You've Got to Hide Your Love Away

Wow. In the words of Mike: "oh my kittens." That was a crazy day. Not so much because of the day itself, but because I have to do it again, and while I spent two weeks preparing for yesterday, I only had 16 hours to prepare for today.

The Three Step Plan

Class went well, it really did. The kids were quiet and well behaved. I didn't stutter over my material, I didn't forget to mention anything too major and the worst part of the day was when I accidentally saved over my book check-out document with a temporary attendance spreadsheet.

In our second session of English class today we read the poem "There is no frigate like a book" by Emily Dickinson. These kids are going to get their fill of Dickinson, but I thought beginning with that poem was especially appropriate because of the subject matter and the fact that it is ingrained upon the deepest part of my gray-matter in the voice of Mr. Tobey who read it in my own 7th grade English class.

The poem is as follows:

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

I loved telling the kids about how Emily Dickinson slowly developed into an incurable recluse, and how her poems were only gathered and published after her death when they were found stuffed into her desk and even into the walls of her bedroom where she spent most of her adult life. For my money she is one of the greatest minds that ever lived and perhaps it was because she confined herself to the small beauties of her hometown and childhood home. Emily only traveled further than a few miles from Amherst once, and that was to visit her father who was serving as a congressman in Washington, D.C.

It was the simplicity of Emily Dickinson's life that really allowed her to become a great writer and thinker. She knew very little of the world, she had very few books to read, but what she knew she knew exceptionally well.

It occurred to me the other day that to be fully human - to be really living the human experience - only three things are essential, and that our models of humanity, from Shakespeare and Dante to John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, have shown us what this progression looks like.

1. Know Yourself - The truth is often so incomprehensibly simple that it can take us years to wrap our minds around even a small aspect of it. From our birth, our education should not be centered on "doing," but on being. It is not and has never been our job to find a profession or to learn a trade, but it turns out these things happen naturally as we learn to see the native beauty in ourselves and the world around us. But how does this education take place? Well, as I see it, if you are given access to formal education then the best way is through the masterworks of Western literature:Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. When you are done with them: raking leaves, swimming, taking long walks, stargazing, playing with children, cooking your own meals, building a fire. That's how we become human. Neither the means nor the definition of humanity have ever changed, we've just developed an increasing number of inventions to distract us.

2. Make Yourself - As we digest the beauty of the universe and the produce of minds who have devoted their lives to pursuing the highest truths of the nature of man, we slowly begin to see the disparity between what we are and we ought to be. Between Jesus, Socrates, King Arthur, Odysseus and Atticus Finch, we have no excuse for wanting to stay the way we are and not conforming ourselves to a higher standard.

3. Make Yourself Known - "Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree rotten and its fruit rotten, because a tree is known by its fruit." - Matthew 12:33. Most literature, poetry, and culture in general today is a result of men forcing their way past self-knowledge to making themselves known. I can't imagine that a mind like Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson could do anything but write. You can see in their words that no matter how intricate and layered their meaning and intent, the composition was the effortless and natural consequence of comprehending real and abiding truth. I don't want to make this sound like reaching nirvana or anything like that, but I can't imagine how such understanding and comprehensive souls could do anything but provide, out of their abundance, signs and symbols that might act as intermediaries for the rest of us. Much like the atoning sacrifice of Christ, these giants of intellect devoted their lives and often their deaths to building a bridge between us and the truth.