My Year With Proust - Day 7

   "'My dear,' she said to Mamma, 'I could not allow myself to give the child anything that was not well written.'

   The truth was that she could never make up her mind to purchase anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, and, above all, that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth.  Even when she had to make someone a present of the kind called 'useful', when she had to give an arm-chair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques', or though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 41

In this passage Proust is discussing his grandmother and her refusal to give him, or anyone, a gift that lacked intellectual merit.  Proust couldn't sleep and his mother suggested they open presents.  "It contained La Mare au Diable, Francois le Champi, La Petite Fadette, and Les Maitres Sonneurs.  My grandmother, as I learned afterwards, had at first chosen Musset's poems, a volume of Rousseau, and Indiana; for which she considered light reading as unwholesome as sweets and cakes . . ." In some ways I resemble Proust's grandmother, in either being a snob or in a dedication to a purer intellectual vision; I would propose the latter, although others might champion the former.

In an earlier posting I discussed giving my son a copy of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius when he was going through a tough patch in high school. In a far distant posting I remember singing the praises of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and how discovering it when I was fourteen had a profound impact on my intellectual development. Essentially, it opened up a world of adult ideas and a much more complicated universe.  I leap-frogged young adult fiction and never went back.  I'm a passionate believer in the notion that endless hours of intellectual cotton candy does far more harm than a film or book that skirts the boundaries of being too adult in theme.

Of course, I'm also quite guilty of introducing my son to dozens, if not hundreds, of astonishingly bad psychotronic movies, which we still avidly watch today.  Even the Greeks balanced out Sophocles with Aristophanes.

As you might imagine, this view also shows up in my professional life as well.  Recently I filmed a Core Talk (and the CTs deserve a couple posts of their own) where I called for taking every opportunity to bring in the classics (no matter how you define them), or at least more complicated works, into our Core classes.  While I see the value of introducing more popular culture or graphic novels in class, I think there is a danger that we play to the audience instead of pushing them to climb higher.  So, I'm the curmudgeon who assigns the Ramayana, the Shahnameh, the Analects of Confucius, Journey to the West, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the Sundiata and Winesburg, Ohio. I don't think I do this as part of an allegiance to a perceived canon, although there is some value to possessing even a passing understanding of these works.  One of the reasons why I've had success overseas is my ability to paraphrase the Ramayana to an Indian audience or quote the Quran to Emirati students. Rather, I just sincerely believe that these works are more profound and give the students a greater understanding of culture and human nature.

Finally, I completely agree with this notion: "The truth was that she could never make up her mind to purchase anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, and, above all, that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth" In some ways this has always made more a poor fit for Champlain and its goal of providing a practical education that is malleable enough to adjust on the fly to the needs of the workforce. My students will sometimes tweak me for my lack of technological skill (and that's OK, because they receive far worse than they give), and I always respond that they shouldn't brag about their ability to run the latest software, which I compare to bragging about how fast you can change a tire.  In the end the world of art or literature will always trump the intellectual equivalent of blacksmithery.  As Rumi reminds us, "judge a moth by the beauty of its candle." In the end, they are beautiful works which speak to the best of the human imagination.