Worthy Words, Part 15: John Dewey

John Dewey (1859 - 1952) was an American philosopher who is still commands the attention of graduate schools of education three quarters of a century after his death. One of Dewey's best known books, Democracy and Education, establishes the purpose of education early on:

Beings who are born not only unaware of, but quite indifferent to, the aims and habits of the social group have to be rendered cognizant of them and actively interested. Education, and education alone, spans the gap. (Democracy and Education, page 3)

In the context of Dewey's position, I refer to education to not only what occurs within a school building. I include what elders teach children. A modern society tends to overlook this essential detail pf spanning the gap between ignorance and learning cultural traditions. Consider some of societal expectations: respecting public property; tolerating people unlike ourselves; contributing to the greater good of the community through work, learning, and volunteerism; investing in quality and safe food and goods; and providing housing, medical, psychiatric, social, sanitation, and security services, among other provisions. 

Sure, technology continues to change us, but we still need each other to perpetuate our species. This basic reminder from Dewey should be part of a teacher's oath.   

Worthy Words, Part 14: Albert Einstein

When Albert Einstein received a human rights award from the Chicago Decalogue Society on February 20, 1954, he opened his acceptance speech with this comment:

You are assembled today to devote your attention to the problem of human rights. You have decided to offer me an award on this occasion. When I learned about it, I was somewhat depressed by your decision. For in how unfortunate a state must a community find itself if it cannot produce a more suitable candidate upon whom to confer such a distinction. — Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, p. 34. 

If you think Einstein was attempting humility, think again. He was speaking at a time of McCarthyism, at a time not long after the Nuremberg Trials showed that following government orders or arguing tu quoque was insufficient grounds for defense against human rights violations. Yet, Einstein implies, too few people step forward to denounce government crimes and resist their creators and enforcers, and most who do arrive on the scene far too late.

Worthy Words, Part 13: Robert Frost

I have been rereading some of the poems of Robert Frost (1874-1963), perhaps for the first time in this millennium, so I am experiencing his work a quarter-century older, hopefully wiser, and certainly more curious about the human condition. Few poets can write as Frost does about our proclivity toward pensiveness ("Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"), our spirit of adventure ("The Road Not Taken"), our lament of passing time ("Nothing Gold Can Stay"), our tendency toward judging humanity ("Fire and Ice"), or our heartbreak in enduring loss ("Home Burial"). 

I came across a 2-stanza, 1-sentence, 8-line, 34-word gem, "Dust of Snow," from Frost's Collected Poems. In such a short space, he shows why critics universally regard him as a master of the American vernacular. From The way a crow / Shook down on me to save some part / Of a day, the verse seems like plainspeak, merely a matter-of-fact statement made in idle passing, until it repeats and repeats in the memory like a sacred credo. 

If you read these six referenced poems at the Poetry Foundation website (53 of Frost's are there), start with "Dust of Snow."

Worthy Words, Part 12: Robert M. Pirsig

Robert M. Pirsig's 1974 must-read masterpiece, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, contains many worthy quotes, especially when he departs from his literal 5,700-mile round-trip motorcycle journey from Minneapolis to San Francisco with his 12-year-old son to explore quality and being. I suppose I can write several hundred blog posts quoting from this book, which has sold over 5 million copies. 

In an hour-long May 20, 1974 talk on the book at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Pirsig anxiously awaits an introduction and quotes a local Zen master by saying, "Whatever situation you're in, you should find yourself in it immediately." From that sentence, he commands my attention like few speakers can. 

Pirsig was interested in bridging Western and Eastern philosophical systems in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. His sentence underscores what no Aristotelian or Buddhist thinker would argue. We must be present to observe and to experience. We cannot be in the past or in the future. All we have is now. Fifty years later, this timeless quote remains infallible.

Worthy Words, Part 11: Bertrand Russell

In Religion and Science (1935), Welsh Nobel laureate and philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) wrote three sentences that draw a clear line between the essential distinction and value of science and religion. Here is the first:

A religious creed differs from scientific theory in claiming to embody eternal and absolutely certain truth, whereas science is always tentative, expecting that modifications it its present theories will sooner or later be found necessary, and aware that its method is one which is logically incapable of arriving at a complete and final demonstration. (page 14)

Russell posits that science builds on observable facts, while religion emerges from unprovable beliefs. Science continues to reconsider the validity of its own theories based on new empirical evidence, but religion professes to know eternal truth drawn from unimpeachable prophets. Russell's detractors who point to his self-proclaimed agnosticism sidestep the fundamental truth of his comparative statement. 

Russell does credit religion for its serving as basis of societal good in this next sentence:  

In the best of saints and mystics, there existed in combination the belief in certain dogmas and a certain way of feeling about the purposes of human life. (page 17)

What good is science without understanding its usefulness in making bearable life on this planet? Religion, Russell implies, has the potential to serves that purpose. Nevertheless, this final sentence unveils his viewpoint of the historical tension between science and religion: 

No real excellence can be inextricably bound up with unfounded beliefs; and if theological beliefs are unfounded, they cannot be necessary for the preservation of what is good in the religious outlook. (page 18)

Logic and ethics, not dogma, ultimately stand as the determining factors of what is good, how we should live, and why we should conduct ourselves as we do.

Worthy Words, Part 10: Carlos Fuentes

The great Mexican writer, diplomat, and professor Carlos Fuentes (1928 - 2012) had a lot to say about a broad range of topics, ranging from literary legends to politics, business to social class, national identity to cultural myths. Fuentes's  soul-searching, humorous, and compelling memoir, "How I Started to Write," appears in his 1990 essay collection Myself and Others: Selected Essays, in part a remembrance of his initial experiences in the United States as the child of a Mexican diplomat stationed in Washington, DC. 

The North American world blinds us with its energy; we cannot see ourselves, we must see you. The United States is a world full of cheerleaders, prize-giving, singin' in the rain: the baton twirler, the Oscar awards, the musical comedies cannot be repeated elsewhere; in Mexico, the Hollywood statuette would come dipped in poisoned paint; in France, Gene Kelly would constantly stop in his steps to reflect: Je danse, donc je suis. [I  dance, therefore I am.] (page 5)

Americans can argue all they want about whether that national energy still exists, but it surely does to people outside of the USA. As the son of Maltese immigrants and with close familial ties in three continents, I have often tried to see the country I was born, raised, and reside in, the United States, from the eyes of outsiders. Fuentes's words remind me that Americans love a parade, exude creativity, and focus more on doing that leads to results than on reflecting purposelessly for its own sake.

Three paragraphs later, Fuentes doubles down on his view of the USA:

As a young Mexican growing up in the U.S., I had a primary impression of a nation of boundless energy, imagination, and the will to confront and solve the great social issues of the times without blinking or looking for scapegoats. It was the impression of a country identified with its own highest principles: political democracy, economic well-being, and faith in its human resources, especially in that most precious of all capital, the renewable wealth of education and research. (page 6)  

I refuse to get jingoistic or nostalgic, so I'll conclude with these words: If only we Americans could live up to that praise ...  

Worthy Words, Part 9: Theodore Roethke

These are the first 4 lines of Theodore Roethke's 24-line sestet "In a Dark Time": 

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree. 

Writers have described this poem as Roethke's exploration into psychological suffering or mental disturbance. Roethke did, in fact, contend with manic depression. And lines such as "What's madness but nobility of soul" and "My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, / Keeps buzzing at the sill" can incline readers toward interpreting the poem as the poet's plunge into despair.

After reading "In a Dark Time" more than a dozen times over the past 40 years, I see the poem from an entirely different perspective. For sure, its beginning movement is one of descent, into the mind, an attempt to resolve mystery, into the soul, a quest for harmony with one's existence and the natural world. But its ascendancy staggers the imagination. How else could I see a poem that concludes with these lines:

A fallen man, I climb out of fear.

The mind enters itself, and God the mind.

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

The poem does more than take my breath away. It shakes my spirit to its core. I urge you to read and reread "In a Dark Time" at the Poetry Foundation.

Worthy Words, Part 8: Duke Ellington

Today is the 125th anniversary of Duke Ellington's birth. Edward Kennedy Ellington (1899 – 1974) was a bandleader who kept his orchestra touring for more than a half-century and an extraordinary pianist. As for his great musical compositions, I rank him as peerless among American composers and second to none among the classical Europeans. Ellington's range was staggering, from blues to sacred compositions. His music, especially his suites, continues to give me countless hours of pleasure, and I'm glad that Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will celebrate the maestro's contribution to world music with three concerts later this week.

Ellington was also an exceptional writer, as he shows in his endlessly entertaining 500-page autobiography, Music My Mistress. In what amounts to a scrapbook of his long career, the book pays homage to hundreds of people Duke met and loved throughout his life. He mentions each one in a positive light, proof that none of us can get where we're going all on our own. 

One particular passage in a section called "Music and the Primeval" strikes me as emblematic of how Ellington saw humanity:

The human being has patterned his every move, sound, and image after God's other creatures and natural wonders. Birds whistle like birds, leopards walk like leopards, horses run like horses, gulls fly like gulls, lions roar like lions, and fish swim like fish. All animals, except people, act like their species.

Music, for instance, began with man, primitive man, trying to duplicate Nature's sounds—winds, birds, animals, water, the crescendo of fire—after which great systems of learning were set up, only to discover that music is limitless. The more you learn, the more you want to learn. And the more you hear it, the more you want to hear it. (page 436)

I have read numerous writers, starting from the Ancient Greeks and the New Testament right through the existentialists, describe what makes humans different from other species, but none has explained it any better than Duke. His words capture humanity's ingenious nature, our desire to understand and drive to create. He makes me want to listen to his "Sunset and the Mockingbird"; excuse me as I do that now.

Worthy Words, Part 7: Grace Schulman

In her remarkable memoir, Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage, Frost Medal recipient Grace Schulman writes this of her husband of 57 years, Jerome Schulman, an epidemiologist, as he struggled with a terminal disease:

Jerry was crafty at hiding, even from himself, the gravity of his illness. That skill, famously called denial, had obvious drawbacks, but did offer a way of going on. Although he knew that his heart was pumping at a small fraction of the minimum, Jerry phoned in February of what would be his fatal year for tickets to see a new play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the following autumn. He ordered new novels online, and bought tailored, no-iron chinos for the following summer. 

Reading this paragraph reminded me of my beloved father-in-law, Peter Kostares, a World War II veteran, who from his New York Hospital bed as he was dying of stomach cancer with hours to live talked about how he was looking forward to attending his niece's wedding five months into the future. We have at least two ways of looking at Schulman and Kostares. One is to say they were ridiculous optimists unable or unwilling to face the inevitable end of their life; the other is to say they were experiencing life at its most intense fullness, a mindset that looks forward to the future in a never-ending, life-affirming present.

Grace Schulman's prose, like her award-winning poetry, inspires us to realize that regardless of our circumstances, we want to go on. We want to plan as if we will live forever, which is not a bad thing, provided we experience life as if we have only this moment.

Worthy Words, Part 6: Thich Nhat Hanh

If one must carry the burden of being a genius in a particular discipline, I suppose the most useful to society would be one of the human condition. Composers, musicians, painters, sculptors, dancers—they all have their huge place in inspiring and entertaining us, and you could rightly argue that such artists are themselves communicators of the human condition. But as much as I love the performing and fine arts, I do not know a quarter from a sixteenth note, can barely draw stick figures at best, and dance more with my hands than with my feet. Yet, I breathe. I think. I look at and listen to the world around me. I encounter life's mysteries. I have no words to describe to you the moments my senses experience so that you can experience them the same way. 

These remarkable capabilities are the specialties of Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926-2022), and from what we can tell of his voluminous writings, he bore his genius with grace. Nhất Hạnh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who traveled globally to promote peace and teach the Way of the Buddha, had a singular influence on many other renowned authors, including Daniel Berrigan, bell hooks, and Thomas Merton.

In A Lifetime of Peace: Essential Writings by Thích Nhất Hạnh appears this excerpt from one of his many best-selling books, The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation (1987): 

Keep your attention focused on the work, be alert and ready to handle ably and intelligently any situation which may arise—this is mindfulness. (p. 76)

This simple statement may seem too obvious to acknowledge as wisdom, until we realize that we spend most of our waking hours pursuing personal goals, attending business meetings, and running all sorts of errands. Nhất Hạnh insists that we can be mindful in those situations as well. One of the keys to mastering mindfulness is focused breathing, a practice beyond the scope of this brief post. My intention here is to draw attention to a master of life who shows us that living at peace requires exercises that are rather easy to practice, but not so easy because of their demand on our persistence.

Worthy Words, Part 5: Edward Said

Edward Said's collection of 46 essays, "Reflections on Exile" and Other Essays (2000) appeared in print three years before his death. One of those essays, "On Defiance and Taking Positions," begins with this sentence:

Compared, say, to most African, Asian, and Middle Eastern universities, the American university constitutes a relatively utopian space, where we can actually talk about the boundaries of the academy. (page 501)

Knowing how candidly self-reflective Said was, I wonder in this age of gotcha journalism if he would retract this statement. We have seen the results of accusatory rhetoric following Harvard's Claudine Gay, MIT's Sally Kornbluth, and Penn's Liz Magill testimony before the United States Congress, as well as numerous legal cases challenging employers over alleged discriminatory practices as a violation their free speech.

During my undergraduate years in the mid-1970s and graduate years in the early 1980s, I would have backed Said's observation. But I had already begun seeing signs of a reversal of freedom of speech on campus during my Rutgers doctoral years throughout the 1990s. Two instances come to mind. I failed one of four essays for my qualifying examination. The reader who failed me was a tenured political conservative professor who disagreed with my socialist approach to the education topic. He said, "Your paper got to the wrong reviewer." Fortunately, I passed the essay the second time around. Then a tenure-track liberal professor, recommended for my dissertation committee by the committee chairperson, said of my position, "You know that's a racist viewpoint, don't you?" I replied, "I could see how some people might agree with you, but ..." "I said it's racist," she interjected preemptively. The next day I asked my committee chairperson to remove her from the committee. He did so, but if he had not, I am certain I would not have attained a doctorate.

As you can see, there's plenty of blame to be shared by both political persuasions. A quarter century later, we are living in times when free speech is endangered. We need more thinkers like Said to swing the pendulum toward Americans' First Amendment rights.  

Worthy Words, Part 4: Galway Kinnell

American poet Galway Kinnell (1927-2014), Pulitzer Prize and Frost Medal recipient, wrote many poems in his six-decade career, from haunting dreamlike sequences like the 13-line "Promissory Note" to sweeping epics like "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World." One of his poems in particular, "When the Towers Fell," about the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, contains two haunting lines in the first stanza that still strike me to the core of my soul. Describing the Twin Towers, the poet writes we: 

grew so used to them often we didn't see them, and now, not

seeing them, we see them.

I passed through the former World Trade Center hundreds of times as a student, employee, or business owner during its brief 28-year history. While I remained awestruck by its underground network of shops, restaurants, theaters, subways, and commuter trains, I was never impressed by its exterior design. Thus, I looked only at its shadow as I walked past it. But after it fell, I wanted it back. I wanted to see it. I don't want the Freedom Tower. I want back what I cannot have. It is not there, yet I still see it. I sometimes feel that I still have not moved past the anger or depression stages of grief. Kinnell's two lines speak for how I live with this loss.

I am grateful that The New Yorker makes "When the Towers Fell" available on its website.

Worthy Words, Part 3: Walker Percy

In Walker Percy's 1991 essay collection Signposts in a Strange Land appears a previously unpublished, thought-provoking article, "Is a Theory of Man Possible?" containing this sentence:

Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge. (page 113)

Percy's sentence seems prophetic more than a quarter century before the truth became relative in American politics and beyond. Philosophers have sought to define and describe truth for more than two millennia, but all their work has vaporized in a time when polemicists and even academics refuse to ground their observations and summations in commonly accepted principles of morality and ethics. 

We can surely find many more examples of prescient wisdom, such as comedy writer Robert Orben's oft recycled 1974 aphorism, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." I suppose we have always known this "truth," but what are we doing about it?

Worthy Words, Part 2: Albert Murray

Albert Murray (1916-2013), soldier, scholar, teacher, cultural commentator, music critic, and community leader of Harlem, where he lived his later years, came to my attention because of my love of jazz. Murray was a cofounder of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, a beautiful multivenue facility where I have seen numerous shows. So how could I not love him too? Arguably, his most famous nonfiction work is his collection of essays The Omni-Americans (1970). In that book , he writes this 73-word sentence:

In all events, it is not only possible but highly probable that the “cultural dislocation trauma” suffered by Africans transported to frontier America was considerably less than European-oriented polemicists imagine, precisely because the African’s native orientation to culture was less static or structured than they assume, precisely, that is to say, because the African may have been geared to improvisation rather than piety, for all the taboos he had lived in terms of. (Library of America's edition of Murray's Collected Essays & Memoirs, page 158)

This assertion is only one of Murray's many insightful observations in The Omni-Americans, a provocative reflection on Black identity in its many forms as perceived within and outside the race. We see examples of cultural dislocation trauma appearing in the United States whenever refugees land on its shores. But the first Blacks here were not refugees choosing to flee to America for their safety; they were unwilling arrivals subjected to slavery. In casting a spotlight on the Africans' vibrant and organized orientation to culture, Murray forces his reader to imagine not the European's polemicist or the dominant culture 's viewpoint but to reckon with Blacks as equals, human beings who think, create their own culture, and live and die by their own mores. Note the phrase improvisation rather than piety, whose context is better understood by reading the entire essay. As for the taboos Africans had lived in, think first of their past in their native continent, a past over 250 years in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, virtually impossible for any of us to fully comprehend, as well as the interdictions imposed on them in their new continent. Murray fashions a quandary that his readers will contemplate long after they close his book.

Worthy Words, Part 1: Wallace Stevens

With this post, I begin a series of memorable words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, or stanzas by writers who continue to inspire and inform my own writing. 

Ever since I started reading the poetry of Wallace Stevens in 1988,  I have expected surprise. While I understand that by definition, surprise must be unexpected, I hope this post explains the oxymoron of the previous sentence. 

Stevens's poems are so deep in their reaction to experience and their immediacy of feeling that their full meaning might not penetrate my senses until a second or third reading, sometimes ten years apart. When I do capture glimpses of their essence—I doubt I ever get their complete meaning— I look back realizing I just was not ready to accept his message, I misunderstood it, or I dismissed it too quickly. For sure, I can read any one of his poems a dozen times wondering about what he was trying to accomplish. 

Take "Chocorua to Its Neighbor," his 130-line poem comprising 26 quintains. The title of the poem itself is laden with ambiguity. Does Chocorua refer to the 3,500-hundred-foot mountain in New Hampshire or the 500-person community at the mountain's base? Is Chocorua talking to its neighbor, is Chocorua's neighbor forming an impression of it? Is Chocorua's neighbor the closest mountain to it? The sky? The forest embedded in it? Is it the poet or the mountain speaking? Or is it we who are perceiving what the poet describes? Consider the first verse of the poem:

To speak quietly at such a distance, to speak

And to be heard is to be large in space,

That, like your own, is large, hence, to be part

Of sky, of sea, large earth, large air. It is

To perceive men without reference to their form.

After a recent reading of this poem, nearly four decades after reading it for the first time without much of an impression, I emerged from this stanza feeling larger than humanity itself, a maker of mountains, an omniscient being. Perhaps not even a being, but something that comprehends without availing itself of senses.

Let's look at the oft-referenced nineteenth stanza, which struck me in an entirely different way after reading the poems decades later:

To say more than human things with human voice,

That cannot be; to say human things with more

Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;

To speak humanly from the height or from the depth 

Of human things, that is acutest speech.

Upon first reading, I took this stanza at face value, interpreting it literally. I assigned great worth to its denotative meaning. Once I reread it, the eighteen stanzas preceding it as well as the seven following it, brought a greater metaphysical, existential connotation to my consciousness.  

I do not see my job here as clarifying any of Stevens's poems, but simply (or not so simply) as explaining my reaction to them in the hope that you might read some of his verse as well. Reading his brief poems "The Reader," "Debris of Life and Mind," or "Human Arrangement" would be a good starting point.