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."