Friday, August 30, 2013
Monday, August 26, 2013
Saturday, August 10, 2013
"Did you come to Pala by the airplane?"
"I came out of the sea."
"Out of the sea? Do you have a boat?"
"I did have one." With his mind's eye Will saw the waves breaking over the stranded hulk, heard with his inner ear the crash of their impact. Under her questioning he told her what had happened. The storm, the beaching of the boat, the long nightmare of the climb, the snakes, the horror of falling . . . He began to tremble again, more violently than ever.
Mary Sarojini listened attentively and without comment. Then, as his voice faltered and finally broke, she stepped forward and, the bird still perched on her shoulder, kneeled down beside him.
"Listen, Will," she said, laying a hand on his forehead. "We've got to get rid of this." Her tone was professional and calmly authoritative.
"I wish I knew how," he said between chattering teeth.
"How?" she repeated. "But in the usual way, of course. Tell me again about those snakes and how you fell down."
He shook his head. "I don't want to."
"Of course you don't want to," she said. "But you've got to. Listen to what the mynah's saying."
"Here and now, boys," the bird was still exhorting. "Here and now, boys."
"You can't be here and now," she went on, "until you've got rid of those snakes. Tell me."
"I don't want to, I don't want to." He was almost in tears.
"Then you'll never get rid of them. They'll be crawling about inside your head forever. And serve you right," Mary Sarojini added severely.
He tried to control the trembling; but his body had ceased to belong to him. Someone else was in charge, someone malevolently determined to humiliate him, to make him suffer.
"Remember what happened when you were a little boy," Mary Sarojini was saying. "What did your mother do when you hurt yourself?"
She had taken him in her arms, had said, "My poor baby, my poor little baby."
"She did that?" The child spoke in a tone of shocked amazement. "But that's awful! That's the way to rub it in. 'My poor baby,' " she repeated derisively, "it must have gone on hurting for hours. And you'd never forget it."
Will Farnaby made no comment, but lay there in silence, shaken by irrepressible shudderings.
"Well, if you won't do it yourself, I'll have to do it for you. Listen, Will: there was a snake, a big green snake, and you almost stepped on him. You almost stepped on him, and it gave you such a fright that you lost your balance, you fell. Now say it yourself—say it!"almost stepped on him, and it gave you such a fright that you lost your balance, you fell. Now say it yourself—say it!"
"I almost stepped on him," he whispered obediently. "And then I ..." He couldn't say it. "Then I fell," he brought out at last, almost inaudibly.
All the horror of it came back to him—the nausea of fear, the panic start that had made him lose his balance, and then worse fear and the ghastly certainty that it was the end.
"Say it again."
"I almost stepped on him. And then ..."
He heard himself whimpering.
"That's right, Will. Cry—cry!"
The whimpering became a moaning. Ashamed, he clenched his teeth, and the moaning stopped.
"No, don't do that," she cried. "Let it come out if it wants to. Remember that snake, Will. Remember how you fell."
The moaning broke out again and he began to shudder more violently than ever.
"Now tell me what happened."
"I could see its eyes, I could see its tongue going in and out."
"Yes, you could see his tongue. And what happened then?"
"I lost my balance, I fell."
"Say it again, Will." He was sobbing now. "Say it again," she insisted.
"I fell."
"Again."
It was tearing him to pieces, but he said it. "I fell."
"Again, Will." She was implacable. "Again."
"I fell, I fell. I fell . . ."
Gradually the sobbing died down. The words came more easily and the memories they aroused were less painful.
"I fell," he repeated for the hundredth time.
"But you didn't fall very far," Mary Sarojini now said.
"No, I didn't fall very far," he agreed.
"So what's all the fuss about?" the child inquired.
There was no malice or irony in her tone, not the slightest implication of blame. She was just asking a simple, straightforward question that called for a simple, straightforward answer. Yes, what was all the fuss about? The snake hadn't bitten him; he hadn't broken his neck. And anyhow it had all happened yesterday. Today there were these butterflies, this bird that called one to attention, this strange child who talked to one like a Dutch uncle, looked like an angel out of some unfamiliar mythology and within five degrees of the equator was called, believe it or not, MacPhail. Will Farnaby laughed aloud.
"...One of them was an atomic physicist, the other was a philosopher. Both extremely eminent. But one had a inental age, outside the laboratory, of about eleven and the other was a compulsive eater with a weight problem that he refused to lace. Two extreme examples of what happens when you take a clever boy, give him fifteen years of the most intensive formal education and totally neglect to do anything for the mindbody which has to do the learning and the living."
"And your system, I take it, doesn't produce that kind of academic monster?"
The Under-Secretary shook his head. "Until I went to Europe, I'd neverseen anything of the kind. They're grotesquely funny," he added. "But, goodness, how pathetic! And, poor things, how curiously repulsive!"
"Being pathetically and curiously repulsive—that's the price we pay for specialization."
"For specialization," Mr. Menon agreed, "but not in the sense you people ordinarily use the word. Specialization in that sense is necessary and inevitable. No specialization, no civilization. And if one educates the whole mind-body along with the symbol-using intellect, that kind of necessary specialization won't do much harm. But you people don't educate the mind-body. Your cure for too much scientific specialization is a few more courses in the humanities. Excellent! Every education ought to include courses in the humanities. But don't let's be fooled by the name. By themselves, the humanities don't humanize. They're simply another form of specialization on the symbolic level. Reading Plato or listening to a lecture on T. S. Eliot doesn't educate the whole human being; like courses in physics or chemistry, it merely educates the symbol manipulator and leaves the rest of the living mind-body in its pristine state of ignorance and ineptitude..."
"Well, as I was saying," Mr. Menon continued, "adolescents get both kinds of education concurrently. They're helped to experience their transcendental unity with all other sentient beings and at the same time they're learning, in their psychology and physiology classes, that each one of us has his own constitutional uniqueness, everybody's different from everybody else."
"When I was at school," said Will, "the pedagogues did their best to iron out those differences, or at least to plaster them over with the same Late Victorian ideal—the ideal of the scholarly but Anglican football-playing gentleman. But now tell me what you do about the fact that everybody's different from everybody else."
"We begin," said Mr. Menon, "by assessing the differences. Precisely who or what, anatomically, biochemically and psychologically, is this child? In the organic hierarchy, which takes precedence—his gut, his muscles, or his nervous system? How near does he stand to the three polar extremes? How harmonious or how disharmonious is the mixture of his component elements, physical and mental? How great is his inborn wish to dominate, or to be sociable, or to retreat into his inner world? And how does he do his thinking and perceiving and remembering? Is he a visualizer or a nonvisualizer? Does his mind work with images or with words, with both at once, or with neither? How close to the surface is his storytelling faculty? Does he see the world as Wordsworth and Traherne saw it when they were children? And, if so, what can be done to prevent the glory and the freshness from fading into the light of common day? Or, in more general terms, how can we educate children on the conceptual level without killing their capacity for intense nonverbal experience? How can we reconcile analysis with vision? And there are dozens of other questions that must be asked and answered. For example, does this child absorb all the vitamins in his food or is he subject to some chronic deficiency that, if it isn't recognized and treated, will lower his vitality, darken his mood, make him see ugliness, feel boredom and think foolishness or malice? And what about his blood sugar? What about his breathing? What about his posture and the way he uses his organism when he's working, playing, studying? And there are all the questions that have to do with special gifts. Does he show signs of having a talent for music, for mathematics, for handling words, for observing accurately and for thinking logically and imaginatively about what he has observed? And finally how suggestible is he going to be when he grows up?..."
Aldous Huxley
"I came out of the sea."
"Out of the sea? Do you have a boat?"
"I did have one." With his mind's eye Will saw the waves breaking over the stranded hulk, heard with his inner ear the crash of their impact. Under her questioning he told her what had happened. The storm, the beaching of the boat, the long nightmare of the climb, the snakes, the horror of falling . . . He began to tremble again, more violently than ever.
Mary Sarojini listened attentively and without comment. Then, as his voice faltered and finally broke, she stepped forward and, the bird still perched on her shoulder, kneeled down beside him.
"Listen, Will," she said, laying a hand on his forehead. "We've got to get rid of this." Her tone was professional and calmly authoritative.
"I wish I knew how," he said between chattering teeth.
"How?" she repeated. "But in the usual way, of course. Tell me again about those snakes and how you fell down."
He shook his head. "I don't want to."
"Of course you don't want to," she said. "But you've got to. Listen to what the mynah's saying."
"Here and now, boys," the bird was still exhorting. "Here and now, boys."
"You can't be here and now," she went on, "until you've got rid of those snakes. Tell me."
"I don't want to, I don't want to." He was almost in tears.
"Then you'll never get rid of them. They'll be crawling about inside your head forever. And serve you right," Mary Sarojini added severely.
He tried to control the trembling; but his body had ceased to belong to him. Someone else was in charge, someone malevolently determined to humiliate him, to make him suffer.
"Remember what happened when you were a little boy," Mary Sarojini was saying. "What did your mother do when you hurt yourself?"
She had taken him in her arms, had said, "My poor baby, my poor little baby."
"She did that?" The child spoke in a tone of shocked amazement. "But that's awful! That's the way to rub it in. 'My poor baby,' " she repeated derisively, "it must have gone on hurting for hours. And you'd never forget it."
Will Farnaby made no comment, but lay there in silence, shaken by irrepressible shudderings.
"Well, if you won't do it yourself, I'll have to do it for you. Listen, Will: there was a snake, a big green snake, and you almost stepped on him. You almost stepped on him, and it gave you such a fright that you lost your balance, you fell. Now say it yourself—say it!"almost stepped on him, and it gave you such a fright that you lost your balance, you fell. Now say it yourself—say it!"
"I almost stepped on him," he whispered obediently. "And then I ..." He couldn't say it. "Then I fell," he brought out at last, almost inaudibly.
All the horror of it came back to him—the nausea of fear, the panic start that had made him lose his balance, and then worse fear and the ghastly certainty that it was the end.
"Say it again."
"I almost stepped on him. And then ..."
He heard himself whimpering.
"That's right, Will. Cry—cry!"
The whimpering became a moaning. Ashamed, he clenched his teeth, and the moaning stopped.
"No, don't do that," she cried. "Let it come out if it wants to. Remember that snake, Will. Remember how you fell."
The moaning broke out again and he began to shudder more violently than ever.
"Now tell me what happened."
"I could see its eyes, I could see its tongue going in and out."
"Yes, you could see his tongue. And what happened then?"
"I lost my balance, I fell."
"Say it again, Will." He was sobbing now. "Say it again," she insisted.
"I fell."
"Again."
It was tearing him to pieces, but he said it. "I fell."
"Again, Will." She was implacable. "Again."
"I fell, I fell. I fell . . ."
Gradually the sobbing died down. The words came more easily and the memories they aroused were less painful.
"I fell," he repeated for the hundredth time.
"But you didn't fall very far," Mary Sarojini now said.
"No, I didn't fall very far," he agreed.
"So what's all the fuss about?" the child inquired.
There was no malice or irony in her tone, not the slightest implication of blame. She was just asking a simple, straightforward question that called for a simple, straightforward answer. Yes, what was all the fuss about? The snake hadn't bitten him; he hadn't broken his neck. And anyhow it had all happened yesterday. Today there were these butterflies, this bird that called one to attention, this strange child who talked to one like a Dutch uncle, looked like an angel out of some unfamiliar mythology and within five degrees of the equator was called, believe it or not, MacPhail. Will Farnaby laughed aloud.
"...One of them was an atomic physicist, the other was a philosopher. Both extremely eminent. But one had a inental age, outside the laboratory, of about eleven and the other was a compulsive eater with a weight problem that he refused to lace. Two extreme examples of what happens when you take a clever boy, give him fifteen years of the most intensive formal education and totally neglect to do anything for the mindbody which has to do the learning and the living."
"And your system, I take it, doesn't produce that kind of academic monster?"
The Under-Secretary shook his head. "Until I went to Europe, I'd neverseen anything of the kind. They're grotesquely funny," he added. "But, goodness, how pathetic! And, poor things, how curiously repulsive!"
"Being pathetically and curiously repulsive—that's the price we pay for specialization."
"For specialization," Mr. Menon agreed, "but not in the sense you people ordinarily use the word. Specialization in that sense is necessary and inevitable. No specialization, no civilization. And if one educates the whole mind-body along with the symbol-using intellect, that kind of necessary specialization won't do much harm. But you people don't educate the mind-body. Your cure for too much scientific specialization is a few more courses in the humanities. Excellent! Every education ought to include courses in the humanities. But don't let's be fooled by the name. By themselves, the humanities don't humanize. They're simply another form of specialization on the symbolic level. Reading Plato or listening to a lecture on T. S. Eliot doesn't educate the whole human being; like courses in physics or chemistry, it merely educates the symbol manipulator and leaves the rest of the living mind-body in its pristine state of ignorance and ineptitude..."
"Well, as I was saying," Mr. Menon continued, "adolescents get both kinds of education concurrently. They're helped to experience their transcendental unity with all other sentient beings and at the same time they're learning, in their psychology and physiology classes, that each one of us has his own constitutional uniqueness, everybody's different from everybody else."
"When I was at school," said Will, "the pedagogues did their best to iron out those differences, or at least to plaster them over with the same Late Victorian ideal—the ideal of the scholarly but Anglican football-playing gentleman. But now tell me what you do about the fact that everybody's different from everybody else."
"We begin," said Mr. Menon, "by assessing the differences. Precisely who or what, anatomically, biochemically and psychologically, is this child? In the organic hierarchy, which takes precedence—his gut, his muscles, or his nervous system? How near does he stand to the three polar extremes? How harmonious or how disharmonious is the mixture of his component elements, physical and mental? How great is his inborn wish to dominate, or to be sociable, or to retreat into his inner world? And how does he do his thinking and perceiving and remembering? Is he a visualizer or a nonvisualizer? Does his mind work with images or with words, with both at once, or with neither? How close to the surface is his storytelling faculty? Does he see the world as Wordsworth and Traherne saw it when they were children? And, if so, what can be done to prevent the glory and the freshness from fading into the light of common day? Or, in more general terms, how can we educate children on the conceptual level without killing their capacity for intense nonverbal experience? How can we reconcile analysis with vision? And there are dozens of other questions that must be asked and answered. For example, does this child absorb all the vitamins in his food or is he subject to some chronic deficiency that, if it isn't recognized and treated, will lower his vitality, darken his mood, make him see ugliness, feel boredom and think foolishness or malice? And what about his blood sugar? What about his breathing? What about his posture and the way he uses his organism when he's working, playing, studying? And there are all the questions that have to do with special gifts. Does he show signs of having a talent for music, for mathematics, for handling words, for observing accurately and for thinking logically and imaginatively about what he has observed? And finally how suggestible is he going to be when he grows up?..."
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Saturday, August 3, 2013
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