books 19 Mar 2006 03:00 pm
A Jacques Barzun Reader: Selection From His Works
Barzun is a writer whose name I have frequently heard mentioned in the the classical education circles but one I have never personally read. In fact, I didn’t know he was still alive, from this century (or the last), or anything really about him. I wouldn’t have gone looking for one of his books or works in the library. Thankfully, David is someone who would. And, that he would know from page one that we’d just found someone whose writing would strike such a chord that we would gleefully giggle over the stretching of our minds. In fact, as it turns out, Barzun is the kind of writer who takes what I was trying to articulate and does so with such excellence that I’m not only dumbfounded to read *exactly* what I was trying to say, but am blown away with his genius and skill in doing so. The first essay in the book, Toward a Fateful Serenity, he brilliantly excites with the following:
On things done well:
Growing up before the first World War in an artistic milieu in Paris and also a conventional one in Grenoble, furnished the mind of the child I remember with two main perceptions. One was that making works of art by exerting genius was the usual work of adults; the other was that such a life was hedged about by traditions, manners, and prosperity.
Needless to say, neither of these notions was explicit–or abstract as in the retelling. But faith in thier reality encouraged a precocious interst in all subjects, persons, ideas, and words half-understood. The joy of being was the joy of being there: the zest for life was tied to the spectacle of good things being done with confident energy.
Take your pick: the following quote hit my school/educational musings on head, applies to my dread of rote worship and mega-church infrasructure, and is precisely why I fight against putting my faith in systems:
Where, then is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drugery but where human judgement abdicates. …”methods” substituted for reading books and judging art are a perversion of what belongs to science and engineering: “models”, formulas, theories. Specialism too turns machine-like if it never transcends it’s single task. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely.
On maintaining perspective and the benefit of studying history:
History is concrete and complex; everything in it is individual and entangled. Reading it, mulling it over does not weaken concern with the present, but it brings detachment from the immediate and thus cures “the jumps” –seeing every untoward event as menacing, every success or defeat as permanent, every opponent as a monster of terror.
Elsewhere online, I’m considering the difference between being a “joiner” and a “skeptic” and the suggestion that one is either one or the other. Feeling inside that there has to be more to this but not being sure why or how to exactly say it, I was happy to read this resonating thought by Barzun:
A sense of “how things go” in history –how they came and go– also protects against the worst among machines: the bandwagon. To keep from climbing on is harder than ever since that other machine, the media, has been installed. So many projects, attitudes, and “concepts”, as they are quaintly called, are launched with all the trappings of true ideas that holding aloof looks like egotism or the sulks (or, my note, skepticism?): but it is not sulking to stare as the lemmings rush by; it is self-defense.
On history and it’s study leading to more than just defensiveness but on admiration, and let’s hear it for those who are so entrenched in the everyday living of life, raising little ones in all its thankless glamour, that you have a story worth the telling:
The past is full of men and women (and children too) whose lives and deeds are worthy of honor, wonder, and gratitude…lives of this kind confirm or reinstate a just estimate of life itself. The modern dogma that art is the only redeeming feature of the much-pitied “human condition” rejects nine-tenths of life, and with it those not dedicated to the highest pursuits. Faulkner in that mood said that one of Keat’s odes “was worth any number of old women”. Such literary conciet is also bad logic. Life is good because it is the source and container of everything we value. It is old women, not Grecian urns, that have in thier time borne Keates and Faulkners.
I of course have much more to share but The One Who Found This Book is clamouring to come read to him…..;-)
