Generally good advice, although, in the age of film and TV drama, we have to strike a balance. It can't all be literary fiction. Film is not an inferior art form to the novel. Also, he has a Catholic bias.
Tony Esolen
Enchanting the world ...
Or rather, allowing the world, which is an enchanted place, to be present to your children in all its wonder ...
Or again, how to scrub away the grime of DISENCHANTMENT, which grime is the stock in trade of our schools ...
I've gotten some requests recently about what to do to work against the grime. Here are my recommendations:
1. Get your kids the hell out of the schools.
2. Find the list of the Thousand Good Books, by John Senior. A very fine list it is. I might have a couple of quibbles here and there, but in general it is terrific.
3. Get your kids outdoors. Do things. Make things. Play games. Visit people. Find food and cook it.
4. Teach your boys to chop wood, hunt, fish, find their way in the woods, etc.; if your girls are interested, take them too.
5. Learn to play a musical instrument. Learn the stars in the sky. Get a pair of binoculars and use them. Get a small telescope. Things like those ....
6. As for BOOKS: Anything by Charles Dickens -- or rather EVERYTHING. Dickens is the greatest creator of literary characters this side of Shakespeare. For that one capacity, he can even stand the comparison with the Bard. Nobody else can, with the possible exception of Dante -- for characterization, I mean. Dickens is a comic genius, and is underrated, because anybody can read him. Read the other great novelists of the 19th century: Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas, George Eliot, Walter Scott, Anthony Trollope, Victor Hugo, Alessandro Manzoni, Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathanael Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol ...
7. Don't ignore art, music, and poetry. Get the 19th century, before the 20th century meltdown in poetry: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, etc. Poetry delivers a lot in a small space: it is TNT. Read Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Read Browning's dramatic monologues: "My Last Duchess," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb etc.", "The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," "An Epistle of Karshish," "Andrea del Sarto," "Caliban Upon Setebos," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "How It Strikes a Contemporary," "Cleon," ....
8. Don't go down the Lord of the Flies route, for starters. Lord of the Flies is a great work of art and thought. But it is not for beginners. It is not for your disillusioned young people, nor is Walker Percy, nor is Fitzgerald, nor is Orwell ... Not for starters. They come later ...
I wish I had more appreciation of fictional literature. I think I just didn't get that gene. Same goes with sports.
ReplyDeleteFilm and TV drama displaced literature as the dominant form of fiction. Film and lit. are good at different things.
DeleteTV and film still pretty few and far between for me. Last TV show that hooked me in was Breaking Bad. I am a sucker for space-themed films, but recent entries have been a mess (e.g. Interstellar). At least there is some visual spectacle to them.
ReplyDelete