The Humanities Die in Silence

“Learn to labor and to wait”

Feb 23, 2024

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 —

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            “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:

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            “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

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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:

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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

Hortus Scriptorius

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