SCHOOLS, NEWS MEDIA, AWARENESS, AND MEETING THE CHALLENGES

I begin with three apparently random observations.

First, this morning I read about a local school district near Houston, Texas voting to remove chapters from school texts, texts whose publishers had already been forced by the state to eliminate so-called “wokeified” elements. The state board didn’t want young children learning, for example, that Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez “advocated for positive change.” But the board of a district near Houston, Texas – a district in which nearly 80% of the students are people of color, thinks that the state board did not go far enough. They removed chapters from five texts – the board member proposing the change said the deleted chapters “were inappropriate for students because they discussed ‘vaccines and polio,’ touched on ‘topics of depopulation,’ had ‘an agenda out of the United Nations’ and included ‘a perspective that humans are bad.’” Better, the argument goes, that students not learn anything that might unsettle a particular world view.

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ECOLOGY, ETHICS, AND GOVERNMENTAL POWER

I recently finished reading Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. As I say in my notes about the book, I wish that I’d discovered this book long ago. But I didn’t say in those notes that as I read the book I found myself thinking again and again that there’s an analogy worth exploring between Leopold’s analysis of the proper relationship between humans and the rest of nature, and of how we have abused that relationship, on one hand, and how we should understand the relationship between one country and the larger international community, and of how the Trump administration is abusing that relationship, on the other. I’m still struggling with this, but — true to the title I’ve given my notes here — I want to think out loud about it.

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SELECTING BOOKS; SELECTING IDEAS

Some random and vaguely formulated thoughts about books, ideas, and possessions.

I began this year with a commitment both to plan and track my reading more carefully and also to post here in the blog some notes about each of the books. Now, three months in, I find that it’s been very helpful to me, and I even get some hints that others find it helpful as well.

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SELF AS THE ENDPOINT OF HISTORY

James Atlas:

We think of ourselves not as located in a continuum, part of an ever-evolving world, but as its endpoint. All of human history has been leading up to us. It’s hard — impossible — to grasp that we, too, will seem quaint to the generations that follow us, our clothes strange, our images fixed in a remote moment in time.

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WHY WRITE?

Why write?

A response to this question is a pretty standard essay for essayists, a pretty common post for bloggers, and (I suspect) a common entry in a personal journal or diary. I think about it pretty much every morning when I start the day’s journal entry, and I struggled with the question openly in the first entry of this blog and again in a post written a few weeks later. I’m sure the question has come up in other posts as well, simply because I remain unsatisfied with my attempts to answer it.

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PERMANENTLY PHILOSOPHICALLY PUZZLED

Bertrand Russell, as quoted by Ved Mehta:

You know the best remark [G. E.] Moore ever made? I asked him one time who his best pupil was, and he said ‘Wittgenstein’. I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Because, Bertrand, he is my only pupil who always looked puzzled.’ … That was such a good remark, such a good remark. It was also, incidentally, very characteristic of both Moore and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was always puzzled.

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INTIMACIES: ENTERING THE WORLD OF AN AUTHOR

Earlier this month I introduced my comments about Megan Marshall’s After Lives: On biography and the mysteries of the human heart by saying that “I came out of the reading with the sense that I know Marshall as I might know someone with whom I have occasional conversations over the course of many years. Her personality and her person emerge both in the stories that she tells and in the way that she tells them.” I suppose that I find myself in relationship with any author whose book I read carefully, but there are some books – and Marshall’s is one of them – that engage me more deeply than others. I was reminded of this earlier this morning, when I read an essay in Vivian Gornick’s The Men in My Life. Gornick begins one essay with an memory of an experience she once shared with her mother. “When she was in her eighties, and living alone, I once gave her a copy of the memoir of an Englishwoman, older than herself, who had written many novels and lived a life as different from hers as any two lives could be. A week later I found her reading the book as though in a trance. ‘How are you liking it?’ I asked. She looked up at me, remained silent for a moment, and then said, ‘I feel as though she’s in the room with me.’ And then she said, ‘When I finish this book I’m going to be lonely’” (pp. 29f). I wouldn’t say that finishing my reading of Marshall’s book left me feeling lonely, but it does leave me with memories of times that I shared with her by way of her writing.

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WE WRITE TO TASTE LIFE TWICE

Anaïs Nin:

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don’t write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.

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USING THE HTML DETAILS DISCLOSURE ELEMENT

Like many others, I post notes about my reading on my blog. I’ve tried several ways of doing this; I’m now in my third month of the current strategy, and I find that it helps me to think more carefully about what I’m reading.

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NATURE: COMMODITY OR COMMUNITY

Aldo Leopold, writing in 1948:

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.

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