A Way with Words, Part 8: Robert Frost's Surface Tension

I have returned to the poem "Birches" by Robert Frost at various stages of my life since I first discovered it in college more than fifty years ago, and each time its meaning and value deepen for me. As a college student, I was struck by the image of birches bending either by the weight of a boy swinging on them (unlikely, says Frost) or the more possible severe consequences of ice storms. A decade later, as a father, I was taken by the choice of escaping the troubled world by climbing a birch tree to its highest weight-sustaining point or returning to earth, the only place where one can find love. As my wife and I became  empty nesters, I found heartrending the concluding picture Frost paints of spending one's final moments climbing a birch toward heaven. Later, when I saw one of my grandsons atop a tree on my property, I recalled the moment in the poem when Frost considers country boys apart from companionship, which  they would be able to find in the city, entertaining themselves by creating their own games, such as climbing a birch.      

But one moment in the poem has never lost its vividness and significance throughout my adult life. Recollecting a boy climbing a birch, Frost writes:

                ... He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

The comparison Frost draws is what a scientist would call surface tension, that apparently gravity-defying position that liquid can hold slightly above their container before spilling over. We have all tried that stunt, marveling at how water refuses to drip down our glass even though it exceeds its barrier. Admittedly, I still do so as a challenge on mornings when pouring orange juice into a four-ounce glass. Returning to the lonely boy painstakingly ascending the birch, I delight in the realization that Frost breaks the common belief of youth's reckless abandon. Sure, we can see climbing a tree as reckless, but the boy does so with utmost caution and precision, inclinations we usually do not attribute to children. Even above the brim. I never tire of that moment in "Birches."   

A Way with Words, Part 7: Sharon Olds's Artistic Choice

At the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poetry Festival in Stanhope, New Jersey some 30 years ago, poet Sharon Olds responded to a question about her bringing into her poetry people from her life, such as her parents, husband, and children. She used the terms silence for omitting real people and song for referring to them in her work. She concluded, "If I have to choose between silence and song, I will choose song." 

Even if we disagree with Olds's choice, we can still appreciate her metaphor, equating the concealment of personal experience as silence and its use as song. We can also extend her statement to the political poetry Ernesto Cardenal, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Pablo Neruda, and to other genres, such as the education treatises of Paolo Freire and the historical criticism of Michel Foucault. Silence evokes closed societies and song open ones. What better way is there to discover how human beings deal with grief, mental illness, and brutal oppression?  

While we may stop short when it comes to showcasing our family members or friends in our writing, the writer's imperative is song. That is our existential dilemma. We need to communicate to learn, to evolve as a culture.

A Way with Words, Part 6: William Faulkner's Singulary Artistry

This 10-part series, "A Way with Words," has focused up to this point on written sentences by notable authors. But for this post, I turn to the spoken word of Nobel laureate William Faulkner from his legendary 1956 Paris Review inerview, which I strongly encourage developing writers to read. The first page alone is worth memorizing as a mantra to guide one's writing life. Here is one such quote in response to a question about the importance of a writer's individuality:

All of us failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. In my opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't, which is why this condition is healthy.

For this reason, writers grow more metaphysical, painters more impressionistic, and composers more abstract. They continually and dutifully try to attain the unreachable in their artform. During the creative process, the representation of their imagination matters infinitely more to them than the linguistic mindset of their reader, the visual perspective of their viewer, or the aural sensibility of their listener. This creative endeavor, claims Faulkner, is the true work of the artist.

A Way with Words, Part 5: Isabel Allende's Universal Truism

In Isabel Allende's novel, La ciudad de las bestias (City of the Beasts), Kate Cold, the grandmother of the protagonist, 15-year-old Alexander, says: 

"Con la edad se adquiere cierta humildad, Alexander. Mientras más años cumplo, más ignorante me siento. Sólo los jóvenes tienen explicación para todo." ("With age, you acquire a certain humility, Alexander. The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.")

Allende's observation crystallizes a major distinction between the aged and youth. As we move through childhood, our parents, teachers, and other elders give us what we believe to be a reliable playbook of life. We are know-it-alls. But as we evolve from children to adults, experience shows us countless contradictions between what our guardians taught us and what we learned through observation. Our desired outcomes are too often derailed, our relationships are too unexpectedly transformed, our hopes are too frequently dashed. Life is just unpredicatable, full of risks and surprises, some good and some bad. The longer we live, the more untrustworthy we realize the expression, "Now I've seen everything." Now matter how much we wish Kate Cold's comment to her grandson were merely an ironic remark by a bitter, disillusioned old woman, we accept it as an enduring truth. 

A Way with Words, Part 4: Gabriela Mistral's Spiritual Metaphor

Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, better known as Chilean poet and educator Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), the first Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote this sentence in her prose poem "La oración de la maestra" ("The Teacher's Prayer"):

Dame el levantar los ojos de mi pecho con heridas, al entrar cada mañana a mi escuela. (Lift my vision from my broken heart as I enter my school every morning.)

I want to start with the subjectivity and difficulty of translation. I take literary liberties since ojos literally means eyes (I use vision), pecho means chest (I use heart), and heridas means wounds (I use broken). Not all translations agree with me. I realize that eyes can be used metaphorically, as in "Mine eyes have seen the coming of the Lord," from Julia Ward Howe's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Presumably, Howe's use of eyes alludes to the human spirit, but I feel, rightly or wrongly, that vision is a more expansive, or existential, term for Mistral's ojos where English is concerned. As for chest wounds, I believe the more common English term broken heart is as figurative as the author's intent. 

Now, what makes Mistral's sentence sing so universally is its ascendent humility and unqualified passion for the children she teaches. We have heard the apt expression "Don't bring your work home" and the equally applicable "Don't bring your home life to work." As students or parents, we do not want teachers to allow outside pressures, disappointments, and sorrows to influence the way they teach or treat their students. Whatever bad happens to teachers outside the classroom should stay there.

Mistral's way with words elevates common wisdom to a summoning of her God for granting her spiritual faith, hope, and charity in teaching her students. In doing so, she transforms a simple statement into an essential, transcendent prayer.

A Way with Words, Part 3: Yuval Noah Harari's Parallel Definitions

After taking Yuval Noah Harari's brilliant course, A Brief History of Humankind, now available on YouTube, I decided to read his 2014 book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The book brought numerous unexpected pleasures, including Harari's fluid, trenchant writing style. 

I am reading Harari's most recent book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, brings new surprises, both in content and style. Note these two sentences from page 119 of Nexus: 

To summarize, a dictatorship is a centralized information network, lacking strong self-correcting mechanisms. A democracy, in contrast, is a distributed information network, processing strong self-correcting mechanisms. 

The premise of Nexus is that since the beginning of time, no one person can change much in our world; indeed, communities (or information networks) are necessary to disseminate, interpret, and act on data for society to flourish. As Dennis Duncan's mostly unfavorable review of Nexus in the New York Times puts it, "In a nutshell, Harari's thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information. Dictatorships are more concerned with controlling data than with testing its truth value; democracies, by contrast, are transparent information networks in which citizens are able to evaluate and, if necessary, correct bad data."

You can see why the two sentences quoted above from Nexus are essential to understanding Harari's proposition. Those sentences taken together sing because of their parallelism in both parts of the statement. The first part of the sentences describes the type of information network belonging to each form of government, and the second part reflects on each government's relationship with what Harari calls self-correction. Communities that commit to infallibility of a central guiding doctrine, whether  economic, political, or religious, do not take well to self-correcting. Such systems are intolerant of people questioning their doctrine. Contrarily, true scientific communities are by definition self-correcting. They have no infallible doctrine and continually seek to advance knowledge and human prospects, meaning they will be quick to overrule an existing standard if someone can disprove it and propose a more fitting doctrine. 

The second part of the 500-page book covers what will happen to self-correcting communities as AI imposes greater influence on the world. I'm not there yet, but I still delight in Harari's thinking and expressiveness. 

A Way with Words, Part 2: G. K. Chesterton's Paradoxical Wit

In "Tremendous Trifles," the first of 36 essays in G. K. Chesterton's 1909 book of the same name, comes this concluding sentence:

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

A quick read of that sentence would make you miss the deep and rich insight of Chesterton's point. A bit of background. In this essay, the author uses a parable of two boys, Peter and Paul, whose wishes are granted by a passing wizard. Paul wishes to be a giant to easily walk across all the wonders of the world in no time, and Peter wishes to be only a half-inch high to endlessly strive for distant horizons of mere meters. You'll have to read the rest of the brief essay (1,316 words) to find how things turn out for the boys.

Think of Chesterton's aphorism in two parts. He begins with the claim that we live in a world of abundance, sometimes overwhelming in its beauty, breathtaking in its excitement, boundless in the experiences it affords us; he ends it with an indictment of a human condition lacking in imagination, enchantment, and inspiration. Also, note his verb choice: starve. Is he talking about a matter of life and death? Indeed, if we think of our mind and spirit as life-affirming mechanisms. Finally, hear the rhythm he creates with his repetition of for want of and near-repetition of wonders and wonder, the s prompting such a prominent contrast in meaning. In doing so, he challenges us to examine our worldview. We do live the life of the mind, as Hannah Arendt put it. And Chesterton underscores this point in the last paragraph of the essay: "everything is in an attitude of the mind."