’s treatment is perfect; Professors Cooper and Keane do what professors ought, true exegesis. No cut-rate sociology here, just history and analysis to open the text to their listeners. Even where I knew the history they described, it often took me listening to them to connect it to the poem. And I often didn’t know the history besides.
            Do enjoy.

The Amphitheater

            The Main Squeeze is a funk band out of Indiana. When I’m in for a fix of modern music, I’ll often put on their covers. I will never be able to watch horror movies; they make me twitchy and furious. But I do understand why those who like them like them. It’s for the same reason people like the Blues and Soul, both of which I just adore. A good sad song just saps life’s venom and frustrations straight out of me.
            So it is with The Main Squeeze’s rendition of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come”:

             And, just in case your life has been deprived of the original, here's that too:

Reviso Courtyard et Peroratio

            I recently finished rereading Emma, Jane Austen’s second- or third-best book (again, don’t @ me – and for the record Sense and Sensibility is the competition and Pride and Prejudice has none). Like all of Austen’s books, it’s a long contemplation about the line from Scripture: “By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive”. (Matthew 9:16.)
           In particular, Emma is about Emma’s long struggle to know when to speak and when to keep quiet. All her mortification happens because of an excessively liberal tongue and all her correction comes from the reserved but penetrating speech of Mr. Knightly (and her own conscience, of course).
            I too need to learn when to hold my tongue and when to speak, and how to speak.  
            In my New Year’s letter, I wrote:
 

 “We come to the end of the year and my fifth newsletter. In these letters I’ve tried to balance scholarship, to the extent I engage in it, and reflections on writing generally as well as on education. I fear, though, that these letters sound rather too much like a diary and are rather too long besides.”

            Ever towards the confidential and the personal have these letters strayed. As Valéry noted, omphaloskepsis is a weakness to which all humans are heir, and for those of us with a captive audience (a captive audience with multiple PhDs too! How special must I be!), the temptation is especially strong.
            As my New Year’s letter says, Hortus Scriptorius aims to elaborate upon three topics: 1. Our cultural heritage generally, 2. Our literary heritage specifically, and 3. How to teach in a classical tradition. I shall endeavor to keep my eye on those three balls.
            In the Introduction, I talked about those poor children (in spirit if not in purse) who are illiterate by almost any measure, but the truth is that none of us compare favorably with our ancestors. Even compared to an unschooled farmer during the Civil War era, we often know very little indeed. (Unsurprisingly but appropriately, Austen is good on this in Emma, with her character of Mr. Martin.)
            There is no easy summation for what went wrong. The problem is at every level of the education, every level of culture, every level of politics, every level of religion, and every level of the family. To see what’s wrong and talk to someone who only knows our modern education system as it exists in all public and all-but-all private schools in this country is to try to converse in a virgin language. Which is what The Schoolroom aims to address.
            But my greatest worry is that these letters go on too long. Partially this is a particular sickness of mine (I have never said five words where fifty would do), but it’s also a testament to how much I try to cover in each newsletter. So the simple expedient is to shrink them. But given that my writing style is decidedly set at this point, how can I use fewer words yet cover the same distance?
            The same way I would eat the same amount without overeating at any one meal; I need to pace and space myself.
           You might have noticed there was no Hortus Proprius in this letter. That’s because this was a Schoolroom letter. Next week (not in another fortnight but next week), I shall send another letter with a Hortus Proprius. As this letter is about three-thousand words, I hope each letter will be three-thousand words weekly instead of four- or five-thousand words fortnightly. (Editor’s Note: This did not work out as intended.)
           And no, this is not just an excuse to write more, though I can’t quite blame you if you come away from this thinking so. 

           Piggybacking on last week’s question: if you could have any month of the year completely off, which would it be? Especially for those in cold climates, I can see an argument for January or March (February is too short), where one might be able to escape the deep chill. Would those around me like to have all of August instead of only part off so we could escape the baking heat?

Leave a comment

            Or if you don’t want to post publicly, you can

Email Me

            If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click

Here

            If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor

Subscribe now

            And you’d be doing me a favor if you would, on any social media available to you,

Share

           Until next we meet, I remain your fellow,

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

            As you can see, I’m violating the plans I laid out in my last letter. I’m writing to you all in April. You see — What I’d planned to do was to break up the older, longer letters so you could get two easily-digestible parts of one long, ponderous letter over two weeks instead of that one and ponderous letter entire.

            This did not work out. The letters may have been long and ponderous, but they were also cohesive, and I can find no way to break them apart which does not make them hopelessly uneven. I could, of course, send you the Flowerbed and Amphitheater parts of the letter this week and the other 3,000+ words next week. But why not have a break inside that beast?

            So instead I’m going to write about a book, a poem, and a concert. All very briefly and not in that order.

Hortus Proprius

            I will one day (probably in about two years, though, as things are going now, maybe five) piece together a poetry collection for children. As we are about to have our third, I’ve been looking back over some of those poems. And I stumbled upon this one, which I’d wholly forgotten. I’d say this is a good time to remember.

A Little Fellow Follows Me
Anon

A careful man I want to be —
a little fellow follows me.
I do not dare to go astray,
for fear he’ll go the self-same way.
I cannot once escape his eyes.
Whatever he sees me do he tries.
Like me he says he’s going to be —
that little chap who follows me…
He knows that I am big and fine —
And believes in every word of mine.
The base in me he must not see —
that little chap who follows me…
But after all it’s easier,
that brighter road to climb,
With little hands behind me —
to push me all the time.
And I reckon I’m a better man
than what I used to be…
Because I have this lad at home
who thinks the world of me.

The Amphitheater

            This is a “concert” I stumbled across on YouTube of Polyphonic music from the 15th to the 20th Centuries. It’s form the 1989 Album Splendori della polifonia - Mottetti e madrigali per coro a quattro voci miste. The choir is Cappella Musicale Basilica di San Marco, with Giovanni Vianini directing.

The Hammock

            I wrote online that I tended to side with Lewis on the debate about whether there was or was not a Renaissance. An acquaintance of mine (a professor at a University in the Northeast) send me an article of his arguing that there was, in fact, a Renaissance. More than that, he says that Lewis’s idea there wasn’t really a Renaissance is a bit of an embarrassment for him in The Academy. I have several Lewis articles and chapters yet to read (and my friend’s essay to re-read) before I make up my mind about it all. Among that reading is a chapter of Jason Baxter’s The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis.

            The book feels to be almost the perfect combination of quotations, explanations, and elaborations. If you have been too scared to read The Discarded Image, if you have read The Discarded Image but can make neither heads nor tails of it, or even if you feel you wade through The Discarded Image well enough but would like delve deeper into its refreshing waters, this book can help. At the very least, it’s certainly helped me. I was re-reading it by happenstance right now anyway, and so I shall soon re-read it, particularly Chapter 3, “From Symphony to Machine”, by design for my response to the good professor.

            I found it on Hoopla before I bought it, for those who are uncertain about it or who cannot spare the money for yet another book right now. That last mode almost always describes me.

The Shed

            Next week you shall have that ponderous letter of mine.

Reviso et Peroratio

            See you next week.

            Thank you

            I asked this question on Twitter, but got no response. Perhaps you all will equip yourselves better. In a world of HVAC, why do we give children Summer off and not either Spring or Fall? At least in the South and Southwest, it’s often too hot to use most of the day in Summer; whereas now, in April, it’s a chill fifty-five in the morning & a hot but easy eighty-five in the afternoon. Perfect! So why don’t we give students a Spring (or Fall) break and make them work in cool AC through the summer? If you have thoughts, please

Leave a comment

            Or if you don’t want to post publicly, you can

Email Me

            If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click

Here

            If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor

Subscribe now

            And you’d be doing me a favor if you would, on any social media available to you,

Share

           Until next we meet, I remain your fellow,

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

            I hate the latter, but find the former hilarious with everyone else. On April Fools’ Day, we celebrate too often that targeted humor, and so I generally avoid anything to do with the day. Except, it’s one saving grace is that it’s my Grandmother’s birthday. I’ll be talking about that (and Holy Week, a bit) today. Hope you enjoy.

With Our Fathers

            Today, my Grandmother is 86. Even many of us who were raised near her (on the East Coast) have moved away, either to the middle of the country or to another country altogether. So even though I will call her and talk, even though we’re sending her pictures of our girls (the eldest of whom is named for her), I won’t be able to spend her birthday with her as I’d like. I’m getting a bit nostalgic about it, honestly.

            My grandmother (whom I call Mims) is a Southern Lady (from Richmond) who moved up to Quaker country for college and stayed there. She was a lawyer for many years and admitted to practice (and I think even went before, though she doesn’t actually talk about it much) the United States Supreme Court. She was also a museum tour guide and a realtor in her time.

            I grew up a bit intimidated by her (not that she was intimidating), with her pearls and her always done hair and her fine clothes. It’s not like we were slobs, my parents and I, but we partook fully in the 90s dress-down culture. And Mims very, very much did not. By the time I was a teenager, though, it’s all we could do not to talk of history, literature, and archeology for hours every visit.

            I still remember that liminal space, between me as an intimidated child and me as an ersatz friend. My mom and I were visiting Granddad and Mims, and they started talking about this topless party they’d gone to nearby. Now, as I’d become a teenager my parents had been increasingly open with me, so a startling revelation like this wasn’t new in terms of content (exactly), but it was certainly new in terms of intensity. Said another way: I knew they were liberal, but I hadn’t realized they were that liberal, to talk about a topless party before their grandson like it was nothing, like it was expected. They were talking about all the little dishes, how they’d even brought something, and they kept deploying ‘topless’ as if it were an adjective. There was all this topless about; ‘this toplessness?’ my brain kept rendering it as. I would have been more confused if I wasn’t quite so horrified.

            I don’t know how many years it took me to realize they were talking about a “tapas” party the whole time.

Flowerbed

            No comment, just art.

Hortus Proprius

The Donkey
G.K. Chesterton

When fishes flew and forests walked
   And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
   Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry
   And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
   On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
   Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
   I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
   One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
   And palms before my feet.            

            O Friends, that ending! Donkeys are such silly creatures, and one can just see Puzzle (from The Last Battle) walking cluelessly forward with God on his back and smiling at the noise his entrance into Jerusalem occasioned. I think often about children in this way; how so often what they do creates utter joy in the adults around them. They don’t know why the adults are delighted, but they delight in the delight. “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

            The other association is with ‘the first will be last and the last will be first’. On the eve of his very Resurrection, on the eve of Jerusalem’s redemption, the donkey, the least of the barnyard animals, stumbles into Jerusalem itself before Christ Himself.

            This makes me think of the other major depictions of donkeys, those we get with A. A. Milne’s Eeyore and Orwell’s Benjamin. They’re smart but a bit silly, a combination of dour intelligence of undisturbed pessimism (in Milne never warranted and in Orwell always). How does that sour persona fit with the more childlike Puzzle? I haven’t a clue, but it’ll be interesting contrast to contemplate.

The Shed

            A reminder again that I’m off until the first full week of May. Until then, I’ll be posting old letters which haven’t had a Substack debut.

The Grotto

            My grandmother is a fairly healthy for an 86-year-old, but still has many back and knee problems which cause her regular trouble. If you are the praying sort, please, in your charity, pray for her.

Reviso et Peroratio

            If you don’t know, on Twitter you can “bookmark” a Tweet. It allows you to go back to it, save thoughts, links, charts, and ideas. Many people used to use ‘likes’ for that (and perhaps they still do), but since likes are public and bookmarks are private, likes seem to have increasingly become a tool of the approbation they’re named after and bookmarks have become the (my, at least) main attempt at saving information. Anyway, all that is prelude.

            Every so often I hear a joke on Twitter about the bookmarks, and how we have all saved all of this stuff in a folder (that is, in ‘Bookmarks’) we never check. And I laugh right along with them, because I check my bookmarks maybe twice a year and get through about three months of them before I have to go and do something else. There are years of bookmarks waiting to be remembered. And of course, as always, I unclick half the bookmarks I saved because I haven’t an idea why I saved them in the first place.

            The problem is, I do this not just with Twitter Bookmarks but with... everything. I have notebooks and notebooks, word documents beyond word documents. I have almost fifty Apple “Notes”, many of them pages long if I moved their content into Word. Just off the top of my head, I have a notebook in which I keep Bible notes, I have a journal, I have a notebook for my narrations of The Language of Creation, I have a “Quotations” Word document, a “Orphan Language” document, I have a “Writing” Scrivener file, and a “Politics” Scrivener file, I have a “Newsletter”, “Read”, “To Do List”, “Morning Prayer”, “Work Schedule”, “Figures”, “Girls’ Letters”, “Homeschool”, and “Quotations” list on Apple “Notes” — all of which I use about once a day. I’m sure I’m missing something. Do any of you all do this?

             I also have a list of saved websites (articles, mostly, but some books and music and paintings, &c also) on Firefox, on Safari, and on my phone. I intend (I always do little more than ‘intend’) to re-visit them, re-read, re-listen (Oh! because I also have hours of podcasts saved!), and compress all this saved knowledge into a useful reference (what else) document. When does one have time for such things?

            Did Sir Walter Scott or Shakespeare, Beethoven or Tchaikovsky have a whole drawer (or ten) of old papers, saved news clippings, re-written quotations from books that they intended to compress into useful material later on and just... fail? Or did they manage it, being less distracted by Twitter, by email, by our life and its blue-lighted avalanche of information? For surely it must be different to have only the several dozen books in your library and at best another library or two in easy travel distance. Meanwhile we now have our personal libraries of maybe a thousand books, plus dozens of libraries in easy travel, plus thousands of libraries right over the internet.

            Avalanche indeed.

            Thank you.

            How do you all keep, record, and store stories, quotations, and other... stuff... you want to come back to? Please

Leave a comment

            Or if you don’t want to post publicly, you can

Email Me

            If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click

Here

            If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor

Subscribe now

            And you’d be doing me a favor if you would, on any social media available to you,

Share

           Until next we meet, I remain your fellow,

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

With Our Fathers

            For Christmas 2022, back when she was two, which feels like lifetimes ago now, she got twin dolls from my mom. I can’t remember what their first names were, but they were girls, and she carried them around and treated them as her Mama and I treated our second daughter (who was then not six-months-old). This persisted through the summer.

            See, she’d been going to a “Mommy’s Day Out” class, twice a week, three-hours each time. And the names of the dolls were taken from the older girls in that class, with whom I don’t think she ever played but whom she idolized anyway. The class, however, kept getting her (and by extension us) sick. We felt she missed half the classes due to illness, so we stopped sending her after the Spring term. Instantly we got better.

            But that also meant we needed a new social scene. We got that mostly through our parish friends and those friends we’d made through that “Mommy’s Day Out” program. We see most of them once a month, and we see one group once (or twice!) a week. Either way, because she wasn’t near the older girls in the class, she stopped calling the dolls by their names and started calling them by her friends’ names. And that’s how the babies became Ryker and John.

            But John was too evocative, and we were reading too many (that really should be “too many”) Bible stories, and so quickly her dolls became (as they remain still, about a year later) Jesus and John. Jesus is (you will be glad to know) her favorite.

            And this creates hilarious little moments. She will, for example, sometimes forget him downstairs during bedtime. Which means she’ll suddenly remember after they’ve bathed and dressed, so she’ll go running downstairs at top speed, screaming, “I need Jesus!”

            Which... I mean... fair enough — but still!

            She will often ask me “Do you know where Jesus is?” or, if we’re looking, everybody’s favorite “Have you found Jesus?” If she no longer wants to carry him around and I’m sitting, she’ll come to me and ask, “Would you watch Jesus?” or “Please stay with Jesus” or, especially if she knows I won’t want to mind her doll right then, “Papa, do you need time with Jesus?” She will even occasionally say, “Papa, I think you need Jesus right now.”

            She hasn’t pulled something like ‘Jesus wants to spend time with you, Papa’ yet. But it’s only a matter of time.

Flowerbeds

            Joseph Clark (1834-1926) died on his 92nd Birthday, on July 4th. Too bad he was English. From Dorset, his father died in 1851 and Clark started supporting his mother and two elder sisters on the income from his painting as early as 1857. I wonder what the family did for the intervening six years. Perhaps his elder sisters went out to work at a local estate, or perhaps they had enough saved to keep body and soul together until Clark could support them. Or perhaps, as he’s given as an uncle of Joseph Benwell Clark, another painter, he might have had married brothers and sisters somewhere which do not otherwise appear in the sources I read but who (blissfully unconscious of their historical invisibility) went on happily supporting them anyway.

            In 1868 (at 34), he married an Annie Jones. They had three daughters and a son. Victorian Painters calls him a “tender and affecting” painter of domestic scenes, often with small children. And that’s exactly what I’m showing you today.

The Amphitheater

            I stumbled across these Syriac Catholics singing, and I find it just beautiful. There is such great diversity within the Unity of the Catholic Church. I find it hard to imagine they in Communion with the Church our family attends every Sunday, but here we are. Anyway, Catholic or not, Arabic speaking or not, the music is simply beautiful (so is the Church they’re singing in), and I highly recommend this to everyone.

The Hammock

            I often post the refrain “Read Great Books” (with an image from a book cover) on Twitter. I try to follow my own advice, but recently I listened to a Great Lecture. The Professor was Michael Drout and his lecture series was Singers and Tales, a look at the oral tradition in storytelling.

            I grew up knowing that Homer’s works were recorded by him (let’s ignore whether it was a ‘him’ or a ‘they over centuries’, yes?) from an oral tradition. I knew that they’d been bouncing around, modified, augmented, rearranged for decades and perhaps centuries before Homer ever put stylus to slate. But what I didn’t understand is how that oral tradition worked. I thought he simply knew the stories and put them into language as I might retell The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, as Charles and Mary Lamb retold Shakespeare.

            Not a bit of it, argues Michael Drout. He says the entire field of oral composition is misunderstood. We may think the oral poets compose as literary poets would, then memorize their creations. When the poems are passed down from generation to generation, the rising generation memorizes the poems from the reigning one. But that is not how it works at all.

            Instead, the scenes and moments of the story are remembered, but each performance is a new production, as if I were to tell you all the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. I know ‘starving family, cow sold for beans, angry Mama, beanstalk, new realm, giant’s castle, gold, golden goose, harp, bye bye beanstalk’, and I even may remember particular phrases which I put well last time, but I don’t memorize every single world. They do basically the same.

            ‘How could that be, Judd,’ one might say, ‘For you started this by talking about Homer. And Homer is in dactylic hexameter; surely no one is composing dactylic hexamter on the fly!’

            That’s exactly what I thought! But Professor Drout convinced me otherwise. I won’t give away his argument or his evidence. If you want then, listen to the lectures. They really are great. However, I will draw you a comparison which I made from some of my other reading.

            Two weeks ago, in “Practice Makes Perfect”, I talked about Deliberate Practice. In the same studies, they look at how experts in a field and novices look at reality. While this is true for all experts, what I mean is easiest seen in chess masters. (Like my discussion there, all of this will be from memory so the details will be a little off.)

            If you arrange chess boards to be in the middle of random matches and then let men look at the boards for several seconds, novices will be able to place only a few pieces back in proper order while grandmasters will be able to arrange the whole board accurately. At first blush, this sounds like a perfect example of the genius of the grandmaster. Look how quickly he memorizes! But if you instead randomly scatter chess pieces about the board, the grandmaster does little better than the novice. That’s because he’s not memorizing. Or, rather, he’s memorizing something else.

            The grandmaster’s mind does not see individual chess pieces and individual squares, as the novice’s does, but in chess scenarios. He sees the relation of the pieces, and so while the novice is trying to memorize (let’s say) twenty pieces and where they go, the grandmaster has recognized five scenarios and can replace them easily. Indeed, by knowing that all five are working together he can correct the errors in one. That is, if, for example, he knows not only that White’s bishop was threatening Black’s rook but that Black’s rook was threatening White’s queen, he can realize that if White’s queen is threatening Black’s knight, it must mean Black’s knight is on e5 and not f5.

            I hope that made sense. Let’s look at it in another context. When I watch a football game, I can follow the ball in almost all circumstances. That might not sound like a high boast, but my wife (who saw her first football game five years ago and may not have seen a full dozen in her life) often cannot even do that. She’s wholly taken in by any fake-out, and, even when there’s no fake-out, she just can’t see the game well. Meanwhile, while I can follow the ball, I have no idea where any of the other players are and cannot both follow the ball and them. My cousins, on the other hand, who’ve watched probably thousands of games and played in maybe hundreds, know where everyone is at almost every moment. They not only see all the players in each play, but see the play as it fits into the drive (‘oh, they want to do this because if they can’t advance it then they’ll have a chance to do that in the next down’), and they see each drive in the context of the whole game. If I’ve been a bit vague about the football terminology, it’s because I am a bit vague about football; I’ve played many more games of chess than I’ve ever watched of football.

            Oral poets construct their poetry in the same manner as chess grandmasters play their games, likely as NFL Quarterbacks play their games. They do not place words together to fit the meter, they place phrases together. They know thousands of phrases, as chess grandmasters know thousands of situations, as football fans know thousands of plays, as writers know thousands of images, as indeed we all know thousands of words, and these phrases can be built up into whatever line is appropriate for the tradition.

            I’ll give you one example from Drout. There is a rest in the Homeric dactylic hexameter which breaks the phrase into two, and the oral poets know phrases that can fit each, so they can tell you how someone rested before he fought or they can tell you how he rested before he ate. But either way, it fits the meter.

            If you’re still a bit unclear about this it’s almost certainly my fault. But let’s look at language to try and get at how this works again. You and I have several thousand words at ready access, and we also have a grammatical structure with which we talk. When we speak, we do not think, ‘let me put a noun here and a verb here, an adjective here and an adverb there’. We do not even think (usually) about which words we want to use. We think in concepts and ideas and intentions and give voice to them as best we can in language (verbal and grammatical) which is second-nature. There are of course greater and lesser speakers, and what we call ‘being a good talker’ is largely a product of memorizing a variety of patterns (old aphorisms, new slang, quick jokes, clever anecdotes) and then expertly arranging and artfully altering them to fit the audience. And that’s just what these oral poets do.

            Now, whether you’re convinced or not (whether you understood or not!), I highly recommend Professor Drout’s Singers and Tales. It’s short, fascinating, and very well performed. And it opens a door into a world of modern epic storytelling which I’d thought extinct and ancient history.

The Shed

            Just a reminder that there will be no (new!) letters in April, except that I will have a short letter on April 1st. But then I’m off for the rest of the month. I will continue to release old editions of this newsletter for those of you who are new to the letters.

Reviso et Peroratio

            I bet we all know those people who just seemingly know what’s going to happen in every movie. My hypothesis is that they instinctively know the grammar of stories and see them like a chess grandmaster might see a game play out before him and predict all the moves. Brandon Sanderson says something about this in one of his recorded lectures at BYU. He says that there comes a point in every writer’s career when he can see what tricks the author of a book is playing on him, where the build-up happens, where the seeds are sown, whence comes the misdirection. Some people have this talent naturally; that is, they attended to enough stories well enough that the channels have been built into them.

            I’m not sure we ever taught these building blocks, or if we always expected those with story inclinations to pick them up by osmosis, but now we don’t even teach in a way that allows that osmosis. The building blocks of stories are: Bible stories, fairytales, myths, fables, and legends. But like molecules, that’s only what the bodies of stories are made of. The molecules themselves have constituent elements — atoms. The elements of stories are something like, plot, character, motif, image.

            Some of these are obvious; everyone knows a comedy ends in a marriage (or a feast, or a dance). There are revenge plots (Kill Bill) and discovery plots (Star Trek); there are bildungsroman (Kidnapped) and lovers reunite plots (Ivanhoe, The Princess Bride). Many characters we could easily name, like the lovable rogue (Han Solo, Falstaff), or the doe-eyed naïf (Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter), or the wise old man (Merlin, Dumbledore, Yoda). There are motifs every which way, like the Dragon-Slayer Motif (Beowulf in the cave, Harry Potter in the Chamber of Secrets, Lando Calrissian blowing up the Death Star). There’s the Self-Mutilation Motif (Cinderella, Foo from Fullmetal Alchemist). There’s the Lost Home Motif (Hogwarts, Ithaca), the Impotent Father Motif (basically all of them). And there are images, images of water, blood, wine (which is the same image), plains, mountains, dungeons, &c.

            To track them all may be a lifetime task. But as I learn about them, I try to use them more intentionally in my own writing. If you haven’t a clue what I am talking about, watch O Brother, Where Art Thou? again (it would be again, right? Right!?). It’s such a pure use of all the plots, characters, motifs, and images. Really, a great joy.

            Thank you.

            Can you see the ‘grammar’ in your own expertise? I’m trying to think of other skills I have, but in none of them I’m quite good enough to really come up with excellent examples. In cooking, it’s about the flavor (of course), but also smell, texture, and even color. But I can’t quite get at the elements, merely down to the molecules of it. If you have a skill whose grammar you’d like to share (or if you’d like to share about anything else), please click

Leave a comment

            Or if you don’t want to post publicly, you can

Email Me

            If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click

Here

            If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor

Subscribe now

            And you’d be doing me a favor if you would, on any social media available to you,

Share

           Until next we meet, I remain your fellow,

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

            Okay — no more. Let’s just jump in.

            Welcome to my garden! (Constantly overgrowing with weeds.)

With Our Fathers

            About a month ago now, I wrote about how our three-year-old was starting reading lessons. The reading lessons have stopped. She was having problem moving from seeing R-A-T and being able to say r[pause]a[pause]t to saying without pause rrrrraaaaat. As that’s what the lesson called for, and as I could see how she found it impossible to advance without that skill, I stopped the lessons. They were just making her cry, and without even the eventual compensatory joy of bursting through her blocks and allowing me to celebrate her. (Not that I didn’t celebrate her hard work, but you know as well as I that that is not the same.) In the end, she just would cry and cry and never get it.

            It was no fun, and a recipe for hatred of reading besides. So I stopped.

            Now, no one is worried that a three-year-old hasn’t learnt to read. No one is worried she isn’t learning to read even if she’s closing in on four. I don’t know when the exact proper time is when we must sit down and force the issue (or seek professional help, an ever more dicey position in this our contemporary culture), but it’s certainly on the far side of four. It’s on the far side of six. Probably on the far side of seven, and maybe even on the far side of eight.

            Our three-year-old does not need to learn to read, but she does want to learn to read. So the failure with this lesson brings to mind some questions.

            Is the curriculum at fault? It is possible (possible even if or maybe even because their tagline is “100 million children taught”) that this curriculum is just not very helpful. It’s needlessly confusing, either to her or to me. It confuses issues or rushes issues or jumps over questions about how to read which should be more fully explained and need an explanation before she can progress. Perhaps that’s it.

            But I don’t think so. I really enjoy this method. Indeed, with the “tasks” my daughter understands — she enjoys the lessons. There is this ‘repeat fast and slow’ task, for example, where I say rrrrrrrraaaaaaat (that’s the slow bit), and she then repeats that slow bit before going (fast) “RAT!” It’s great fun, or at least she seems to think it is. Indeed, the only part of the lessons she does not seem to like is when I ask her to do the actual reading.

            Is her resistance to instruction at fault? My wife and I were talking about this the other night. Our three-year-old does not like to struggle. Now, in fairness, most people don’t, and (as far as I can tell) all of those who do like to struggle only like it after teaching themselves to struggle through dislike. But our daughter hates it something unusual; she won’t even struggle to reach a goal she wants. Our younger daughter, for example, may get angry quickly as our elder does not, and so she may throw the toy she can’t figure out across the room in a snit fit, but she will then walk over to it again and sit down, plunking away endlessly until she figures it out. Our elder will try something for never much more than half a minute before she does something far worse than throw it across the room; she’ll walk away.

            Now both girls are resistant to instruction. With the younger, when we try to help out she screams “no” and continues to try and figure it out on her own. But with the elder, she just won’t listen to us. By that I mean, she will stay where we are, she will even not speak or sing or play while we’re speaking, but she simply seems to be in her own world. And then, when we’re done speaking to her, she will go on with what she was doing, which, in this case, is usually walking away from a problem she does not know how to solve.

            Not only is this behavior a bit more than a bit infuriating, it boggles the mind. She is normally an exceptionally well-behaved little girl. She is helpful, indeed eager to be helpful, and she is mindful of what we say. But when there’s something to ‘learn’, she won’t have it.

            Is she just not old enough? I wonder if she’s too young to understand the concepts, or, perhaps more accurately, if we explain them in ways too complicated for her to comprehend. I try to think of when she is obliging and when she is resistant, and it seems to me that she’s obliging when she has a discreet task she understands how to do and is resistant when she has a more involved task. This means we should be breaking up her longer tasks into shorter sequences. Which is exactly what her lesson book seems designed to facilitate!

            And this holds true even for tasks she knows how to do. For example, she knows how to pick up and she sometimes does with the request “Please pick up now.” But she also seems to want the moment-to-moment instruction we give her sister. When we’re getting the girls to pick up the toyroom before bed, the elder consistently asks us to give her a discreet task, like ‘Pick up Kitty and put him in the box. Okay, now take the wagon back to the hearth.’ &c. As I say, this is how we treat our younger daughter; our elder has been beyond it for a year at least.

            We cannot dismiss the idea that the complexity of tasks may be overwhelming. We all know the feeling of staring at a tasks and asking ourselves ‘Where do I even start?’ The difference is that most of us have enough experience (or training?) to discover a way (if not exactly the best way) to start. My wife and I want to give our elder that experience, letting her try things on her own. It’s why we ask her to draw a house or a person, without explaining exactly how one might do that. Yet even though she’s both seen and even drawn houses and people before, she just... doesn’t. She’ll ask us to do it for her, but, if we refuse, she doesn’t even want to try. She just stands up and walks away to go play a safe, tidy game which she knows well.

            It’s very perplexing. I feel like there must be something fairly obvious we’re missing, but I can’t figure out what it is.

            Despite how aggressively in favor of homeschooling I am, this is one of those moments when there is value in the institutional memory of a school. If I were a teacher in a school, I could walk up to an older teacher and say, ‘Have you ever seen this?’ And, since that older teacher would have taught hundreds if not maybe thousands of children, she probably would have seen “this”.

            And possibly it is just an age thing pure and simple. I keep balming my soul with memories. I remember how she went (seemingly overnight) from struggling to put on her coat on even when I helped her to putting on her coat perfectly without help. I remember how she went (seemingly overnight) from asking “Is this [shoe on] the right feet?” and being more often than not wrong to still asking but being (almost) always right. That happened about three weeks ago.

            I remember her going from staring at more complicated puzzles in complete bewilderment to organizing her pieces and checking the color and shapes on each piece against the picture of the completed puzzle on the box. Now, may she still regularly going for a middle-piece when she needs an edge-piece, but (still!) the attention is there where it wasn’t before. And nothing we did contributed to the change (at least, as far as I can tell).

            This change was only this past week, and, Saturday, she put together a puzzle with thirty pieces. She had us there talking her through it, but she never got an answer from us, she never got so frustrated she up and walked away, and she did completed it in the end. Th next day, doing the puzzle again, she started exactly as we had taught her, without having us remind her. All of these were seemingly overnight changes. Something in her brain had clicked while she dreamt.

            So then I remember how I would put ‘A’ and ‘T’ blocks together and add ‘C’, tell her it’s “cat”, then add ‘R’, ‘M’, ‘F’, ‘S’ and go through all of them with her. She’d repeat after me happily. Then I’d ask her, ‘Which one was “mat”?’ and she’d just... walk away, ignore me, not want to have anything to do with the game anymore. Not want to even try.

            That’s the worst of it, for we are not in any way bothered if she fails. We just want her to try.

            We ourselves will keep trying and (I hope) eventually succeed with her. When we discover what worked (that’s assuming a lot… if we discover —), I shall dutiful report it to you all. Until then, if you have any ideas, please do email me or leave a comment below.

A Bench Under the Trees

“The Fairy Tale Wars” by Vigen Guroian

            In this magical essay, Professor Guroian launches a defense of fiarytales for their own sake. He starts with a critique of those in the “guild” of fairytale scholarship who fail to understand the stories, either by misconceiving their nature or by indulging in the “chronological snobbery” C.S. Lewis was so adept at exposing. Indeed, to the observations about fairytales from that luminous trio Dickens, Chesterton, and Lewis, Professor Guroian adds his own wisdom, which is not so negligible.

            The article is a joy to read. “Disney Studios is by no means the only offending party. A ruinous reduction and brash bowdlerization of the fairy tales appears in a seemingly endless stream of often lavishly illustrated adaptations. Recently, I borrowed from our local library a handsome volume titled Treasured Classics, edited and illustrated by the well-known illustrator Michael Hague. The pictures are lovely. The retellings of the dozen or so fairy tales and nursery stories are literate but so stripped down that the meaning of the originals has invariably been altered or lost.”

            We here in this garden wish to reclaim our lost Tradition. Few better places to start than with fairytales. And few better thinkers to start with than that luminous quartet: Dickens, Chesterton, Lewis, and Guroian.

The Amphitheater

            “Oak, and Ash, and Thorne” is a perfect example of traditional music which isn’t old music. First recorded by Peter Bellamy for his 1970 album Oak, Ash and Thorn, the music is modeled off folk songs while the lyrics comes from “A Tree Song”, a poem Kipling published in his 1906 collection Puck of Pook’s Hill.

            As I’ve written before, I love to sit and listen to a dozen variations of every song. If you are likewise inclined, here are three different musicians (well, one group and then two separate musicians) performing “Oak, Ash, and Thorn”. The first is The Longest Johns, who do a contemporary take on it. Very proficient, and indeed far more than proficient, but lacking the raw power; the instruments distract from the voice and it’s all very “mixed” (or whatever the proper sound engineering word is). The next is from Davin Coffin, which has some of the raw power but is slower and more meandering than the original. The third is from Peter Bellamy himself (and two accompanists). This is both raw and earthy, and (as you all can no doubt tell) my personal favorite.

            The version of the Bellamy I offer is a remixed one, so it lacks some of the original clicks and bumps I associate with records. I find it more haunting for its cleanliness. It also has lyrics on the page, if you feel you must just start singing this song, as I always do. Indeed, the reason I’m sharing this song with all of you is because of all the songs I sing regularly (we have about a score in the rotation), this is currently our elder daughter’s favorite. Everyday she wants to hear “All the trees”. I feel the same, and I hope you will too.

The Loud Music Played Way Too Late Into the Night

            I have over the last several letters been advertising my article on TikTok. If you have somehow managed to escape it, it’s called “Why TikTok Should Be Banned or Sold” and I bet you will never guess what it argues.

            But I realize that many of you were not around when I first advertised my short stories. I have three published and the links to them can be found on my website. But as I recently finished a class on fairytales, and as I included in this letter an article on fairytales, I figured I’d advertise my fairytale. Called “Magicians for Good & Ill”, it’s a straight up, traditional, literary fairytale. I’d like to thank The Fiarytale Magazine for publishing it, and I’d like to hear what you all think. Here’s the beginning:

             “Long ago there lived an old king who when young had married a woman he deeply loved. She bore him one daughter and then she died. All the king’s advisers told him to take another wife, one who might bear him a son. All told him this but one tall and gaunt adviser, known as a skilled magician, who said that it was an ill-omen to marry with a heart sore sick with grief. And so the king refused every lady of the realm.
            Now in time the princess grew, and all the gentlemen of the kingdom wanted her. Not only was she as beautiful and witty as her mother, not only did she have the strength and tenderheartedness of her father, but any man who wed the princess would inherit the throne upon her father’s death.
            And yet still many advisers cautioned him to take a new wife. And yet still the magician said that it was an ill omen to marry with a heart sore sick with grief. The king still missed his wife dearly, and so he did not marry.
            Now this magician had a son not much older than the king’s daughter, and he so contrived it that his son married the king’s daughter..."

Reviso et Peroratio

            Emily Oster, in her book Cribsheet, talks about changes in the timing of potty training through the years. Specifically she notes that as disposable diapers became more available, parents moved back (and then moved back again) the start of potty training. Nothing gets a parent forcing potty training on a child like having to clean cloth diapers! Except pre-school, for now that we have two (three, really, but one is still ‘on the inside’), I would argue with moral certainty that parents would push potty training back further still if they didn’t have to contend with the near universal rule in pre-schools for potty trained children.

            Potty training illustrates what seems to be a general rule about raising children. One can start earlier and fight or one can start later and have a smooth road. In Charlotte Mason’s Home Education, she quotes a Mrs. Wesley as an authority: “None of mine [Mrs. Wesley’s children] was taught to read till five years old, except Kezzy, in whose case I was overruled: and she was more years in learning than any of the rest had been months.” It’s a joke among parents that our children wake up having mastered a skill they couldn’t complete going to bed.

            I think this insight is what’s behind the child-led educational philosophies, most notably (or at least most obviously) the Unschooling Movement. Yet I think in this we deal with an ideology, that is an idea which people fixate upon as the truth but which is in truth the myopic half-view of a full-grown philosophy. Our eldest happily picks up now (even if we sometimes have to instruct her), and our younger will happily throw out anything you give her now, but in both cases we had to power through their refusal to do the task. Several weeks ago, our younger daughter literally threw some cheese on the ground, and I had to sit there with her for half an hour or forty minutes while she cried until she gave up and threw the cheese away. (After which, we celebrated her with clapping, fanfare, and hugs.) Our girls also now expect to clear the table, but only after a week of us demanding they do so.

            Perhaps the rule (if there is a “rule” at all) would be something like this, ‘Expect all the correct behavior a child can manage, none she can’t.’ Of course, as with many rules, this merely shifts the question to the next plane: ‘At what age can she manage which behaviors?’ And while I’m not even going to try to attempt to parse that here, getting our attention from one plane to the next is not wasted effort. Rules may and should be tossed out a top-story window when they prove unhelpful, but life would be paralysis (and parenting especially) without journals full of such rules. Journals of such rules, kept in pencil.

I was absolutely serious. We do not know how to get our girl to work hard at things. If you have any ideas, please click

Leave a comment

            Or, if you don’t want to post publicly, you can

Email Me

            If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click HERE.

            If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor

Subscribe now

            And you’d be doing me a favor if you would, on any social media available to you,

Share

           Until next we meet, I remain your fellow,

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

Dear Scriptor,

            I read an argument the other day which said that most people only have four really good personal essays in them, and that pretty soon any blog degrades to a public diary. While in no world does it seem reasonable to argue that writers are like printers and must be careful with how they dole out their essays lest they run out of ink, I too have talked often about how these letters can (and I feel too often do) degrade into diary entries (see here, here, and here for some examples).

            Without a firm goal for each ‘essay’, the problem is perhaps insurmountable. I modeled these letters after past letters I wrote, while traveling abroad, back home to family. They were very well received and I thought maybe that style could recommend me to the wider world. But writing on a specific topic is comprehensible, writing a letter to a specific person (or a small group of well-loved family) is comprehensible, but writing a letter to a broad group of people some of whom I know well, some I know, and some I only know by name or email address — it all turns back into diary entries.

            And I’ve read collections of diary entries which were fascinating. But those are a rare breed (even if they have more than four), and probably carefully selected besides. So let’s mix this up.

Hortus Proprius

            We’re going to take a break this week from the Figures. Indeed, as I get closer to finishing the book, I’m going to share fewer and fewer chapters before publication. Sorry about that, but I am starting to worry publishers will be uninterested if I have everything (not that I posted everything) up online already.

            So let us talk about learning to write. The hubris of writing about learning to write before I’ve published my first book does not escape me, but I am going to try and escape it by saying that these are facts I’ve learnt while trying to learn to write. As I’ve now published several articles and short stories (and written hundreds more, including these letters), I think I’ve learnt some things. At the same time, especially for those readers who are far more experienced in publishing than I am, please do correct me if I err.  

            There’s one of those self-help books that ought to have been a pamphlet but which is no less fascinating for that; it’s called Talent is Overrated. While his argument unsurprisingly boils down to his title, he takes us beyond a mere recapitulation of my favorite Anthony Trollop quotation: “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”

            He argues that hard work is the key, but not mere hard work. Long hours practicing will not get one there. He uses the example (and forgive me, I’m doing this from memory so details will be wrong) of musicians in conservatory. There are those who practice six hours a day, and they are good musicians but will never be great. There are those who practice twelve hours a day, going through their pieces again, and again, and again. Doing scales they’ve always done, and doing those scales over again, and again, and again. Those hard workers will be great but not celebrities. The celebrities, the breakouts, they often practice only ten hours a day, less time than the more mediocre group.

            But they practice differently. Instead of going over the same old pieces, they identify where they flub the score and brutally train those parts until they’re perfect. Instead of going over the same old scales, they make the scales harder or mix them up or do them without using normal, comfortable, familiar, fingering. You may know all of this, and, even if you don’t recognize my description, you might recognize this practice’s name. It’s called “deliberate practice”.

            Deliberate practice is quite well known and well… (wait for it) practiced in sports, in music, and in chess. In sports, it looks like drills and heavy training for light work. In music it looks like what I’ve described above. And in chess it looks like the replaying of chess matches and the solving of ever more complicated chess puzzles. In the military, it’s drilling in conditions more demanding than the force is expected to meet in person; I heard a Marine and later a Navy Seal both describe being on patrol as almost a vacation, given how hard the training had been. Deliberate practice creates (or, let’s be fair, helps refine) geniuses. Or at the least it creates those who have in this, our modern world, taken their place.

            But what does it look like in writing? I’ve seen almost no real investigation of this idea. Certainly it hasn’t been systematized as it has been in sports, music, and chess. Now likely that’s in part because writers tend not to believe their work can be “systematized”. We are still beholden to the Romantic Era Cult of the Artist. (I once heard it described by example as Kanye West complaining he wasn’t nominated for Album of the Year in a year he didn’t release an album.) But obviously the music examples give lie to this argument. If a man can deliberately practice his piano playing, he can deliberately practice his writing.

            Although, the argument might still run; playing a piece is not the same as composing it. The creation of a work, it may be argued, is a separate realm from the mere mechanical playing of it. When we conceive of writing as some esoteric magic that happens, this may seem persuasive. But this too is to make us beholden to the Cult of the Artist. I’m not saying there’s no magic that happens, no Muse who inspires, I’m just with Henri Matisse who said, “Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.” Even in writing, we have our forms and our shapes, our short stories, our essays, our plays, novels, sonnets, ballets, epics, comedies, and tragedies. They overlap, surely, and there is play in them, but there is play in the playing of Beethoven’s Fifth as well. Our forms are no less formational for their fun.

            Indeed, this is why I focus so much attention on the Figures of Speech. They are in microcosm what the forms of writing are in macrocosm. They are models from which we can embellish moments. They help save us from clichés, those bits of “heard language” which are the most obvious mark of bad writing and which are so numerous in some work that one feels as if he needs just turn on a light to see half the book’s phrases scurry right out of sight. Those who read Suspense and Romance novels especially come up against these critters, and their lot isn’t half (isn’t a tenth) so dismal as those poor fools — God help them — who must read corporate email.

            While there have been some attempts by past writers to build up or pass on writing exercises, most notably Ursula K. Le Guin in Steering the Craft, I’d argue writers haven’t formalized (that sounds so much better than “systematized”, and indeed may be different) our deliberate practice because the very act of writing naturally creates the conditions for deliberate practice. Salman Rushdie or Martin Amis once explained (and no, you will neither get an exact quotation nor a video, for if citing two possible sources didn’t give it away, I can’t find the damn quotation), the act of writing a book is the act of learning to write that book, and, when a writer starts another book, he has to learn to write this new one from scratch.

            Well, not exactly from scratch. What I (and Mr. Rushdie or Amis or some yet third person) mean is that each bit of writing is an attempt to compress into images and language a wholly new part or aspect of the world. This new attempt relies on what a writer has learnt from solving past needs, just as a man can learn from comforting one friend how to comfort another, but the men and the situations are different and will make different demands. So too with written work. Each new essay or story or poem is a new relationship. It will rely on many of the skills built over past work, but will always, always demand something new. And so the same effect musicians try to achieve by going over difficult passages in new ways, the effect chessmen try to stimulate when working through chess puzzles, writers meet in the very nature of their work.

            So it stands to reason that the best practice I have found in writing has been the writing itself. I may have spoken about this before, but I once sat down every weekday for a two- or three-month period, and each day I wrote a new short story. It didn’t have to be good, certainly needn’t be great, and it didn’t even have to be long — but it had to be done, complete. With this method, I improved my storytelling ability by orders of magnitude. At the very least, I went from struggling to put two-hundred words together in a morning to being able to write about one-thousand words an hour. I recommend the practice to anyone who wants to write stories.

            The selfish case for these letters is that they do for my essay-writing what that practice did for short stories. May they also be of interest to you, dear readers.

Flowerbeds

            Edward Henry Potthast was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on June 10, 1857. After studying at the McMicken School in Cincinnati, he studied in Paris, then Munich, back in Cincinnati, and then Paris again. He spent most of his life in New York City, where he remained until his death. He died in 1927, a well-known painter of America’s Impressionist Age. Here are some of my favorites from among his paintings, all from about 1910; I can’t find specific dates for any.

Girls Playing in the Surf

Along the Mystic River

Landscape of the Shore (or, The Picnic)

The Shed

            You can probably tell I’m trying something different this week. For a variety of reasons, I have not been altogether happy with these letters. So over the next several months I’m going to shift things up a bit. You see I’m shifting the format first. Each letter shall be shorter but the letters themselves shall be more frequent. So expect a letter next week.

            Or, that is, almost next week. Because I’m also going to shift when I send the letters. Starting not next week but the week after, they shall arrive on Monday morning instead of Friday afternoon. Haven’t a clue if that’s the best way of it, but we’ll see.

            Other changes will come. As I said back up in Hortus Proprius (the only main section, it turns out, of this letter), I will be sending fewer Figures. There are about twenty Figures in the past letters if you want to go read about them, and I intend my final book to have at least fifty and probably closer to sixty. But for now, you’ll have to content yourself with (like today) thoughts about writing. For those who enjoy my talk about the family, fear not. They too will come.

            I hope you enjoy the changes, and please do tell me below.

Reviso et Peroratio

            You can tell my friend and I were delightful children (and young – and not so young – adults) when I tell you that he and I used to laugh at people who warned us against thinking we were always right. We said, ‘Of course we think we’re right. If we didn’t think we were right, we wouldn’t think what we think.’ And there is of course some truth there. Many who refuse to argue, or those who cannot argue, or those whose arguments are weak end up slandering argument itself as a vice. But there is a difference between ‘you always think you are right’ and ‘you think you are always right’, and clearly what most people meant was the latter, or, said another way, ‘you hold your ideas too firmly’.

            I still can. If you’ve been with me long enough, you’ve seen it in these letters.

            In these letters, I try to capture a way of picking through life, through literature, art, and culture, which stands not in total but in occasionally radical opposition to contemporary life as most people live it. The biggest example perhaps is how both my wife and I insist on working from home, as well as not only the mere fact that we plan to homeschool our children but how we plan to homeschool them.

            Our world abounds in riches which are free or cheap and easy to pass on and which we simply do not pass on. This astounds me. There is a way to read and teach which almost no one uses but seems in every way superior to what almost everyone does. I want to scream when I think too much about it. And yet (and yet!) if no one does it, then we could indeed be a small remnant rich in truth, or (and this is just as important to remember) we could be a cult.

            Just because our world flows over with color while the outside feels drab and grey does not tell us all. Hold those ideas — hold them dear even, bu — loosely. I tell this more to me than to any of you. And so we end where we began: at this being a diary.

            Thank you

            If you write, what tricks do you use to help you? If you’re not a writer, is there anything outside of interest that’s stopping you? If you’d like to tell me (that or anything else), please click

Leave a comment

            Or if you don’t want to post publicly, you can

Email Me

            If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click HERE.

            If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor

Subscribe now

            And you’d be doing me a favor if you would, on any social media available to you,

Share

           Until next we meet, I remain your fellow,

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

Dear Scriptor,

            I can find myself pretty bummed out by the world. I almost wrote ‘one can…’, but I shouldn’t talk for others. To me, it feels as if the world is collapsing around our ears on the regular. Whether that’s just because too many of us are too ‘plugged in’ or because all of us are coming to a crisis point – I’m unsure. But it’s hard not to feel as if it’s all too much for us.

            Well – come to think about it — “it all” is too much for us! I can’t zip over to Ukraine and kick the Russians out. I can’t zip over to Israel and rescue the hostages. I can’t zip into Sudan and force the civil warring sides to compromise, seek peace through democracy. And that’s just to speak of the armed conflicts, and only a few conflicts at that. What are am I to do about Fentanyl deaths? I haven’t the power. More pressing but less remarked upon, I haven’t the wisdom. I can’t even help get either of our two political parties to choose for president someone other than an 80-something with memory problems and legal trouble. Two-thirds of Americans agree with me that we should have someone, almost-anyone else. But the parties just sit there saying ‘no’.

            I said last time that I don’t like to complain. Maybe this introduction makes me a liar (revealed vs. stated preferences, &c). Maybe it just shows me a hypocrite (hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue). But I think neither, because I wasn’t complaining so much as winding up a prelude for this:

            When I do get bummed out, when I feel powerless to act on the world stage, I remind myself that I am powerless, that we always are mostly powerless, and that we should not feel failures for not stopping world events unless we are invested with the force, power, authority, and responsibility of a Winston Churchill. Joe Biden (God save him) must think of these things. We must, of course, make sure the men leading us are energetic and faithful men (we have systematically failed at that), but there’s little else we can do but look to what is right before us.

            Our work is a work of generations. Our fight is not only a fight we must engage in but one we must equip our children to wage. And that means we must focus on those children, not seeing them as weapons (not seeing ourselves as weapons!) in any real or imagined culture war (and there are both many real and many more imagined culture wars). We must see our children as persons, image-bearers as it were. And we must dedicate ourselves to their education and upbringing. Heal the wounded, educate the ignorant, fill the silence with words of beauty.

With Our Fathers

            Our three-year-old has started reading lessons, and I want to begin by saying I do not recommend this. While I don’t really have enough experience (either direct or observational) to have too firm an opinion, it seems unnecessary to me to start a child on reading until about six and anything but basic number sense until about eight.

            But this does require a good deal of willingness to read aloud. Children love stories, and I think our three-year-old would let us read to her from when she awoke in the morning to when she slept at night with no break but so we could make mac-n’-cheese. But even that would not be enough: she wants to read to herself and she wants to read to her little sister and she wants to read to little baby brother when he comes.

            So we’re doing reading lessons every weekday morning. Each lesson is supposed to last about twenty minutes, broken up into about ten ‘tasks’ (sections). So far, their time estimation seems accurate enough. We are three weeks in and on lesson 12. We’ve had other obligations two days and broken up two lessons over two-days each. As there is no reason to push her on anything, I try to finish the lesson as soon as she voices annoyance with it.

            One must be cautious here. As much as I feel no need to force her to read, I feel a very great need not to train her to laziness. One cannot just quit as soon as it gets hard. If I allow that now, it’ll take her decades to kick the habit. (I should know; that’s how long it took me.) I do not know where the proper line sits between a relaxed atmosphere and an insistence on struggling through, but I try to balance both. How I’ve done that so far is by forcing her to complete her task but not pushing her much beyond that. So if her complaint came at the eighth of ten tasks, I just finish the lesson. If her complaint came in the fourth of ten tasks, I force her to finish the fourth and then do the fifth (if easier) and then return to review the first task (always easy), and then I let her off the hook to go play.

            So far, so good. But I won’t really know until we finish the lessons and she’s a reader. Even then, I won’t really know if it worked until I’ve taught her siblings in the same way and until I see if they’re all still readers after graduation. Even then, I probably won’t ever know. Humans are not as easy as science experiments. It’s not one cause, one effect.

            For those interested, the curriculum I’m using is Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Siegfried Engelmann, which is a phonics-type program. This is not a recommendation for it, but I’d want to know if I were you. Also, you may wonder why this whole section (on the family, yes, but mostly on education) is not in The Schoolroom. That’s easy – The Schoolroom is occupied with thoughts on our humanities education.

The Schoolroom

            I got into a back and forth with a writer I both like and have promoted here, Tanner Greer of Scholar’s Stage. We argued about the nature of the sciences and the humanities, specifically about whether the sciences or the humanities are harder to learn (though that flattens the argument somewhat). I have chosen to adapt what I said to him into a post for you all, because I think it gets at something interesting. Here goes:

            While I would not want to say science is ‘easier’ than the humanities, it is faster to acquire. The knowledge-base of science is smaller, it’s parts more independent of each other. In the sciences, one can move as fast as he can understand the concepts. In the humanities, however well one understands the concepts, he must read and then re-read and then read something else and then go back and read the first thing again. It isn’t so much “facts” as situations and connections.

            For support, I argued that scientific masterworks come younger than humanistic masterworks. So we can look at the great mathematicians and scientists as against the great poets, playwrights, and novelists, and we see this definite age gap. The scientists et al. are young; the novelists et al. aren't. Einstein discovered relativity at about 26. Isaac Newton discovered optics, gravitation, and calculus between 23 and 25. Meanwhile Shakespeare wrote his seminal plays between 1595 and 1601, that is from when he was between 30 and 36, meanwhile Dickens started his stride with David Copperfield in 1859, when he was 47. We can do this with others, from Stephen Hawking (mid-30s) and Richard Dawkins (35) to Herodotus (about 60) dying with his Histories unfinished and Churchill (at 63) starting his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (which he didn't finish until he was 84... but some stuff happened between 1937 and 1958).

            There was a study that made me think of this. It purported to track the great scientists, writers, economists, historians, mathematicians, poets, &c and traces their ages of masterwork production. This study I know Mr. Greer has seen, because he wrote about it interestingly (he always writes interestingly). In responding to the previous paragraph, he brought up Keats (who died a great poet in his 20s) and how this study suggested poets came to their fullness in their 20s, as mathematicians do.

            I think whoever made that study took 'modern poetry' to be all of poetry. The Beat Poets were in their 20s. Keats was in his 20s. And Byron produced great work in his 20s, but his best work was in his 30s. Tennyson published in his teens and twenties, but didn't get going until his late-30s, and he didn't finish his masterwork (Idyll of the Kings) until his late-60s. Auden got going around 30 but didn't publish The Age of Anxiety (for which he received the Pulitzer) until he was 38; he published The Shield of Achilles (for which he won the National Book Award) in his late-40s.

            Even Walt Whitman (whose poetry took genius but little art) was 36 when he wrote Leaves of Grass. Chaucer didn't start The Canterbury Tales until his late-40s and hadn’t finished them at his death (somewhere between 55 and 60). Jon Donne's most famous poems were written when he was 41 (including "Death, Be Not Proud"). I could go on and on – Marie Curie (30s) as against Charles Baudelaire (his masterwork unfinished at his death at 47).

            I think this is fairly convincing evidence of my hypothesis. The great works of literature are almost universally written late as compared to the great works of science. But a second part of my argument was also that, while this has been true for at least as long as experimental science has been around (though one does wonder when Galen wrote his breakthrough works, when Homer recorded his), something has changed over these past hundred years. That something is our education.

            Only homeschoolers (and usually not they) get that Old Education now, though that education was normal as recently as Churchill’s and Lewis’s time. Most of us get a pretty heavy drum-beat of scientific thinking injected into our schooling from kindergarten at the latest. Even most of the humanities education we get is merely disguised scientific thinking. This is why we find all these English dissertations that sound like sociology papers, History dissertations which read like economics papers. Some faithful have coined a word for that, a word we all know. It’s ‘scientism’, but I often wonder if none of us know quite how deep into the bone it’s gotten.

            In order to regain a true humanities education, it's at least five years but probably closer to a decade just to re-wire how our brains have been taught to think. We need Bible stories, myths, fables, fairytales, and legends — we need to see the images, find them in nature and feel them in our blood. And that doesn't even touch the languages we don't learn, the poetry we haven't memorized, the hymns which are unknown to us, &c. Of all the people on ‘my side of Twitter’, only Anthony Esolen, currently a Lecturer at Magdalen College, seems to feel fully the weight of this generational work.

            So, yes, the sciences require a robust set of knowledge and skill, and they are a boon and benefit for mankind. Their practitioners ought to be part of the stories we tell our children, the people we celebrate. But they are. They are almost the only people who are. And their thinking the only thinking taught. We barely even have the humanities anymore. And that’s because (or so it seems to me) not only do we train people in the humanities too late (I once heard ‘it takes twenty years to make a Latin scholar’), but we don’t actually train them at all.

Flowerbeds

            William Dyce was a Pre-Raphaelite. The exact nature and organization (loose) of the Pre-Raphaelite movement would require (and indeed has merited) several long dissertations. We’re not going into that here. In general, the Pre-Raphaelite movement was a group of artists, poets, and critics who considered themselves a reform movement. As the name suggests, they wanted to get back to the Pre-Raphaelite era; that is, they believed that Raphael and Michelangelo had introduced into art a classicism and elegance which became mechanistic in their epigones, the Mannerists. Most of them a generation younger than John Ruskin, they took many of their ideas from that great man and his writings. They all would go on to influence basically everyone, from Arthur Rackham to Charlotte Mason to C.S. Lewis.

            It was a heavily Romantic movement, wishing to emphasize artistic individuality over the rote learning of the schools (which meant something different then and harder than it does now to us). They were fascinated by medieval culture, especially what they viewed as the loss of British fairytales, myths, and legends. This same feeling of loss would haunt Tolkien two or perhaps even three generations later; it would haunt him right into creating The Lord of the Rings, which is largely an attempt to recreate the lost myths of England.

            Given their reaction against rote learning, it’s probably no surprise that the Pre-Raphaelites formed in 1848 and Dickens published his novel Hard Times (which is a screed against rote learning in novelistic form) in 1854. Indeed, the movement was larger than The Brotherhood after whom it was named, for that Brotherhood broke up only five years later. Still, in that time William Michael Rosetti (one of the at least three Rosettis in the group) had written up a list of their principles, which I share with you now:

            1.     to have genuine ideas to express;

            2.     to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;

            3.     to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote; and

            4.     most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

            As I said, William Dyce was a Pre-Raphaelite. Born in 1806, actually before Ruskin, he was one of the greybeards of the group. Born in Aberdeen Scotland, he studied not at Oxford or Cambridge but at Marischal College in Aberdeen, then afterwards at Royal Academy schools in Edinburgh and London. In 1825 and again for a longer period in 1827, Dyce worked and studied in Rome. There he met the German painter Friedrich Overbeck, a member of the German Nazarene school, which was doing in Germany (not that there was a Germany yet) what the Pre-Raphaelites would do in England a generation later.

            In 1837, Dyce returned to the United Kingdom to teach, first in Edinburgh and then eventually in King’s College London. He spent the rest of his life teaching, publishing, and lecturing in London or its environs. It was here that he founded a separate but related society, the Motett Society, which sought to restore long-neglected works of the English Church to regular liturgical use. For besides his artistic talents, he was an able organist.

            William Dyce died in Streatham, Surrey, on February 14, 1864, and is buried there at St. Leonard’s Church. While I find all of his paintings quite fine indeed, here is perhaps my favorite, one which I share with you at a particularly appropriate time. This past Sunday, for the First Sunday of Lent, we read about the Temptation of Christ. And here he is in The Wilderness. May none of us be.

“The Man of Sorrows” by William Dyce

Hortus Proprius

Epanalepsis, or resumptio, the slow return.

            To start how one wants to start, to write how one wants to write, and to end how one wants to end — that’s a phrase of epanalepsis after a phrase of epanalepsis. The same comfort English has with isocolon is the comfort English has with epanalepsis, but on steroids — for epanalepsis’s repetition is of same for the same. Simply, epanalepsis is the use of the first word or phrase of a phrase or sentence as the last word or phrase of that phrase or sentence.

            “Common sense is not so common.” (Voltaire)

            “Men of few words are the best men.” (Henry V, 3.2.40)

            “Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius.” (Julius Caesar, 1.3.90)

            “The King is dead; long live the King.”

            “Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice.” (Phil. 4:4)

            “Man’s inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn!” (“Man Was Made to Mourn”, Robert Burns)

            These are all epanalepsis, and we see the effect immediately. It’s a loud drawing-attention to itself, as with so many of the ‘fancier’ Figures. Notice the wit, we do, and we enjoy it; but subtlety must be without notice. Persuasion is less effective when we notice the persuasion. For my money, the first triune quoted (and all I’ve invented here) are not as effective as the second triune quoted. But can we see the difference?

            I’m indebted to Mr. Forsyth for the observation. Epanelepsis, like everything, works best when its form matches its function — and its form is circular. Epanalepsis is most effective, then, when used for circular thoughts or continuous cycles. Thus a King dies and creates a king; we rejoice in the Lord, for He gives us cause to rejoice; and man is always inhumane to man. Or —

            “Blood hath brought blood, and blows have answer’d blows;
            Strength match’d with strength, and power confronted power.”
            (King John, 2.1.329)

            “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” (Henry V, 3.1.1)

            “In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. " (Paul Harvey)

            “It takes time to ruin a world, but time is all it takes. (Fontenelle)

            There is in fact a danger of epanalepsis in that it makes one’s writing sound a bit too precious, over-artful. You’ve seen that yourself in my prose today, which has a woodenness to it which (I hope) seldom otherwise appears. Shakespeare uses this effect to great effect in Julius Caesar; Brutus starts his speech with a churn of clogging epanalepsis:

            “Romans, countrymen, and lovers, hear me for my
             cause, and be silent that you may hear. Believe me
             for mine honor, and have respect to mine honor
             that you may believe.”
            (3.1.14)

            Indeed, after using it in many of his early plays, Shakespeare seems to drop it entirely after Julius Caesar, until he picks it up for a glorious reprise in King Lear: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!” (3.2.1). What a start to a scene!

            In sum, epanalepsis is a figure where one repeats the first word or phrase of a phrase or sentence as the last word or phrase of a phrase or sentence. Being an obvious Figure, it can appear wooden and clunky, which means a deft writers may indeed use it to show his character is wooden and clunky. But because of its obvious and circular form, it is highly effective when showing circularity or continuity.

            Thank you.

A Bench Under the Trees

“Poetry is a Form of Life” by Mark Signorelli

            There may be one reason and one reason only we have lost poetry as a major art form: we degrade what Keats called “half-knowledge”. If I could talk to Keats (he’d probably find me too boring to stay in conversation with), I’d remind him not to degrade the knowledge so. It’s not ‘half-’, merely without mechanistic articulation. But it is a sickness of our age to believe that all knowledge, if it is to be real knowledge, must be lowered to the level of mechanistic articulation.

            Or, as Mr. Signorelli writes, “[Poetic knowledge] is realized in the idiom that reverberates in the heart, in the word that unites two emotions as one, and not in the reduction of that communion to a singular assertion. Strange as it may sound, the fact that one is moved by the lines of a poem is sufficient attestation to their truthfulness. The fanaticism for systematizing that is such an epidemic of our own age; the mania for investing abstract representations of experience with the significance of the experience itself; is simply anathema to the person of poetic instincts. The lover of poetry and the ideologue can never be one person; poetry is, in fact, the irreconcilable enemy of ideology.”

            This article is a long and beautiful discourse on how poetry works to form knowledge in the mind, yes, but also in the heart, body, and soul. I highly recommend it.

“The Spiritual Testament of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI”, published by Vatican News

            We are called not simply to ‘have faith’ but to ‘stand firm in faith and hope’. This can be a problem if you are, as I have been in this letter and elsewhere recently, gloomy. The welter of the world can seem to be at any moment about to throw us over. Yet I take comfort when I look to History. Perhaps that’s History’s greatest comfort; it can show us that all has come before and all will happen again. If you’re starting to get Ecclesiastes vibes, so have I been.

            In reading from the Catholic Tradition, I keep coming across Pope Benedict XVI. A scholar of prodigious memory, he had a reputation for silence during discussion followed by a paradigmatic ability to sum and tie up the two hour long talk in a couple paragraphs. Being a Pope, and a long-lived Pope, he was also (this may surprise you) an old man. An old, thoughtful man can have some insights for the more hot-blooded youths of us. And though I am middle aged (or at least on its threshold), I am in very many ways still the hot-blooded youth. Or, I guess, in this letter, the melancholic youth. If you are feeling woeful as I have been, this is the testament to you — even if you are not Catholic.

“I have witnessed from times long past the changes in natural science and have seen how apparent certainties against the faith vanished, proving themselves not to be science but philosophical interpretations only apparently belonging to science - just as, moreover, it is in dialogue with the natural sciences that faith has learned to understand the limits of the scope of its affirmations and thus its own specificity. For 60 years now, I have accompanied the path of theology, especially biblical studies, and have seen seemingly unshakeable theses collapse with the changing generations, which turned out to be mere hypotheses: the liberal generation (Harnack, Jülicher, etc.), the existentialist generation (Bultmann, etc.), the Marxist generation. I have seen, and see, how, out of the tangle of hypotheses, the reasonableness of faith has emerged and is emerging anew.”

The Amphitheater

On Shakespeare
By John Milton
1630

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid  
Under a star-y pointing pyramid?
Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a live-long monument.
For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art,  
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart  
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,  
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,  
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;
And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

The Loud Music Played Way Too Late Into the Night

            I’ve several times here advertised my blog post at The Vital Center, “Why TikTok Should Be Banned or Sold”. If you have read it, thank you. If you haven’t read it, no worries. They requested (and have now published) a revised and expanded version for their Winter Magazine. You may read it here.

Reviso Introductio et Peroratio

            I ended the introduction with “fill the silence with words of beauty”; the title of this letter is “The Humanities Die in Silence”, which is (I hope) an obvious take on the Washington Post’s obnoxious slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. I mean by my little joke that we must pass on the best of our History to the future. Our lips must overflow with poetry, must get into our children’s ears and in their souls like a catchy pop tune. All true.

            But in some sense it’s also the opposite of true, because there is no silence anymore. My wife and my mother will occasionally comment about how I always have music on. It’s not exactly true, but I certainly have music on more than they ever do. The comment is often, ‘Why don’t you just live in silence’. My response is, ‘Because it’s not silent. If I don’t have music on, I don’t hear silence but the whirl of the fridge, or the gurgle of the pipes, or the whine of our electronics, or the wuther of the HVAC.’

            Of course, the same is true in the culture. By withholding beautiful stories, one doesn’t fail to fill a child, one makes sure the child is filled with garbage. Saturday Morning Cartoons were my childhood’s version of garbage. I fear the garbage now may be a whole lot worse.

            One of my favorite poems (I may have written about it) is Longfellow’s “The Psalm of Life”. It ends:

Let us, then, be up and doing,
   With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
   Learn to labor and to wait.

            Since I married and more since we had children , I have gotten the labor thing down. (I’ve talked about this before.) I think I (as a culture we) really need to learn how to wait.

            Thank you.

            What is making you excited right now? If you’d like to tell me (that or anything else), please click

Leave a comment

            Or if you don’t want to post publicly, you can

Email Me

            If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click HERE.

            If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor

Subscribe now

            And you’d be doing me a favor if you would, on any social media available to you,

Share

           Until next we meet, I remain your fellow

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

            I feel as if the whole world has changed under my feet, and I am glad. I hope to share some of that news with you today and more over the next several months. Until then (and even though it feels like five months ago now) Happy New Year. Let’s start 2024!

With Our Fathers

            There is a quotation which I’ve never been able to source. Attributed as far and wide as to a baseball player, the Talmud, and a Cuban Revolutionary – as far as I know it’s just one of those perennial maxims. Anywhere, here it is: ‘There are three things a man must do in his life: plant a tree, have a son, write a book.’ (I’ve also found the quotation, reportedly by Hemingway, which adds ‘fight a bull’ — because of course.) I first heard the quotation from Christopher Hitchens, and felt frission that very moment. I’ve stared at this quotation during many a sleepless night the decade before I was married, and I dreamed and day-dreamed of it. Whenever I’ve thought (or been asked) about ‘what I want in life’, this is the quotation which has come to mind.

            I do not want to give the impression I think there’s a problem with being (as the West Wing put it) “Abu el Banat”, a father of daughters. Or indeed with being the father of one daughter. Or indeed without being a father at all, at least in the physical, genetic sense. I am not trying to make a point of about ‘how nature works’ or ‘how society ought to work’.

            Priests are Fathers but not fathers, and Isaac Newton (to pick one example almost at random) was the Father of Modern Physics but otherwise childless. Their lives are (were) still filled with meaning and give great comfort and beauty to our lives, and their childlessness is no impediment to that. Indeed, it might be necessary precondition to that comfort and beauty. Most of all, as those of you who read me regularly know, my wife and I have two daughters, and the last thing in the world I would want anyone to suspect is that I have somehow been disappointed with them! They are the light of my life, and if my wife and I had never had another children, I would still count myself blessed beyond measure.

            Nonetheless, in part because of my family history and in part because of my temperament, I’ve always wanted a boy and I’ve always been drawn to that quotation. And while I have been working on my book of Figures of Speech, I have kept this quotation in mind. I’m checking boxes over here. For planting the tree is easy; I’ve indeed planted many trees in my life. From where I sit right now in my study typing this letter, I can look out the window and see the Christmas Tree my wife and I bought our first Christmas living here and afterwards planted. A tree is easy; we’ve planted four in the back yard alone.

            The book has been a mite harder. I first started these letters, in fact, to encourage me to write this book of Figures consistently, which I find ironic given that I first set out to write them back in October of (my first letter arrived November of) 2022 when my wife’s and my younger daughter was all of four months old and refusing to sleep more than an hour at a time (which she did until she was eleven months old, the doll). I don’t know how I managed to be so generative, but I did manage steady progress in the book. I thought I’d finish it this year, but I won’t (working on the Figures is one thing I did not do in January). Still, I’m getting closer and I will finish it. I’d thought for some time now, whenever I do finish that book, I’ll at least have the tree and the book down even if my wife and I ended up having six girls.

            But nature intervened. And so I would like to now introduce you to our little boy, about seventeen weeks along. Turns out, I will follow that quotation perfectly – first a tree, then a son, and then a book. Funny how the world works.

Flowerbeds

            Augustus Osborne Lamplough (1877 to 1930) was an English painter trained at the Chester School of Art. He then lectured at the Leeds School of Art and traveled in Venice and through North Africa. He’s now remembered for his “Orientalist” paintings, and he’s one of the few examples I’ve seen (not that that means much, I’m no expert) of dry climates captured in watercolor. He does this amazingly well, for I feel the cool of the late evening in a desert wafting from his paintings almost like a scent.

            To quote Wikipedia, “It was said that he painted everything as it would be seen within an hour of sunset.” I don’t know by whom and Wikipedia (that font of regularly unverifiable information which we take too often like unto the word of God) will not lead me whither I might find out. Indeed, I found no more information on what half-dozen sites I visited than what Wikipedia gave me and what I now have given you. That is, with the possible exception of OxfordReference, which promises more information but hides it behind a paywall. Maybe one day will I pay that fee and discover… probably nothing much more.

            It's remarkable to me in what obscurity most of humanity lived before the modern era, even verified masters of their craft. That cannot be said for us (more fool we). Anyway, here are his paintings; check out the light!

Hortus Proprius

Pleonasm (PLEE-o-naz-um), pleonasmus, superabundancia, plus necessarium, or the too full speech.

            When you are absolutely sure just what you are definitely going to say, when you know without a shadow of a single doubt how to phrase it, and when you can’t help giving three or maybe even five words where one would normally be sufficient, when you write or speak — in other words — just like I usually do, you may be writing or speaking or even perhaps signing in pleonasm. In short, pleonasm is when one uses more words than necessary for grammar or sense.

            In this way, Juliet’s nurse (when speaking of Tybalt’s death) says, “I saw the wound, I saw it with my eyes” (Romeo and Juliet, 3.2.52). How else exactly would the nurse think she could see anything? This is exactly how I responded when a highschool friend of mine said, “I’m going to fail — with an ‘F’”. “Well, you’re not about to fail with a ‘B’, are you?”

            Because pedants in our (and every) utilitarian age generally frown upon pleonasm, authors often use it for comic effect, as when Shakespeare in Marry Wives of Windsor has Falstaff talking to Pistol before the Welshman Sir Hugh Evans:

“Falstaff: Pistol!
Pistol: He [that is, Pistol] hears with ears.
Evans: The tevil and his tam! What phrase is this? ‘He hears with ear’? Why, it is affectations.”
(1.1.149).

            Or in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “A child of our grandmother Eve, a female; or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman. (1.1.263).

            Or Jonathan Swift in his Tale of the Tub: “I saw a woman flayed the other day. And you would be surprised at the difference it made in her appearance for the worse.” (Chap. 9).

            But this Figure is in absolutely no way so confined or confining. There is a beauty and majesty here. The Bible bursts with pleonasms.

            “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” (Ps. 121:1).

            “And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” (Gen. 3:8).

            “At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.” (Judge. 5:27).

            “By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin.” (Ps. 102:5).

            “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2).

            Now sometimes it’s hard to determine whether we’re dealing with a true pleonasm. In that last quotation, for example, is “the face” truly unnecessary? Would “And the Spirit of God moved upon the waters” truly mean the same thing? This isn’t like Pascal’s “I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room”, which, however pleasing the pause there, like the “there” in the last clause the “this” in the Pascal could be omitted without change of meaning. But there’s an elegance and beauty to it (Pascal’s “this” — I claim no such presumption for my “there”) which adds to the euphony of the phrase.

            The same cannot exactly be said for either “the face” in the Genesis quotation nor for the “exactly” in this sentence. An approximation of truth is not the same as a blanket statement, as the planar face of the waters is not exactly the same as all of the waters simultaneously. The exact line may be rather hard to find and harder still to draw; so too about whether this piling up of verbiage matters much. Hemingway said, “If I started to write elaborately… I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.” (A Moveable Feast). This aligns with Mark Twain who said (I think — one never can tell with Twain), “Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

            Any even cursory reading of my work demonstrates in vivid color how fully I dissent from Hemingway’s compression. But even if one falls closer to modern brevity, he, even Hemingway, rarely clears out all the pleonasm. And how could he? For pleonasm works in prose as meter works in poetry, organizing time to give a pleasing sound. Or, as George Puttenham argues, “euen a vice sometime being seasonably vsed, hath a pretie grace.” And that’s what pleonasm offers, the grace of effortless movement over what might otherwise be choppy seas. But if you are like unto me in my taste, be wary; an overabundance of unnecessary verbiage (especially when arcane, like the noun “verbiage”) will sound to most modern readers, at best, like the ramblings of an old Oxford don and, at worst, like politicians or used car salesmen who wish to distract and drown defects with discourse.

            In sum, pleonasm is the addition of grammatically or syntactically unnecessary words. Nigh impossible to avoid entirely, it can add a moving grace to one’s prose but will, if overused, sound stuffy, arrogant, or mendacious.

            Thank you.

A Bench Under the Trees

“‘Opportunity Is Always Out There’ With Simon Mann”, an interview by Ash Milton

            I don’t really like complaining. Which is ironic, because I feel I complain fairly often in these letters and this itself is a bit of a complaint. But I really don’t actually like complaining. I have an especial aversion to those who complain about there being no adventures left to have in this world. Try getting married! Having children! More prosaically, I wonder if the men (it usually is men) complaining about no adventures have ever tried to drive across the country. Have they tried to drive across the country without their cellphones? Have they tried biking or walking across the country? I bet they’d have adventures then!

            If you are like me sick of people complaining and want to be satisfied in your own complaints about them, or if you think there really aren’t that many adventures to be had and wish there were modern day Laurence of Arabias – well, look no further than this Palladium article:

            “Simon Mann was formed in consummately British institutions. After completing his education at Eton College and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, he entered the Scots Guards in 1972. It was a family tradition—both father and grandfather had served before him. Later, he joined the British military’s elite Special Air Service (SAS), which took him across Europe. Such a military career might have set him up for prestige in conventional business or politics. Instead, Mann decided to try his luck in Africa.”

“Poetry and Ambition” by Donald Hall

            Mr. Hall cries out for more ambitious poets. “If I recommend ambition, I do not mean to suggest that it is easy or pleasurable. ‘I would sooner fail,’ said [John] Keats at twenty-two, ‘than not be among the greatest.’ When he died three years later he believed in his despair that he had done nothing… convinced that his name was “writ in water.” … If I praise the ambition that drove Keats, I do not mean to suggest that it will ever be rewarded. We never know the value of our own work, and everything reasonable leads us to doubt it: for we can be certain that few contemporaries will be read in a hundred years. To desire to write poems that endure—we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and that if we succeed we will never know it.”

            To this gloomy possibility, he sets a far more gloomy reality: “But for some people it seems ambitious merely to set up as a poet, merely to write and to publish. Publication stands in for achievement—as everyone knows, universities and grant-givers take publication as achievement—but to accept such a substitution is modest indeed, for publication is cheap and easy. In this country, we publish more poems (in books and magazines) and more poets read more poems aloud at more poetry readings than ever before; the increase in thirty years has been tenfold… I do not complain that we find ourselves incapable of such achievement; I complain that we seem not even to entertain the desire.”

            And complain he does, at great length. Perhaps it will be at too great a length for you; it almost was for me the first time and was for me the second time, but I fear that that merely proves his point about our currently unambitious times. Our capacity to absorb arguments at length has taken as much a hit or more as our capacity to stretch ourselves from origin to eternity. “At sixteen the poet reads Whitman and Homer and wants to be immortal. Alas, at twenty-four the same poet wants to be in The New Yorker”.

            To read this article as a writer is to be convicted, then emboldened, and then charged with orders. As a past great poet once wrote, “Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate”.

The Amphitheater

            Our three-year-old recently joined her first ballet class and has become an overnight obsessive. She will not stop bugging me to watch ballet whenever she can. Because she has long been a Princess obsessive, she especially wants to watch the Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella ballets. Though we normally limit screen time, I have a hard time limiting this. It’s great music tied with beautiful movements, and beautiful movements which (at least in very minor part) we’ve asked her to learn and repeat in class. There are worse sounds to read my books to than Tchaikovsky’s or Prokofiev’s ballets.

            Having said all that, this past Wednesday Gremlin #1 didn’t nap so she could re-watch Sleeping Beauty and by six (a full two hours before bedtime or more) she was a crying, tantrum-y mess. So no more of that, thank you.

            Anyway, YouTube is a glorious achievement of this past generation. The ability to watch almost any performance of our patrimony at the end of a few clicks will never not amaze me. Here is the Sleeping Beauty performance our daughter has become so taken with.

The Grotto

            One thing I didn’t say in With Our Fathers about our little boy is that he’s very, very small. He’s in the 3^rd percentile, where our girls were pushing the 80s. It likely means nothing at all, and indeed his anatomy scan makes him seem perfectly healthy, but there is a small chance that low gestational weight means he has a condition of some kind which might be severe. If you are the praying sort, please pray for him. Thank you.

Reviso in Toto et Peroratio

            It is hard for me not to look around the world and find it miraculous. I don’t mean merely the natural world but the world of human subcreation too. Homo sapiens have lived on this planet for at least 200,000 years, perhaps as many as 1,000,000 years or more. The cities of Ur, Troy, Rome, Tenochtitlan were – from everything we know about them – marvels of engineering and what we’d now call “State capacity”, but I can’t help paying attention to what’s in this laptop or looking over at my bookcases or remembering how we go the three chairs in this room at yard sales for less than an hour’s work – it’s all abundance in our day and age. Even our meals, absolute and unending feasts.

            It’s not that we have no problems. We suffer from a strange lack of ambition in particular (see A Bench Under the Trees). We suffer from isolation and disillusionment, from cultural erasure and learnt helplessness. We are sick, bewildered, and even the best of us are only half-literate. All of these problems (well… most) I’m writing these letters to address. Not by personally providing a remedy, of course. That is beyond my capacity. But by identifying the challenge and pointing a way around or at least away from it.

            Terminology is hard here. In Dorothy Sayers’s The Mind of the Maker, she talks about how the ancient mind had a conception of reality which could encounter setbacks, failures, and sufferings with far greater equanimity than we. Why? She says it’s because they saw those struggles as part of life, crosses to be simply borne, and we see them as problems which we could (and should and will eventually, inevitably) solve.

            But death cannot be mocked, at least not by mortal means. Return to Tolkien – we are subcreators. We create in the image of He by whom we were created, not Towers of Babel but Temples of Jerusalem.

            But in what a monastery do we live! As I write this, I am on YouTube, listening to a free production of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier II by the Netherland Bach Society. “Opportunity is always out there.”

            Thank you.

            What beloved gift of modern technology would you be unable to do without? If you’d like to tell me (that or anything else), please click

Leave a comment

            Or if you don’t want to post publicly, you can

Email Me

            If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click HERE.

            If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor

Subscribe now

            And you’d be doing me a favor if you would, on any social media available to you,

Share

           Until next we meet, I remain your fellow

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

         Originally posted in Aug. 18, 2023, “Chivalry” shows this Hortus at or near its most refined and elaborated. We have non-partisan social commentary, some wonderful art with its artist’s short biography, and we have the Figures, which should always be and sometimes even are the heart of these letters. There’s also music and poetry and even some history here. This letter is a little longer than normal (you will have to open it in browser to see the whole of it), and it is about twice-again longer than what I intend for 2024. But, all & all, this letter gives a good idea of what you’re getting into here at Hortus Scriptorius.

         I hope you enjoy.

         Maybe it’s just my side of the internet, but sex-war Discourse has heated up again. Largely now it’s been ‘a man’s role is this’ or ‘real masculinity is that’. I think all of it kicked off again when a certain accused felon about to stand trial in Romania did the rounds on right-wing media. The less I say about him the less I’ll curse and swear, but it raises many interesting questions which a father must answer – even when he is not, as I am not, a father of sons.
         My daughters will learn what a man is from culture, yes, and from men in our family, sure, and certainly from the talk of women (in and out of our family), but most of all they will learn what a man is from me. If they love my example, they will look for it in other men. If they hate my example, they will flee from it to other men. And so I must be careful to show them a masculinity that will bless them if they seek and nurture it in their friends and husbands and (God willing) sons.
         Which means I must know what men should be.

         And I’m sorry to say, but I often don’t.

The Courtyard

         Our current world doesn’t really seem to know what to do with men. I’m reading Ovid, and if his men (or gods) were the complete measure of men, men wouldn’t measure up. They’re scheming, lecherous, cowardly, and boastful – which of course men can be. But in Ovid there’s little virtue to compensate.
         There’s that old saw of History, you’ve likely heard: ‘Tough times make hard men, hard men make good times; good times make soft men; soft men make tough time.’ Depending on how you define ‘hard’, this is either a syllogism or utter nonsense. Examples do spring easily to mind, like the small and hyper-ambitious Latin republic which grew up to gobble the world, or the hard-scrabble pioneers who turned a (not quite) empty plain into a thriving civilization within two generations before handing that civilization over to their sons who turned it into a world Colossus. But counterexamples also lie about like toys in a playroom. 
         There was nothing quite as ‘hard’ as the Second World War, and yet it broke the (until that point) unparalleled British Empire. The next generation of Brits made what had once been the Bank of Nations into the Poor Man of Europe. Even this analysis is imperfect, for one could argue the Great War did the damage and only unbelievable ‘hardness’ let the British even endure the Second World War. Likewise, life has been (more or less) equally ‘hard’ for Africans and Asians in the 20^thCentury. And yet it is in Asia where we see economic miracle after economic miracle.
         Or look to Botswana and Zambia. I know of nothing which makes one place ‘harder’ than another. They’re next to each other, and both have suffered war, dictatorship, and famine in recent history. In fact, in the 1960s, Botswana was one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita income of a mind-boggling $60 (that’s $0.16 a day). Yet Botswana is closing in on the relative wealth of Russia. Zambia… isn’t. It’s not ‘hardness’ which made it so.
         Men in the 19^th Century thought it useful to have a good war every now and again – it got the blood pumping. But it’s the rare man who knows much about the trench fighting of the First World War (or its modern-day equivalent in Ukraine) and wishes himself there. It’s not that modern men are soft (though there may be something to that) but that modern men do not want to be hard in this way.
         I wouldn’t want to ride on horseback until my clothes rotted off me, eating blood stew and drinking mares’ milk. But I would far less care to sack a city, putting its inhabitants to the sword in the world’s worst bloodletting before the Holocaust. I wouldn’t want to eat on feasting-tables above the groans and cries of my enemies as they slowly suffocated, crushed below the floor I sat upon. (For a detailed history of the Mongols, may I suggest Dan Carlin's multi-part series.)
         All this reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s definition of Chivalry, from his invaluable essay “The Necessity of Chivalry” (which I recommended under a false title in “On Living Biblically”):

          "But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals—if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man comme il faut which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture—we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory’s Morte Darthur.          
          "'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'"

         This is the Christmas Truce. This is the famous chivalry of British (and, to a lesser extent, American) GIs during the Second World War. This is Grant allowing the Confederates (traitors though they were) to keep their mounts and sidearms. It’s the English taking the French knights captive at Agincourt. (At least, those French knights who hadn’t drowned in the mud.) And it’s Robin Hood feasting his enemies before he robs them – and harming not one of them but in self-defense.
         If these then are the hard men of the historical proverb, what about the savages? What about the Vikings or the Mongols, those for whom might made right and the powerless wept. And is it fair to call them ‘savages’? Or would that exile Homeric –even Golden Age – Greece unaccountably from civilization? The question of truly savage men explodes the ‘hard men’ proverb, I think, and returns us (whether we’ve read the Nicomachean Ethics or not) to Aristotle – to Aristotle and to Lewis.
         Too far one way, and you get Roman Orgies and the (often probably unfairly exaggerated) decadence of the East which was the horror of the ancient world, the ‘soft men’ who make ‘tough times’. Too far in the other direction and you get not the ‘hard men’ who make ‘good times’ but the barbarians who burn Rome. That is, on one extreme you have those who let civilization burn and on the other those who burn civilization.
         Tough times do not create the hard men who create good times. Hard men domesticated by culture create good times. Hannah Arendt said, “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.” Our need then is not to be ‘hard’ nor is it to be ‘soft’, but to be cultured and to acculturate.

Flowerbeds

         John Lu Hung-nien was born in 1919 in Taicang, a small town along the Yangtze, which was in his day near (and now literally abuts) Shanghai. He studied with a famous landscape painter (Li Zhichao) in middle school and went on to Fu Jen Catholic University’s Fine Arts Department in 1932. (Fu Jen in Peking (now Beijing) was dissolved by the Chinese Communist Party in 1952 but re-established in Taipei by the Republic of China and the Vatican in 1961.)
         John Lu Hung-nien graduated in 1936 and stayed on at the Peking university as an assistant teacher through both The War and the Civil War. Selected to be a member of the China Artist Association, he completed archival copying at both the Yongle Palace and the North Qi Gaorun Tomb, one before the Cultural Revolution and the other during that sanguinary period. How he weathered both wars, and how he (a deeply Catholic artist) survived the Cultural Revolution and the CCP’s other purges, I cannot tell.
         But survive them he did. He survived to have a long career. Perhaps he stopped painting his religious art once the Communist took over. What else happened in his life, I do not know. Whatever sources exist about him exist in Chinese or English only beyond my reach. So anything else I say would be mere speculation, except this: he died peacefully in 1989. And this: please enjoy his art, as I have.

The Annunciation, John Lu Hung-nien, circa 1950

Jesus Calming the Storm, John Lu Hung-nien, circa 1950

Jesus with the woman at the well, John Lu Hung-nien, circa 1950

Mosaic Copy of "Our Lady of China", John Lu Hung-nien, 2012, Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Dayton, Ohio

Hortus Proprius

         Paronomasia, (pa-ro-no-MAISE-ee-uh), also called agnominatio, the nicknamer, and the pun.
         The next time you hear a howler of a Dad Joke, you can shrug and say “it’s all Greek to me”. For the good ol' pun has its own fancy Greek name: paronomasia. It may seem silly to give examples of such a standby, but “[a] pun is its own re-word” (Silva Rhetoricae).
         Puttenham tells us that they used to call the Emperor Claudius Tiberius Nero, on account of how much he drank, Caldius Biberius Mero (which is altered Latin roughly meaning ‘intemperate drinker of wine’). And a friar irate with Erasmus called him Errans mus (that is to say, ‘erring mouse’). The paronomasia works in wit. By taking two words which sound similar and using them in two different forms, we get a winning strategy (that is, one which wins and one which persuades), as when, according to Puttenham, a man says to his wife against an accusation of adultery:
 
         “Proue me madame ere ye fall to reproue,
         Meeke mindes should rather excuse than accuse.”
 
         (That this could be in any way persuasive leaves me unpersuaded, but there you have it.)
 
         “Were it not here apparent that thou art heir apparent” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.64)
 
         “I should leave grazing, were I of your flock And only live by gazing.” (Winter’s Tale, 4.4.109)
 
         “Messenger: [of Benedick] And a good soldier, too, lady.
         Beatrice: And a good solider to a lady; but what is he to a lord?”
         (Much Ado About Nothing, 1.1.53)
 
         Cicero distinguishes between three types of paronomasia. His third example relies on case-endings which do not truly exist in English, and so we can pass over it without further comment. The second is when the same words, parts of words, or homophones (that is, those words which sound the same) are used in different ways. That’s “here apparent” and “heir apparent” (though less now to our ears, as the years have changed the vowels). It’s also “a good soldier, too, lady” and “a good soldier to a lady”, as well as “prove me madame ere you fall to reprove”.
         Then there are those which simply sound similar but not the same, as “grazing” and “gazing”. That’s how “a pun is its own re-word” works, and again why we change Claudius Tiberius Nero into “Caldius Biberius Mero”.
         Cicero cautions the orator to avoid an over-reliance on paronomasia because its “invention seems impossible without labour and pains.” It can “brighten our style agreeably with striking ornaments” if used sparingly but “lessen[s]” our “seriousness” if used too often. For while the Figure, he says, has “grace and elegance”, it has no “impressiveness [or] beauty”. Indeed the Figure “seem[s] more suitable for a speech of entertainment”.
         And that is indeed exactly where you find it. From the cutting nicknames our nicknamer handed out to Nero and Erasmus, to the husband’s evasions, or Falstaff’s and Beatrice’s wit, the paronomasia is a Figure of comedy.
         That is, except when it isn’t. Shakespeare (of course) transcends this limit. Peacham shows how Shakespeare used paronomasia to deepen exchanges with irony and pathos, as when Lear says to blinded Gloucester, “You see how this world goes” and Gloucester answers, “I see it feelingly”. Or when, dying, Mercutio says, “Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.”
         In sum, paronomasia is an everyday pun dressed for dinner. As with most puns, he’s the butt of as many jokes as he fronts and is used primarily for comedic effect. But the sensitive practitioner can employ a well-timed paronomasia to underline the agony of a moment.
         Thank you

A Bench Under the Trees

“The Catholic Roots of Liberal Modernity” by Thomas D. Howes
         Dr. Howes starts his piece with, “Young people tend toward radicalism. For young serious Catholics, that radicalism is not usually Marxism but instead an excessive form of anti-modernism. You might have heard the narrative: there was the golden age of Christendom and its Catholic kings obedient to the authority of popes. Then came the decadent hyper-individualism of modernity, the first seeds of which were planted by Ockham, Luther, or Hobbes—depending on who you ask.”
         Dr. Howes dissents from this view. He argues that liberalism was heavily influenced by the work of 16^th and 17^th Century Catholic scholastics writing on human rights. Their philosophy found ill fit in the governments of Catholic Europe but, adopted and adapted, found natural expression in post-Glorious Revolution Britain and thence in these United States. He ends his piece by saying, “[T]his, I am convinced, is a story young Catholics need to hear.” I agree, for young Catholics and for everyone interested in American government.
 
“Furniture of the Mind” by Shawn Phillip Cooper
         To judge by contemporary culture, we expect the furniture of the American mind to come from Ikea – or worse. Professor Cooper (whose podcast I recommended in “Speak Loudly and Carry Nothing in Your Hands”) lights us down another path. He writes, “It seems that committing words to memory, voluntarily or not, can form us in ways that we can scarcely imagine. We all generally accept this with regard to prayer as it relates to our spiritual formation: if we, like “the pious monks of St. Bernard” in Longfellow’s “Excelsior”, utter “the oft-repeated prayer,” then we will find ourselves changed as a result: not just more faithful and more able to form new connections between what we have read and what we are… but also changed in the very essence of who we are. Thus memorization has both a useful function and a formative function.”
         I’ve written on this theme before (in my essay called “Time”). That old saying tells us, ‘You are what you eat’’, and it’s just as true for what language you digest. The very idiocy of politics oft-times feels the direct consequence of poor diet. Not that we should or ought be too didactic here; the Athenians who created the High Culture we barely read held slaves, and they held slaves with far more open, rampant, and untroubled abuse than any Christian slaveholder, even in our own Antebellum South. Hitler famously loved art; he had good taste too. It helped little his moral sense.
         Art will not guarantee virtue, but it can inform it. More than inform, art and its digestion tie us in a web of mutual influence. Dorothy Sayers says, "Poets do not merely pass on the torch in a relay race; they toss the ball to one another, to and fro, across the centuries. Dante would have been different if Virgil had never been, but if Dante had never been we should know Virgil differently; across both their heads Ezekiel calls to Blake, and Milton to Homer."
         So, if you haven’t already, come join the conversation. Dr. Cooper may not be Virgil, but he’s a damn good guide nonetheless.

The Amphitheater

         I like music covers — the different versions, instruments, voices, the interpretations. My wife… does not. When I catch a song, when I get its bug in my ear, I will go to Spotify or YouTube and open up and listen to a dozen versions of that song in a row. This causes my wife some distress, for which I am only mildly apologetic.
         Our elder daughter has adopted her mother’s impatience with foreign versions of beloved songs, which I believe and hope is just the natural antipathy children show to change. My response has been to play even more and various versions of those songs, because I am a kind and loving father. She endures it only slightly better than her mother.
         Our song today is “The Star of the County Down”. As with most Trad (that is, Traditional) songs, "The Star of the County Down" is actually quite recent. First collected in 1909, Cathal MacGarvey (1866–1927) wrote the lyrics to the ballad which was set by (and this is also traditional) no one knows who to the Trad tune “Dives and Lazarus” (known as “Kingsfold” to hymn-singers). Unlike songs, tunes are often too ancient to trace.
         I regularly sing this song to our girls, and here I share Colm R. McGuinness’s version of a song. Sort of. What I’m sharing is my version of the lyrics and (mercifully) his cover of the song. Though I am far fonder of my lyrics (a study in the narcissism of small differences), his singing is more than a little superior.

Near Banbridge town in the County Down
One evening last July
Down a boreen green came a sweet colleen
And she smiled as she passed me by
She looked so sweet with her two bare feet
And the sheen of her nut-brown hair
Such a coaxing girl, sure I shook myself
To make sure I was standing there 

[Chorus]
From Bantry Bay up to Derry Quay
From Galway to Dublin Town
No maid I've seen like the brown colleen
That I met in the County Down 

As she onward sped, sure I shook my head
And I turned with a feelin' quare 
And I says, says I, to a passers-by
"Whose the maid with the nut-brown hair?"
He smiled at me and he says, says he
"That's the gem of Ireland's crown;
Young Rosie McCann from the banks of the Bann
She's the star of the County Down" 

[Chorus] 

At the harvest fair she'll be surely there
So I'll dress in my Sunday-clothes,
With my shoes shone bright and my hat cocked right
For a smile from my nut-brown rose.
No pipe I'll smoke, no horse I'll yoke
Till my plough turns a rust-colored brown,
And a smiling bride, by my own fireside
Sits the star of the County Down. 

[Chorus x2]

         And here are The Irish Rovers singing the same song, also much better than mine (you will, I am sure, be shocked to hear).

         The first modern version of this song I could trace, the one that sent it mainstream, is from Van Morrison and The Chieftains. I actually don’t like this version very much, but I record it here for posterity and because you may indeed care for it a great deal.

Reviso Amphitheater et Peroratio

         Originally, I'd planned to write The Amphitheater about, as a friend on Twitter calls him, That Ginger Musician. I generally like his songs, think they’re good if neither groundbreaking nor revolution-inspiring. Maybe others will feel differently, and bully if they do. Mostly I’ve been amazed watching people who insist they Do Not Care getting so worked up about him. The fear of being taken in (of being not coerced, not really even pressured, merely enticed into an opinion) is prevalent – and probably paranoic.
         But if you are interested in modern takes on old-time country, something between bluegrass and the modern pop-country you hear on the radio (does anyone listen to the radio anymore?), then may I suggest Tyler Childers and his song “Way of the Triune God”? It’s exceptional.

            Do you have a favorite version of “Star of the County Down”? If you’d like to tell me (that or anything else), please click

Leave a comment

            Or if you don’t want to post publicly, you can

Email Me

            If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click HERE.

            If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor

Subscribe now

            And you’d be doing me a favor if you would, on any social media available to you,

Share

           Until next we meet, I remain your fellow

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

            Eliot once famously measured out his life in coffee spoons. While I now expect I’ll measure out my life in my daughters’ birthdays, so far it’s been in books read. This year I read 73 books, if we count the Bible as one. Not a bad haul for a tough year.
            One should not romanticize this. Though it does sometimes feel like it, the goal isn’t (or at least should not be) to merely stuff one’s head with words. A small diet of well-chewed and nutritious books is better than hundreds of shlock devoured in haste. But if a man can read both widely and well, then he should. I don’t know if I can, but I do try.
            I write down each book’s title and author. Under Hortus Proprius I’ll list them, with recommendations of those to read and to avoid. I know from other blogs I follow that people like such lists, but I record them for rather more selfish reasons. I record as a form of time-travel, to go back and review my year in letters; it’s amazing what I find when I do.
            Some books I forgot I read because I know them so well, like Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead or Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Then there are those I forgot I read but whose contents return to me like a revelation, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore or Twain’s Joan of Arc.
            But there are some books I forgot entirely. Because I love his podcast so, I’m sorry to say that Dan Carlin’s The End is Always Near is one such; I didn’t particularly care for it while I read it, and I now remember nothing about it. I feel bad about that, but there are happily also those books I forgot not because I’d forgotten them or needed a reminder but because I can’t now imagine ever having not read them, like Euripides’ Bacchae or Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.
            It's a fun little exercise, and I recommend it.

The Courtyard

            If creativity’s father is tradition and her mother leisure, then our modern world aims to make an orphan of her. Since most of us are not properly raised in our tradition, we must needs recover it in adulthood. There is some tension between this recovery work and preserving time enough for wandering thought.
            Not being raised on the good books, not being educated in the Great Books, not having Latin in elementary and Greek in secondary, we struggle along as we can. This is when it can feel like we’re just stuffing words into our heads. We consume our leisure to remedy our lack of breeding, and we so often end up with neither.
            I’ve gone through about half-a-dozen versions of what should come next. None of them really resolve this conundrum I’ve spread before us all. Each attempt just brings me further afield from where I started. Perhaps that’s because there is no ‘solution’ here, just a generational difficulty, or, worse, a difficulty for generations.
            It is so easy to waste time in our modern world, and I have spent so much of my limited leisure not only on frivolous but on actively harmful pursuits. I keep meaning to write about this. Others have wasted away the same way, so my experience may not be particularly interesting, but from re-reading fanfictions when I ought to have read adventure novels to wasting more than two full years on video games, I have lived a largely wasted life.
            By the way, when I say ‘two full years’, I don’t mean I got obsessed with WoW for two years. I mean I spent more than 730 24-hour periods playing video games, which is 20,000 hours, which is enough, if pop-science is to be believed (though it shouldn’t be) to master two whole disciplines of study. And I wasted that time while being little educated in our tradition at school and largely miseducated at university. My story, though extreme I think, I hope, is a difference in degree and not in kind to thousands (millions?) of men in this country.
            Now I don’t mean to complain but to limn the difficulty. We may not be able to add to civilization in this generation. Our goal must first be to check its decline. This starts with our marriages and our children. And it starts with being clear- and eagle-eyed about our New Year’s goals and careful with how we spend our time (see last letter’s Bench).

With Our Fathers

            Any reclamation of culture and learning starts with our children. There’s a damn funny Philip Larkin poem. It goes (and please forgive the profanity):
 
            This Be The Verse
            They fuck you up, your mum and dad.  
               They may not mean to, but they do.  
            They fill you with the faults they had
                And add some extra, just for you.
 
            But they were fucked up in their turn
                By fools in old-style hats and coats,  
            Who half the time were soppy-stern
                And half at one another’s throats.
 
            Man hands on misery to man.
                It deepens like a coastal shelf.
            Get out as early as you can,
                And don’t have any kids yourself.
 
            He apparently was not being facetious as I once assumed. Nevertheless, we don’t have to follow his advice, agree with his conclusions, or even appreciate his philosophy to understand the truth peeking behind the poem’s falsity. We present the world to our children and can (help them) make it a heaven or a hell.
            The world starts with us parents – and that’s literally true. For my part, I try whenever I can to use positive reinforcement with my daughters. Two difficulties wait in this: one does not want to bribe his children and one’s mother (i.e. my mother) might not be quite so circumspect with her praise.
            The twos are supposed to be terribly, and while I have to say our toddler is a wonderfully behaved child, she does push us. And we have resorted to negative reinforcement. Specifically, we’ve started locking her dolls in ‘jail’ (a cardboard box placed on a shelf in her room she can see but not reach) if she misbehaves too badly. It has worked wonders. And do not worry: we do all we can to find an excuse to ransom them before she sleeps.
            Yet even though it’s very clearly efficacious, I feel some guilt here. The line separating tyranny and indulgence can be rather hard to find.
            This is particularly true in activities I thought she’d mastered. For months she would throw out her trash. And she still mostly does, but sometimes, just occasionally, she’ll adamantly refuse, and the only thing we can do to convince her is to threaten her toys or dessert.
            I dislike making such threats, but the alternative seems to be to throw the trash out ourselves. And doesn’t that just encourage her intransigence?
            In time, I shall worry over when to introduce Latin or Huckleberry Finn, how to imbue a love of Beethoven or how to get her to attend to her drawing. But right now, to always say please, thank you, to pick up after herself, and to be clean at table is enough. Overall, she’s a wunderkind about it all.

            (Though any advice on potty training would be greatly appreciated, specifically how to get our child to relinquish the attention she gets while being changed. You see, she always has been changed and the baby is also changed. Future Note: We took away her diapers, let her soil herself. She was potty trained the third day.)

Flowerbeds

            Around the New Year, I see a lot of ‘time is just, like, your opinion man’ wise-guy stuff on Twitter and sprinkled across the news. A year is of course arbitrary in one true, if obvious, way; Mercury and Jupiter do not rotate around the sun at the same speed Earth does (they’re about three months and twelve years, respectively).
            But this is what those skeptical of the Enlightenment mean when they say Scientism has deformed rationality. The idea that the mathematically or scientifically exact definition of ‘year’ is the only applicable one is nonsense, and really rather extravagantly dumb nonsense at that. I’m sorry to be so hard on it, if only because I was so taken with it in my younger years and some friends remain in its thrall.
            A year is not arbitrary. Excluding for a moment that it is contingent of the physics of the planet and the sun (the very definition of non-arbitrary), a year is more than a scientific description to begin with. It is the turning of the seasons (I wrote a short story which hasn’t been picked up yet called “Turning of the Seasons”). It’s the liturgical calendar. It’s when we remember birthdays and commemorate deaths. It determines hunting, fishing, and farming, which did (and in many places still do) determine what food one could buy, even if they determined no more. Gaia once could freeze us in the winter and she could dry up our land, our very wells, in the summer. Sometimes she still does.
            A year is not arbitrary, and we really should laugh out of the room those who like to pretend at wisdom by saying it is.
            Now while I hope you enjoyed that rant, here is a picture if you did not (or even if you did) of a place where we’d have to celebrate the New Year every three months.

Photo of Mercury, NASA, 2021

Hortus Proprius

            As I said in the beginning, I’ve read 73 books this year. And though I haven’t counted exactly how many are new to me, I’d guess about half are. From these new books, I will highlight and briefly describe those I thought the best and worst. Attending to only the newly read books will leave aside some phenomenal classics, like Sense and Sensibility and Abolition of Man. But c’est la vie. I chose fairly well this year (if I do say so myself), and so if I were to highlight all the good books of the year, this letter would be 12,000 words at least instead of the already gargantuan 4,000 it is.
 
The Bible
            I’m not sure what to say about this. We all know the Bible, right? Well… that’s rather the thing, actually. I only thought I knew the Bible. But to read it all, and to read it all chronologically, was a (forgive the pun) revelation. As I said last week. If you haven’t done this, do it.
 
Joan of Arc by Mark Twain
 
Sonnets by Shakespeare
 
Ethnic America by Thomas Sowell
            Thomas Sowell is a genius. Generally billed as an economist, he’s acting the part of a demographer in this book as well as side-hustling as a sociologist and anthropologist. He’s brilliant at it all. Ethnic America runs through the major Ethnic migrations to the United States and shows how they collided with the standing American culture, altered it, and then were assimilated.
            Just one observation of his managed to collapse half of what I thought I knew: often most of the ‘wealth gap’ between populations, let’s take Japanese-Americans and white-Americans as an example, can be explained by the age of the population. If the average Japanese-American is 54 and the average white-American is 32, then it rather stands to reason Japanese-Americans are wealthier on the whole. 54-year-olds are generally wealthier than 32-year-olds. There is so much more in this book, and all of it good.
 
Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
 
Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
 
Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle
 
Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation by George Washington
 
Timaeus by Plato
 
Critias by Plato
 
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
 
1776 by David McCullough
 
Powers and Thrones by Dan Jones
            Powers and Thrones was not bad, exactly. Dan Jones tells an engaging story which helps fill out the big picture of the medieval age. And yet he also suffers from the disease of our age, the need to ‘debunk’ what the past held sacred. It starts in the noble pursuit of Truth (‘let us not be blinded by the dogmas of past peoples’) but ends in obscurity, supposition, and anachronism (‘well, I know they say that’s why they did it, but no one could believe that, so they obviously did it for this reason). He also seems beholden to the cult of ‘trends and forces’ theory, forgetting at times (by which I mean almost completely) that people are, to quote Charlotte Mason, persons who have agency. This, though, might be a real philosophical difference between us which I should not so readily call a defect in scholarship.
 
Dominion by Tom Holland
            I was originally rather hostile to Tom Holland’s thesis (that the entire modern world is an outgrowth of Christianity, even the most hostile anti-Christian parts of it), but by the end of the book I thought it almost too obvious to need defense. This is a testament to the power of his storytelling as much as to his analysis. Others, I’m thinking John McWhorter specifically, have called Wokeism a religion, but Holland lays out exactly how Wokeism is a child of New England Puritanism.
 
The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
 
Shane by Jack Schaefer
 
The Purpose of the Past by Gordon Wood
 
True Grit by Charles Portis
 
Poetry for Young People: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 
A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War by Joseph Loconte
 
War on the West by Douglas Murray
 
Philippics (First, Second, and Third) by Demosthenes
 
Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkia
 
The Poets’ Corner by John Lithgow
 
The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
 
Skip the Line by James Altucher
 
The End is Always Near by Dan Carlin
 
Politics by Aristotle
 
Poetics by Aristotle
 
Lost in Thought by Zena Hitz
 
Bacchae by Euripides
 
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
 
Philoctetes by Sophocles
 
The Song of Roland by Anon
            The best way I’ve found to describe The Song of Roland is that it’s the Medieval Iliad. The story is short, frank, and almost completely foreign to modern sensibilities. I kept feeling as if many of the characters were being sarcastic, but no – they were just different men than we are. In some ways, modern humor is closer to the wry Greeks than to these stern Franks.
            It’s short and beautiful and you should read it.
 
Children of the Fleet by Orson Scott Card
 
Phaedrus by Plato
 
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
 
Xenocide by Orson Scott Card
 
The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis
 
Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan (Abandoned)
            Many whose opinions I trust love this book, so I keep trying to find a criticism of it that lies more in my taste than in the book itself. But it just won’t do. If I say it follows too many different characters, then I notice Middlemarch and Ivanhoe sit below. If I say it’s a Holocaust book (or at least a book partially about Jews and partially set in 1930s Germany), I remember that I liked Time After Time well enough.
            So I must close with this: others love this book and maybe I would too if I finished it, but I could not bring myself to care after the second transition of character POV.
 
The Wind and the Willows by Kenneth Grahm
 
Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card
 
The Last Shadow by Orson Scott Card
 
Heretics by G.K. Chesterton
 
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
 
Irish Fairy Tales (Dover Thrift Edition)
 
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
            Chandler is a master of his craft. Not only does the mystery intrigue, not only does the action compel, but the descriptions are so hilarious spot-on I feel I’m taking a masterclass. Here is just one quotation, the first description of a mansion: "The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building."
 
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
            If you don’t know, it’s an adventure set in the reign of King Richard with jousting, burning castles, and Robin Hood. More than that, it gives lie to the idea that one should cut away from a character in extremis. The description (half- or two-thirds-through) of a villain’s death is both vivid and deeply moving. In sum, Ivanhoe is one of the few perfect novels I have ever read.
 
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
 
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
 
Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
 
Miracles by C.S. Lewis
 
The Story of King Arthur and His Knights by Howard Pyle
 
The Song of the Siren by Nicholas Kotar
 
Tiger… something by Brad Thor (Abandoned)
            As you can see, I don’t even remember the name of this. The story might very well have been interesting, but it seemed to be going nowhere slowly. The real killer, though, was the writing. It was bad, and I mean bad. There are novels I enjoy which I might call ‘workmanlike’. I read them and say not ‘I could do that’ (for there’s much more to writing a novel than the quality of the prose), but I read them and say, ‘I could write that prose, or maybe a little better.’ This book read like an old version of Chat-GPT did the writing.
 
Men Without Work by Nick Eberstadt
 
Know and Tell by Karen Glass
 
Songs of Childhood and Others by Walter de la Mere
 
Middlemarch by George Eliot
 
Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
 
Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum (Abandoned)
            The plus side of this book is it’s quite different from the movie, so, if you know the movie, little of the book will have been spoiled. That’s probably the only upside. While the writing here is slightly better than in Tiger-whatever, above, it’s nothing to write home about. Its real crime, though, is simply being an interminable book. I was a third of the way through and basically all he’d done was kidnap a woman, release her, then save her from rape, and then sleep with her (sorry-not-sorry for the spoiler). It was just… lazy. And boring besides.
 
The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise by Dario Fernandez-Morera
            This was a phenomenal book which corrected much of the trash history I’d been taught as gospel in college. We recognized it as one-sided at the time, but we hadn’t the language to describe the faults. Professor Fernandez-Morera gives us that language. I intend to do a longer review of this book eventually.
 
The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis by Jason Baxter
            Another fantastic book, the review to which can be found in my Christmas letter.
 
William Shakespeare’s The Empire Striketh Back by Ian Doeschester
 
Wordsworth: Select Poems
 
Ruins of Gorlan by John Flangan
 
The Old Spanish Trail by Ralph Compton (Abandoned)
            When I abandoned this book, I wrote a long paragraph about how bad it was and why it was so bad. If you’re interested, I can send you the notes. Until then, just don’t bother. The only benefit to reading this book is to remind oneself of Louis L’Amour’s quality.
 
Notes on Nursing by Florence Nightingale
 
The Turquoise Serpent by Alexander Palacio
 
Red Rising by Pierre Brown
            I’m going to write a longer review of all three of these books (see the two below this one). On the whole series I’m rather less sanguine, but the first book in the series is hard to praise enough. It has an interesting take on an old premise where it sets up one pat morality and then proceeds to demolish that morality over the book.
            And though the plot involves a series of ever-increasing horrors, the narrative neither hides from nor dwells on the angst of them. What I mean is that while the characters react, sometimes violently, to social transgressions, there’s little navel-gazing about it. The one time the narrative does dwell in angst, it dwells for almost exactly two pages and the contrast is so great that one ends near sobbing along with the character.
            Another glory of the book is that by the end of each chapter, one feels as if the whole world has changed under him. Some of Brown’s set-ups are obvious, though that may be because I study plot structure, but overall not only does he take some seldom seen risks, but he pulls everything off deftly. Highly recommend if you like scifi. I still recommend it if you don’t.
 
Golden Son by Pierre Brown
 
Morning Star by Pierre Brown
 
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Bench Under the Trees

“Pining for Democracy: A Few Readings” by Tanner Greer
            Mr. Greer is a man I’ve mentioned before (and another who does these end-of-year reading lists). He’s an up and coming (or is he now established now?) intellectual, and his specialties are China, War, and the American Republic. I probably needn’t explain which specialty this article touches.
            The first half of Greer’s article is an artful peeling apart of what different political movements mean or could mean by ‘democracy is in decline’, where he separates democracy as self-government from liberalism as we understand it.
            He then dives into a short exegesis of fourteen books which could help us understand where we came from, are, and are going. There are few people who could assign fourteen books and call it “a few readings”. Mr. Greer is one of them, though to his credit he also understands the limits of us mere mortals. He presents all fourteen books but concludes with a five-book crash course.
           
“Education is Indoctrination” by John Branyan
            John Branyan is a comedian I know through his unbeatable rendition of “The Three Little Pigs”.

            This is a short article about education, though he calls it indoctrination. He tells it better than I do, and probably in fewer words. But the basic premise is that what we call indoctrination is just education we don’t like. We can’t not indoctrinate, and therefore the best we can do is indoctrinate (educate) to the truth.
            I’ve heard this argument before. There is a scene in Orson Scott Card’s Shadow of a Hegemon where the main character, called “Bean”, runs into the mom of his old commander (Ender, of Ender’s Game fame). There they get into an argument before they become perfect friends, and the argument turns on Card’s philosophy that education is indoctrination by definition.
            I’ve always been rather queasy about what seems a promiscuous intermingling of language. It feels as if we’re stealing from our language an important distinction. The man who educates his child tries to pass on the Truth as best he knows it; he treats his child or student as a person whose interests he cares about more than his own. The man who indoctrinates a child is not passing on his own tradition or what he believes; he instead seeks to mold the child as ever so much clay for some politically or ideologically expedient reason.
            There are some complications here. First, I’d be hard pressed to call the man who teaching a child in the “truth” of Marxism or Nazism (to use non-controversially hated philosophies) an educator, howevermuch he believed the lies himself. But second, I take Dickens’ point in Hard Times that to teach “nothing but Facts” is actually to indoctrinate children in a worldview, and a self-destructive one.
            I’ve definitely written more here than Mr. Branyan wrote, so if you found this at all interesting, please check his article out. Even if you disagree with him (as I believe I still do), he presents his argument well and it’s one worth knowing.

The Ampitheter

            Harpa Dei is a group of three sisters and a brother who sing traditional Catholic hymns. Their voices are transcendent. I’ve been listening to their Vespers around Christmas. Please enjoy.

Reviso Introductio et Peroratio

            We come to the end of the year and my fifth newsletter. In these letters I’ve tried to balance scholarship, to the extent I engage in it, and reflections on writing generally as well as on education. I fear, though, that these letters sound rather too much like a diary and are rather too long besides.
            I model their style after letters I sent back home while traveling and living in the Philippines. Each letter home was greeted with rapturous applause from all who received it. As most who did receive it were family, I would not be surprised if the tone isn’t too intimate and informal for more outward facing pieces.
            And yet I write our Christmas letters each year, and those have the same tone. They are not, as the Philippine letters might have been, only for my intimates, but for everyone who is important in our lives, even those with whom we are not close but merely closely tied. They are widely praised as well.
            I don’t know. But you should. So please tell me, below, what do you think? It’s as simple as clicking

Leave a comment

            Or if you don’t want to post publicly, you can

Email Me

            If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click HERE.

            If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor

Subscribe now

            And you’d be doing me a favor if you would, on any social media available to you,

Share

           Until next we meet, I remain your fellow

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

Dear Scriptor,

            When my wife and I first married, we lived in a two-bedroom house which was smaller than the one-bedroom apartment I’d had before. It had those janky wall-heaters which sort of waft out gas and heat the house when the flame lights them. They’re basically open gas-fireplaces – truly remarkably dangerous if we’d had our children there. When it was really cold outside, they’d fog up all the windows and it felt like we lived in a snow globe or an igloo. My wife and I have dear, dear memories of that place, though we lived there for less than a year before buying a house three times its size.

            One of the two bedrooms we used as my study and also as a guest-room. Enclosing a futon leaned stacks of bookcases, some tied to the wall lest they fall. When we folded the futon out, it took up almost the whole rest of the room, leaving just enough space to stand up and scuddle sideways to the restroom. (Coincidentally we slept on the futon – in a far bigger room in the new house – when our daughters were born. What’s more, that futon’s frame has since collapsed entirely, and the futon itself has been repurposed, with a new frame, as the TV-room couch, which my mom sleeps on when she stays over Christmas Eve.) Even when the futon stood as a couch in my study, the room was small enough that I’d often be hit by the door if I was standing off-plum from my desk. There was where I went clickety-clack all day.

            I had a situation (as Bob Cratchit would say), and so my wife didn’t work at the time. It was deliriously peaceful. I’d wake up, leisurely have breakfast with the wife, and then close myself off in my study until lunch, after which I’d either nap or pick up whatever little work I had to do in the afternoon. One wonders if we had so much free time then only because we did not yet have children. For while it feels relaxing in retrospect, I certainly remember feeling at the time both harried and unproductive, in that special way only people who are not busy can feel. And yet also and in comparison to how I have to use my time now, I was quite unproductive indeed. Never underestimate the effect having children has in concentrating the mind on what’s important.

            I once bought a “Life in Weeks” calendar in an attempt to jump-start productivity. It was poster-sized with ninety ‘lines’ of small squares which went either from the top to the middle or from the middle to the bottom of the page. Each ‘line’ was a year and each small square a week, and so the poster ‘tracked’ every week of a man’s life from birth until he was ninety. The idea was to check off every week as it passed, so one could see – at a glance – exactly how much of his life had elapsed and how much of his life was left in which to “accomplish” something. When I first got it, I had not quite yet passed the one-third mark. I’m a bit over it now. (And of course, that assumes I live to ninety which seems to me an assumption highly suspect.)

            If any of you have been snookered into the ‘productivity’ racket, you know that nine times out of ten, any productivity gains do not come from the ‘hacks’ or ‘habits’ the book, article, or podcast suggests. Instead, the mere habit of attempting to form habits helps make the virtue of diligence and industry a habit. (And aren’t ‘diligence’ and ‘industry’ both more euphonic and philosophically clear than ‘productivity’?)

            So the big poster of “A Life in Weeks” did little. What did do something was coming out of the room after surfing the internet uselessly for an hour and seeing my wife hard at work on some task for our house and our life. That helped. What also helped was when we found out she was pregnant and I imagined the life I wanted to give our child (we didn’t then know ‘daughter’ was the word). That helped. What had already helped was getting rid of video games, which had become a toxin in my life hard to overstate. But what helped most, perversely and unfortunately, was losing my situation.

            Now, I see from finding the link to the first time I wrote about the waste of time that is video games, that I wrote about this first last New Year. It stands to reason we meet the Ghost of Old Years Past at this time.

The Courtyard

            Originally inspired by the ‘character journal’ Ben Franklin describes in his biography, I keep a journal. First instituted to track moral indiscretions circa 2004, it has gone through innumerable changes since. As this year marks that project’s twentieth, I thought I’d say something about it.

            Journals too often degenerate to omphaloskeptical egotism. ‘Dear Dairy, today I just felt…’ Certainly my entries often degenerate in this way, and journaling for me has in the past been almost entirely an exercise in self-regard. Then again – I feel as if these letters too often degenerate in that same way. This paragraph certainly has.

            And yet few habits have helped me quite so much as journaling. So I recommend it to you now. Not that habit of omphaloskepsis – mind – but the habit of writing, recording thoughts and ideas and (most important of all) goals. Writing out one’s thoughts allows a man to ‘voice’ them without the cheating or fudging that so often happens when ideas have not orthography’s body. And setting future goals allows (at a minimum) one to see the cavern between thought and action – again, without the fudging or happy self-talk that can so often happen when looks back at past thoughts without physical receipts.

            The many iterations of my journal need not be recited, and I probably couldn’t remember half of them anyway. But the tool I have found to keep my keel relatively even and my rutter pointed North is to write six-month goals. Over those six months I will track those goals and, at the end of them, see how I’ve done. After doing a retrospective, I will directly make a new set of goals for the next six months.

            Am I making this clear?

            Let’s get to brass tacks. On Sunday, December 31^st, I will sit down at our dining table and open my journal back to around July 1^st (whenever that Sunday was). There I have recorded six different aspects of my life: my intimate family, the wider family, friends, health, my career, and my own self. Within these six aspects, I have listed one habit to start and one vice to stop.

            These are generally deceptively simple. In ‘Intimate’, I have a goal of starting a Morning Time routine, à la Cindy Rollins. And though I continue to think this sounds like the work of a moment, a mere decision easily accomplished, I also have managed to corral us only enough to have regular Morning Times this past week. And then my success is largely an artifact of jetlag and the girls waking shortly after six in the morning.

            (As proof, in the week after I first wrote the paragraph above, Morning Time has fallen apart as the girls wake up past eight.)

            In ‘Friends’, I wanted to start responding to texts within the first day I receive them (whereas it could take weeks formally). Happily, I mostly accomplished this one. But meanwhile, in ‘Health’, I wanted to top slouching, for I have a back far too bent for a man my age. I… did not do this. I attended to it for perhaps only the first month after the dedication and then dropped it almost entirely.

            This Sunday, I will go over all ten to see how I did these last six months. Then I will make goals for the next six months, preserving many of these same goals no doubt but dropping those goals which have either become irrelevant or those which I’ve largely made habit. (It need not be perfect! Indeed, it won’t be.) Over the next six months, I’m thinking of increasing my two habits, one to start and one to stop, to those two habits plus another either to start or stop. Whether I increase my effort will largely depend on how well I’ve accomplished those ten.

            I offer you this look not to mimic but as an example. My journal did not always look like this. Just before the present format I’ve here outlined, originally started back when I was still single, I used to list between four and seven goals to “accomplish” within each of those six spheres of life. I’d set for myself the task of calling friends once a month or perhaps twice during the six-month period. I’d set a goal for how many days a week I’d workout, or walk. I’d set goals for how many short stories I’d write, how far through my novel I’d get, how many books a week I’d read.

            This helped marvelously in making me “productive”, and it even improved my industry, though my diligence had to wait until I married and had children. If that sounds like it may help, go for it. But perhaps you need not clutter your life with more activity, as I no longer need to clutter mine. Indeed, this entire last year was spent on about five hours of sleep, too much caffeine, and racehorse work from dawn till well after dusk. I intend to get more sleep next year (though I doubt I will in the second half of the year – more on that later).

            Indeed, the difficulty I found with that former format was that it gave me races to win but not the virtues to win them. This is the first six-months I’ve focused on habits instead of prizes, but I feel focusing on habits has made me better. Then again, I felt a better person when chasing those prizes, for I had to become a better person to achieve even some of them. So perhaps that old method helped as much or more; or perhaps neither method matters. Perhaps all that matters is trying to reach beyond oneself.

            Perhaps you read all these journaling preoccupations and they sound, as they half-sound to me on a re-read, like an attack of Spreadsheet Brain. All I can say is that, as a man naturally inclined towards idleness and by habit trained to dissipation, too given to barren amusements and too willing to shirk work and hand over responsibility, I have found this effort useful. I leave the rest to you, dear readers.

Flowerbeds

For auld lang syne, my dear
for auld lang syne
we'll take a cup of kindness yet
for auld lang syne

Auld Lang Syne, Unknown Artist, circa 1900, New York Public Library

Hortus Proprius

            Last year I read seventy-three books, taking the Bible as one. The year before that I read over 150. The year before that, it was over 200. This year, I’ve read fifty-three, and most of those are smaller works, like when I count each Plutarch Life as one ‘book’ or counting Cardinal St. John Henry Newman’s pamphlet “The Idea of a University” as a book. With some exceptions (The Idiot, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Aeneid), even the full books I did read were short, Emma, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, She, The First Men in the Moon, &c. So I feel rather unproductive this year when compared to years past.

            It’s not all ineffective doldrums, of course. The girls’ books are becoming increasingly fascinating, and I do not add even the ones I’d have read on my own to this list. I read a lot of lyric poems, for example, and many compelling Saints Lives, scores of fairy tales. What’s more, my choices for myself this year have been more discerning. Not only are they almost all books from The Tradition, but they were all too good, though admitted sometimes it was just that they were too short, to abandon. Last year I may have abandoned a half-dozen. Yet despite this year’s quality, I no longer feel like a cavalcade of culture is pouring into my ears and through my head.

            Not that I’ve been exactly lazy. One book a week (or thereabouts) is not too shabby. Especially true since almost all of the books were new to me, whereas I think last year a solid third were familiar friends. New books to me will have an asterisk (*) next to them.

            Moreover, given the general quality of the books, I will not do what I did last year, which was to pick five ‘Good’ books and five ‘Bad’ books. I will, however, highlight books I found exceptional in some way and share why with you. These books will be bold.

            So just a reminder: an asterisk (*) means I’d never read the book before, and the book being bolded means both that I thought it was exceptional and that I’m about to tell you why.

            I hope you enjoy.

January

*Old English Shorter Poems: Volume II, trans. by Robert Bjork

Job

*Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

            I said last year that Ivanhoe was one of the few perfect books I’d ever read. Brideshead Revisited is another. For being one of those turn-of-the-century books where nothing really happens, I was carried aloft with the perplexity of the story. And then the last third just shuts us in ever tighter boxes, ever more awkward scenarios, until we want to burst. And just when we think we can’t take any more of it, at the very end, the book destroys and gives hope everywhere. I started reading this just as my wife and I started attending Mass. It was a moving synchronicity.  

*Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen Meyer

February

Emma, Jane Austen

“Alexander”, Plutarch

*The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Howard Pyle

            These stories are amazing fun. I wonder why no one writes stories like this anymore, and I wonder if I could. They’re light, funny, but also have a complexity of human characterization I miss in many modern “complex” books. They seem to embody that saccharine banality ‘still waters run deep’ which was such a popular saying in my teen years. One of Pyle’s great skills is his ability to see. He was trained as an artist, and was indeed a damn good one too. The eye for detail that even a poorly trained artist develops is dearly missing in modern literature. The book also reminded me that Stevenson (more on him, later) wrote the books he loved in his boyhood but which no longer seemed to be written. It feels like that’s what Pyle was doing too, and very well indeed.

March

*“Caesar”, Plutarch

*“Cato”, Plutarch

*“Brutus”, Plutarch (10)

*“Demosthenes”, Plutarch

*“Cicero”, Plutarch

April

*The Pattern on the Stone, W. Daniel Hillis

*On the Republic, Cicero

*Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins

*Holy Moments, Matthew Kelly

May

*With the Old Breed, E.B. Sledge

*Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

*Classical Me, Classical Thee, Rebekah Merkle

*“The Idea of a University”, St. John Henry Newman (20)

*Unearthed, Meryl Frank

            I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up Meryl’s book. As I said in my review, Meryl is a cousin and so to advertise this book again is somewhat self-interested. But I also find it deeply compelling. Perhaps it’s just because it’s about my family, but I don’t think so. What surprised me about the book (and I’ve said this, somewhat apologetically, to Meryl’s face) is that it’s so well written! As a bit of a snob and a wannabe expert in that field, I expected my cousin who has spent her life in academia and politics to write like it. Not a bit! I was deeply please, and deeply affected by the horror of the story. It made me again somewhat ashamedly grateful that my great-grandparents (including my great-grandma’s furs, which Meryl writes about) were safely back here in America.

June

*The Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye

            In college, I wrote a thesis about how The Chronicles of Narnia was C.S. Lewis’s attempt to teach readers how to become educated men. Clearly even then I was not fully captured by the apparatus, but I was captured enough to call my essay “The Pedagogy of The Chronicles of Narnia”. If I’d known about Anthony Esolen, John Senior, or someone like Jason Baxter (he himself is my age), I would have tried to track down programs that promoted the preservation of culture (if I could then have stood their religiosity) and tried to gain a Ph.D, with them or their acolytes.

            Instead, I pursued a mostly unused J.D., and I wrote my essay without any “theory”, that is without quoting past literary scholars. At the time, there were no literary scholars I knew who I cared to use. I didn’t even really know C.S. Lewis had written five books and hundreds of articles on literary theory. I knew only The Discarded Image and was so ignorant of The Tradition I didn’t understand almost anything I found there (though knew I’d found something significant all the same). What’s worse, my professors introduced me to no literary theory worth its name, despite my reluctance and indeed outright refusal to use Derrida or Foucault as they wanted. They’d rather I use nothing and suffer in the grading of my essay than learn anything but their Critical scholarship or their Freudian lens.

            Maybe I’m being too harsh on them. Maybe they didn’t know these scholars either.

            But if only I’d known of Northrup Frye then! The Educated Imagination in particular would have been the perfect accompanying book, for it almost effortlessly leads a naïve reader into the world of – well – of how to educate an imagination, what that means, and the main scholars of this field. If one wants to start his journey into understanding literature and The Tradition, he could do far worse than starting with The Educated Imagination.

*Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson

            I talked about Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde right after I’d finished it. What amazed me then and amazes me still is not only that Mr. Stevenson seems to have brought into our world a New Myth, but that so many of the 19^th Century masters did. Peter Pan, Pride and Prejudice, and of course Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde are all remarkable works, perfect in their genres and with a story which carries all before it. Even those who have never once seen any faithful adaptation of these works know their Myths, for the Myths are in everything we now read and watch.

            I am often very hard on the 19^th Century, for I feel the Romantic Movement (esp. the Transnationalism Movement) ruined our understanding of art and man, but those faithful workers in the Tradition in this era are unsurpassed craftsmen. To switch interests of mine for a moment: whatever education these writers had must needs a resurrection in our modern world if we are to endure our future.

*Aeneid, Virgil

July

*This Is My Body: A Call to Eucharistic Revival, Bishop Robert Barron

*The Idiot, Dostoevsky

*Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson

            While nowhere near as profound as Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped is a nearly perfect boys’ adventure story all on its own. What Rob Roy is to the adolescent novel, Kidnapped is to the boys’ novel. Indeed, they are so similar it is hard to imagine Sir Walter Scott’s novel did not heavily influence Mr. Stevenson’s.

            As I wrote on Twitter, “[I]f Stevenson sat down & said 'I want to make Rob Roy for children', I would not be surprised.”

*When We Were Young, A. A. Milne

            This is the only book I read primarily for the children that I’ve included here, and that’s because the poems are just absolutely perfect. I especially love the one which introduces Winnie the Pooh (here Mr. Edward Bear). Seriously, if you have children and even if you don’t, buy this book. Just do it. I’ll even give you a link! The poem begins:

A bear, however hard he tries,
Grows tubby without exercise.
Our Teddy Bear is short and fat,
Which is not to be wondered at;
He gets what exercise he can
By falling off the ottoman,
But generally seems to lack
The energy to clamber back.

Now tubbiness is just the thing
Which gets a fellow wondering;
And Teddy worried lots about
The fact that he was rather stout.
He thought: "If only I were thin!
But how does anyone begin?"
He thought: "It really isn't fair
To grudge one exercise and air."
...

*How to Save the West, Spencer Klaven

August

*The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, G.K. Chesterton (30)

*The Metamorphoses, Ovid

September

*She, H. Rider Haggard

*Poetics, Aristotle

*Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Literature, C.S. Lewis

            Lewis is a genius and howevermuch he is read, he ought to be read more. Many of the ideas in this book, Lewis also presents and beautifully in The Discarded Image, which is a shorter yet weightier work. Nonetheless, if one were to ask for a primer on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, he could ask for no better. Lewis’s superpower is introducing us to this foreign world as naturally as to the town five miles away, but without effacing any of its strangeness.

*Annals (Books 1-6), Tacitus

*St. Francis of Assisi, G.K. Chesterton

*Exogenesis, Peco Gaskovski

            This is the newest book on this list and the one I constantly fail to write a review for. There’re some unevennesses here, questions of plotting and theme I’d have asked him about had I been his editor. And yet, the book is well constructed, thoughtful, and unexpectedly compelling. There are a few “twists” which even in hindsight I do not find quite plum to the story, but the vast majority seem obvious in hindsight yet few were obvious in foresight. What I especially love is how few truly villainous characters there are and how weak are the supposed heroes. No simple morality play, this. He does not repay every virtue with kindness, every vice with consequence, and he weaves what morality he has to share with us into the very nature of the characters. He remembers throughout that we are all broken vessels. I do not read (especially lately) many new books, but this one very much repaid my attention.

*The Enchiridion (The Handbook), Epictetus

Revelation, St. John

*Roots of Western Civilization (A Lecture), Anthony Esolen (40)

October

“On Fairy Tales”, J.R.R. Tolkien

*Sonnez les Matins, Jane Scharl

            This is another new book, one from a friend of these letters. There are three exceptional qualities to this play. First and most obviously, it’s in verse. What’s more, the verse is of consistently high quality. What’s even better, at times the verse simple sparkles. Second, under the surface and yet not obscured by it runs a deep meditation on the Church, one I only half understand. It’s like if a man were to kayak on the crystal ocean and watch as two-hundred feet below all of ocean life pranced before him. He might not perfectly understand what that life was doing, but it would be fascinating to watch. And that leads us to – Third, it’s fun! The play is fun, funny, and even a bit wild. I always looked forward to my time with the play, which I can’t honestly say about all the books I read, not even all those I enjoy. I bet the play would be a riot on stage, and hope I might one day catch a production.

November

*A Mathematician’s Lament, Paul Lockhart

            For homeschoolers (esp. of a Charlotte Mason temperament) who don’t know how to approach math, this book is indispensable.

*The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers

The Song of Roland, Sayers translation

*Love’s Labor’s Lost, Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

December

*King John, Shakespeare

*The First Men in the Moon, H.G. Wells

*Drive, Daniel Pink

*Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper

The Silver Chair, C.S. Lewis

*Will Mrs. Major Go to Hell? The Collected Work of Aloïse Buckley Heath, Aloïse Buckley Heath

The Amphitheater

            Have you ever wondered what Auld Lang Syne would sound like in Irish? Wonder no longer!

The Shed

            First off, January is a month which I normally take off. But that no longer means there will be no letters! Because I now have more than a year of these crazy things, I will post old ones on my fortnights off. I’m thinking of calling it “Garden Memories” or somesuch.

            More important, there is a Tradition which is largely obscure to us now. It’s a Tradition of Story, and it used to be the basis of our culture. It’s made up of nursery rhymes, Bible stories, folk tales, Saints Lives, and the one-thousand or five- good books that lead to the one-hundred or five- Great Books. These books feed the soul, conform one to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. They are teachers, without which it’s impossible to even explain the Good, the True, and the Beautiful except in so far as those without the real thing are desperate enough to gorge themselves on fakery, as a teen who has known only hot pockets will eat freezer-pizza and think himself feasted.

            In my long quest to delve deep into The Tradition, this Sea of Story, what Tolkien called ‘The Soup of Story’, I have used Uncle Jack (C.S Lewis) and the aforementioned Tollers (Tokien) to get an idea of it. There are few living practitioners (that I know of!), but I have found two scholars who deal with this world. They work outside academia and so need not propitiate it. They are Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks of The House of Humane Letters, and I’ve been following their podcast (The Literary Life Podcast) for several years now.

            Because my wife and I are finally back on our feet (that loss of situation bit deep), I bought my first class from them during this Christmas sale (still two days left!). I often feel The Literary Life Podcast barely skims the surface, and Ms. Stanford and Mr. Banks have admitted as much. After all, how far can one delve in three ninety-minute podcasts covering Hamlet? But I want a deep dive, and I look forward to seeing if the fairy tale class I bought lives up to its hype.

            Indeed, if “How to Read Fairy Tales” goes well, I will study with them on deeper levels. Not only are there some whacky classes and webinars I’d like to attend (“How to Read Beowulf”, “Seeking the Discarded Image”, “A Medieval Romance in a Galaxy Far, Far Away”, &c) There is a class, “How to read Literature”, which comes next after the fairy tale class in sequence. If that too goes well, I would try to for a fellowship with them the following year.

            Much of this knowledge one could acquire with a good adviser at a non-crazy University. As that path is no longer available to me, I plan to journey down this one.

            I do recommend their podcast. Enjoy.

The Loud Music Played Way Too Late Into the Night

            I’m here to remind you all, if you did not read the last letter or meant to click the link but forgot, that my essay on why we should ban (or force the sale of) TikTok has been published by The Vital Center. Come give it a read. The Vital Center has also asked me to expand that essay into an article for their magazine. So, as they say, Watch This Space.

Reviso Umbra Aedificata et Peroratio

            As we now have a comment section below this letter, I have a question for you all. I write on music, art, society, (occasionally) politics, education, and, of course, writing. If you don’t like my writing on writing, I honestly don’t know what you’re doing here (that is, unless you’re family). I couldn’t stop writing on writing if you wanted me to.

            But as for those other topics, some are important to me more than others, but none of them are vital to include in these letters. So here’s the question: What do you like? Which do you want more of? Which do you wish I’d avoid?

            As always, please

Leave a comment

            Or if you don’t want to post publicly, you can

Email Me

            If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click HERE.

            If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor

Subscribe now

            And you’d be doing me a favor if you shared this edition of Hortus Scriptorius on any social media available to you.

Share

           Happy New Year! Until next we meet, I remain your fellow

Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff

So what is a Hortus Scriptorius letter like? Well, every letter is broken into ‘parts of the garden’ (listed below). There are currently a dozen sections of this garden, and in any letter we’ll explore maybe half-a-dozen together. Check them out:

The Courtyard

Here I tell stories about my life which I think may help illustrate the theme of the letter. Sometimes I write about the world at large. This is where you and I may have a nice chat about what’s happening in the world. I’ve written about the Holocaust, copyright, and my own education.

Sit down, let’s chat.

With Our Fathers

This is about fatherhood and about generations. I’ve written about my parents and grandparents, but mostly I write about my children. They are crazy Gremlins (in fact, I refer to them here as Gremlin #1 and Gremlin #2). I hope you enjoy them… I was going to write ‘as much as I do’, but that’s impossible.       

Flowerbeds

Here is where we talk art. This is the most regular section (if it isn’t Hortus Proprius), and I hope you’ll enjoy the wealth of beauty I can share with you. My comments on it are amateurish, but they are because of that the words of a true lover.

The Schoolroom

Here we speak of education. I spent much of my adult life tutoring or otherwise working around schools, and my wife and I homeschool our children (or, rather, will homeschool them — as our eldest is not quite four). Here is where I share with you what I know and what I am learning. For those interested, our philosophy is heavily influenced by Charlotte Mason.

Hortus Proprius

This is the heart of the letters. We talk writing. Specifically, as I’ve been composing my book on the Figures of Speech, I’ve been sharing sections here.

A Bench Under the Trees

Sit down on the comfiest part of the bench, dappled by light underneath these bright boughs, and share with me some articles I’ve been reading recently (or, as it happens, often not so recently).

The Amphitheater

A love of good decorative art is a must, but more pressing even is adoration of music. Here I share music (and very occasionally lectures). As common a section as Flowerbeds.

The Hammock

Very occasionally, I will share reviews and recommendations for longer works. So get comfy in The Hammock and try not to fall asleep (I never manage it).

The Shed

This is where I write about what I’m working on. What I’m working on right now is that book I talked about in Hortus Proprius and on these letters.

The Grotto

These are not letters about religion, but I’d be blind and dishonest to obscure how profoundly Judaism and Christianity (especially Catholicism) has influenced my life. I will sometimes talk about that here.

The Loud Music Played Way Too Late Into the Night

Sometimes even the prettiest garden has that annoying too loud music. And, though I try, this is not the prettiest garden. Here is where I advertise myself, where I try (I hope not quite desperately) to get you to pay me more attention or (occasionally even) some money.

So fellow scriptor horti scriptorii, I hope you enjoy.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment