Hildegarde

The Jupiter is for Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, which is what I was listening to while reading this morning–and on a Saturday and not a Sunday, too.

Mostly I only take Sunday off, and not even Sunday when I’m in the middle of a book, either writing the first draft or cutting it. 

But this year, I’ve completed not one but two major projects–a Gregor Demarkian due out for 2013, and the first Georgia Xenakis.  I am feeling deserving of a little self indulgence. 

To put it mildly.

But writing for me is what writing always is, and I do always come up against the problem that I cannot write at all when I’m reading certain books. 

Towards the end of any project, I start to get nervous about reading books I haven’t read before, because I just don’t know if I can work when I’m reading them or not.   I therefore tend to go back to things I’ve read before and know will let me work.

These things do not make a whole lot of sense as a group.  I am not entire sure why these books hang together, or what they have in common beyond the fact that they are books I can read while I’m writing.

All of P.D. James is on that list, and so is all of Anne Perry.  Stephen King is not.  The Loeb translation of Plato is.  Burning Questions works.  So does any Perry Mason or Agatha Christie. Only Gaudy Night, out of the Dorothy L. Sayers, makes the list.

It’s like I said.  There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.  I’m sure there’s an organizing principle in there somewhere.  I just can’t find it.

This time, when I finished Burning Questions and still had a week of writing and cutting to do, what I wanted to read was The Feminine Mystique.  For one thing, I know I can work through it.  For another, the theme fit with Burning Questions.  For a third, it had been nearly ten years since I had read it the last time, and that’s always an interesting comparison.

As it turned out, this was not something I was going to be able to do.  It was one of those things.  I had two copies of it in the house, and I could find neither one of them.  I searched for five days, and then I recognized I would have to give up and find something else.  A friend sent me two copies, and my younger son went to the library and ordered me one on interlibrary loan, but I had to read something right away.

What I finally chose to read was something else I hadn’t reread in a few years, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. 

This is not, by the way, what I want to talk about today.  I had the same problem with the Bloom that I always do.  For one thing, I can never quite figure out what he wants.

But the bigger deal was this–I finished reading that just yesterday afternoon, and when I did, I went looking for some decompression literature, something to be reading when I’m not sure what I want to read next, or when I need something short to balance something long, or whatever.

My usual choice for that kind of thing is Sherlock Holmes–and I want to stress as strongly as possible that if you’re looking for a good complete collection of those stories to actually carry around and read, they’re available in a Barnes and Noble classics edition in two volumes that’s inexpensive, well put together, and arranged chronologically as originally published.

This time, however, Holmes was not what I was looking for.  All I really need for these periods are collections or short stories or articles, so that I can read to the end of one or two and then put the book away to go back to later. 

This time, what I picked up was that enormous collections of essays on education starting with the ancients that I’d first tried a bit of about three years ago.  I’m pretty sure I reported on some of that here–essays and excerpts from longer works by everyone from Plato to the day before yesterday.

When I got to the book this time, the first section I was faced with was by Erasmus, and the second was by Martin Luther.

Erasmus is one of my favorite people in history, and Martin Luther is a man whose work I do not generally like at all.

I say that last with reservation, because not much of Luther’s writing is available in English, and my German wasn’t ever up to it. 

But what I have read of Luther, I have not been happy with, and far too much of it has been concerned with polemics against “learning” that sound a lot like modern-day anti-intellectualism. 

It’s one of the commonplaces in the modern day secular movement that the Catholic Church repressed learning and Luther freed it.  I even met a number of people–and one in particular–who were convinced that the Reformation must have come before the Renaissance, because the Catholic Church would never have allowed the latter.

The section on Luther in this book, however, contained an instruction to the civil authorities in Germany, most of which was concerned with two themes:

1) That learning and study should be encouraged, and pagan learning should not be entirely proscribed–only Aristotle, who was full of error and evilness and other nonChristian and not good things.

and

2) That municipal schools should be set up in every town and city to ensure that every boy and girl should have at least the rudiments of an education.

Now, that the Protestants (unlike the Catholics) insisting on universal literacy for all classes of society and for girls as well as boys was not news to me.  If you’re going to insist on sola scriptura, and on the principle that men did not need the mediation of priests to understand it, then you’re going to have to make sure that all your people can read at least well enough to read a Bible.

What I found much more interesting about this selection, though, was the reason Luther thought it necessary and advisable  for municipalities and churches to set up such schools.

Yes, it would insure that all children would learn to read, even children of poor parents who could not afford to provide tutors or to send their children to private schools with tuition fees.

But the real reason was this:  Luther did not believe we could trust parents to make their children literate, or to properly instruct them in faith and morals.

Parents, apparently, were, to Luther, mostly neglectful, self-concerned, and heedless of their children’s well being.  They were also woefully ignorant, and so mired in sin that they couldn’t provide their children with decent examples of how to live a Christian life.

All this was especially interesting in comparison with the Erasmus I’d just read, which assumed that parents wanted the best for their children, but weren’t sure how to provide it–and a little advice from someone who knew would be all that was necessary for parents to choose the best path, no coercion by the state required.

Which bring me to my question of the day.

The idea that parents are incapable of caring decently for their children and must be forced to by the state has been around a long time, starting at least with Plato, if not before.

And it’s with us still, in the entire “best interests of the child” standard in family courts.

Such ideas have not, however, been universal. 

The question becomes, then, what it is that makes this particular idea so attractive to so many people.

And no, “power” is not the answer.

Seductive as power is, not everybody who craves it craves it in this particular form.  In fact, most people who are after power want it in other ways and in other guises.

I’m tempted to say that this sort of thing crops up  most commonly among people who do not themselves have children, or who have at most one or two–and that seems to hold down to our present day.

Luther, however, went on to have children of his own, and for all I know might have an entire pack of them.

And out of this idea, we have the New England common schools and the directives of most Calvinist societies that all children spend some time in them, which was not altogether a negative thing.

I think it’s the impetus that puzzles me the most–if you’re not interested enough in children to have your own, why are you so passionately interested in what happens to other people’s?

And yes, I know, there’s the power thing.

But as I said, there are lots of other ways to get power, and most people aren’t interested in this one.

So I’d like to figure out what’s going on with the people who are.