The Classical Teacher Parent Edition - Spring 2021

Saving Western civilization one student at a time.

Spring 2021

Civility

Civilization AND

BY LEIGH LOWE

The Metaphysics of Amazement

by Martin Cothran Reading for Wisdom

by Dr. Dan Sheffler

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

The End of Life

by Martin Cothran

IN

Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting, which is set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a twelve-year-old girl named Winnie Foster is dissatisfied at home in her little village of Treegap. She is tired of being cooped up and considers running away. One day, while wandering in the woods, she meets a boy named Jesse near a spring.

Although Jesse looks to be about seventeen years old, he is in reality 104 years old. Jesse and his family, the Tucks, discovered by accident many years before that the waters from a spring in the wood grant eternal life.

Winnie is quite taken with Jesse and his family, and when they leave she goes with them.

A man who has been pursuing the Tucks, having found out about the water, finds them with Winnie and informs her parents of her whereabouts. For her safe return to Treegap he asks the Fosters for the land that includes the spring, intending to sell the water for profit. He offers them a partnership in his plans, which include Winnie, whom he intends to have drink the water as a public demonstration of its effectiveness. But the Tucks refuse, and Jesse's mother hits the man on the head and kills him. She is arrested by the constable and found guilty of murder and sentenced to be executed.

Knowing she cannot die—and that this will become apparent when the constable tries to execute her—they break her out of jail. Winnie takes her place and the Tucks flee. But Jesse, who has fallen in love with Winnie, leaves a bottle of the magical water, and asks her to drink it at seventeen. He will come back, he tells her, and marry her, and they can be seventeen together for eternity.

Winnie accepts the water, but she never drinks it, and she lives her life as she otherwise would have.

Many years later the Tucks return to Treegap, a town that has been transformed by the modern world. It is now a suburban metropolis; the woods are gone and the spring is covered by a housing development. While Treegap has changed, they have remained the same, still the age each was when he or she first drank the water.

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Letter from the Editor

Before leaving, they visit the town cemetery and find Winnie's grave. She had died two years before.

On her gravestone they read these words: In Loving Memory Winifred Foster Jackson Dear Wife Dear Mother 1870-1948

Both before and after I tell my students this story, I ask them: If you could take a pill that would keep you at the age you are forever, would you take it? Few, if any, of those who say yes the first time respond the same the second. The students who originally said they would drink the water almost always change their minds.

Why? What does this story reveal to us that we didn't know before?

As readers, we are unalterably saddened at Winnie's death, and yet we are forced to conclude that there was something present in her life that will forever be absent from the Tucks'. "That's what us Tucks are," says Pa Tuck. "Stuck so's we can't move on. We ain't part of the wheel no more. Dropped off, Winnie. Left behind."

Winnie's life, on the other hand, precisely because it is limited, can be viewed as a complete whole.

And by virtue of this, the story suggests, it has a meaning an incomplete story cannot have. She has lived a whole life, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. She has married and had children, and maybe even grandchildren. If her life could be told, we would see that it had a distinct setting, and that it was filled with characters—friends and family—and that the events considered together would resemble something like a plot.

Her life, in fact, was not just a life, but a story.

And, like any story, it had a theme— an overarching pattern that gave it meaning. A story is a meaninggiving thing. Which is why we should read them―no matter how old we are.

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Spring 2021

FEATURED ARTICLES

Letter from the Editor by Martin Cothran...................................................... 2 A Defense of the Passive Voice by Jon Christianson........................................ 4 What is Metaphysics? by Thomas Cothran..................................................... 6 Reading for Wisdom by Dr. Dan Sheffler........................................................ 8 The Metaphysics of Amazement by Martin Cothran..................................... 10 Narratives Through Music: Peter and the Wold by Dr. Carol Reynolds.......... 13 Welcome Home by Cheryl Swope............................................................... 15 The Story We're In by Martin Cothran.......................................................... 17 Civility and Civilization by Leigh Lowe..................................................... 19

© Copyright 2021 (all rights reserved) Publisher | Memoria Press Editor | Martin Cothran Assistant Editor | Dayna Grant

Managing Editor | Tanya Charlton Copy Editor | Ellen R. Anderson Graphic Designers | Aileen Delgado & Jessica Osborne

MEMORIA PRESS MemoriaPress.com

ONLINE ACADEMY MemoriaPressAcademy.com

LATIN

A DEFENSE OF THE PASSIVE VOICE

by Jon Christianson

"Language is a technology, invented to take information in your head and put it in other heads."

IT

is with this most unromantic premise that I set off with my students to discover the Latin tongue. Worry not that such meager ceremony should christen my charges' maiden voyage to those Lavinian shores. I do not thus qualify their first steps into Latinity to squash their sentiments of mystery and ancient prospect; I do so to liberate them.

As rule-oriented as English education is (and Latin moreso), it serves a student well to remember that the point of language is communication—as regards Latin, communication with the past. The rules we learn that govern use of language, therefore, are those that make the best use of language, or rather, that best accomplish the aim of one's speech. Far better it is that students see these pillars of their study not as strange Herculean mandates, but as foundations for masterful expression.

However, there exists in the English language a number of conventions whose utility for effective speech is difficult to qualify, chief among which is this: Never use the passive voice. To those unfamiliar with this proscription, I encourage you to ask around; it should not take long to find someone who strongly condemns the passive voice as an unforgivable grammatical error. Yet the Latin of antiquity makes frequent use of the passive voice, even in the hands of Rome's most illustrious wordsmen. So, for that matter, does the English tradition. The belief, however, that the passive voice is something inherently worthy of censure has passed so completely into the understanding of modern Jon Christianson is the Latin director and editor at Memoria Press. He teaches Latin for the Memoria Press Online Academy and has taught Latin and classical literature at Highlands Latin School.

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A Defense of the Passive Voice

English education that many treat it as an elemental rule rather than a stylistic admonition. I humbly propose to dispel this well-meaning misapprehension.

Let it be shown that the passive voice is not just allowable but preferable in some cases; in other cases, the active voice is absolutely preferable. In yet other cases both are allowable depending on your preferred emphasis. Our chief concern, therefore, is not to justify how much the passive may be used, but that it can be used at all. Firstly, let us demonstrate that nothing is objectively wrong with the passive voice in English; secondly, let us identify in what cases the passive voice is objectively right.

To our first question—"When others describe the passive as bad, is it objectively bad?"—I turn to Latin, a language that not only employs the passive voice with little stricture, but to which English frequently defers for grammatical guidance. We cannot write Latin passives off as an artifact of Italic primitivity; Romans were exacting grammarians whose energetic promotion of good Latin is the basis for the classical Latin we study today. The very "class" to which this "classical" style refers is the educated elite, whose language was cultivated for public oratory. Its excellence relied on its rhetorical appeal—sufficient clarity and command to sway the masses, with a refinement worthy of recording for posterity. To describe Latin as good, then, is to recognize how careful cultivation of style is borne by the spontaneity of public discourse; its performative quality lends paramount importance to sequence of ideas, rising and falling emphases, and suspension and resolution of themes. The natural features of the language suit it well for these purposes; a highly fluid word order, an emphatic metricality, and a complex variety of verbal agencies such as the passive voice all accomplish this goal of shaping one's speech to maximal sequential effect.

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How does this apply to English? English is suited to its own excellencies by its own features, most notably its enormously rich and adaptable vocabulary. What English does not have is Latin's fluidity of word sequence and emphasis; in English, one cannot arrange words nearly so pliably without altering the sentence's substantive content. In this respect, English lacks an essential tool that lends Latin its performative oratorical quality. Remember, though, that Latin has other means to this end, some of which English has in common; prominent among these is our sought-after passive voice. The chief effect of the passive is to reorder ideas, to replicate the semantic meaning of its active equivalent while changing both word order and emphasis. To forego the passive voice is to artificially limit a capability in English that signifies excellence in Latin.

Our second question—"When I defend the passive as good, is it objectively good?"—is proven easily enough. There exist numerous English constructions that can only be rendered in the active voice by surrendering what advocates of the active claim most characterize its excellence—desired strength and clarity of style. Grammatically speaking, a verb being active or passive changes its subject, but its agent—the actor, the performer, the doer—remains the same. However, the role or importance of the agent can vary so substantially that numerous demands upon it can render it useless or undesirable as a sentence's subject.

If the agent is unknown, any active construction would merely mention that "someone" or "something" performed the action, and the introduction of an indefinite pronoun adds unneeded vagueness: Passive: The sword was forged in the 1300s.

Active: SOMEONE forged the sword in the 1300s.

(Who? Why did you bring him up?)

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If the agent is irrelevant, any active construction would include the agent even though the agent does not need mentioning to make one's point: Passive: Your house has been repainted.

Active: LABORERS repainted your house.

If the agent is obvious, any active construction would include the agent in a redundant fashion: Passive: Shoplifters will be prosecuted.

Active: PROSECUTORS will prosecute shoplifters. (Naturally.)

If the agent's inclusion would appear antagonistic or accusatory, any active construction would imply blame or condemnation in respect to the verb: Passive: Your bill was not paid on time.

Active: YOU did not pay your bill on time.

(This is how you can tell if it's a scam call or not; scammers use the active voice to intimidate you.)

If there are multiple agents acting on a single subject, any active construction would involve multiple conjoined clauses or very complex composition: Passive: I was dumped, fired, robbed, and kidnapped.

Active: JENNIFER dumped me, my BOSS fired me, a BURGLAR robbed me, and my MOM kidnapped me.

(Didn't see that coming, did you?)

Accepting the legitimacy of the passive voice in English need not concede equal utility to that of the active, much less a swing of the pendulum all the way to condemnation of the active. Each has its proper use, and I daresay that the original source of consternation against use of the passive was precisely its frequent overuse, which can produce an abstract, distant, or snobbish style.

In any matter of style, however, the injunctions of our syntactic betters must be regarded as just that—matters of style, whose high fashions come and go but whose quotidian use obeys the demands of common sense.

A Defense of the Passive Voice

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LOGIC

WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?

by Thomas Cothran

M

etaphysics first finds its voice in childhood.

For plants, it is enough to grow. For animals, food and play suffice. But children insist on asking "What is that?" and "Why?" Every answer prompts more questions. Inevitably, the parent's endurance gives out before he can satisfy the child's inquisitiveness.

These bouts of curiosity are not merely a characteristic of childhood. Through them, human nature announces itself. These are the firstfruits of the movement out of a merely animal existence toward the light of reason. And it is in this desire to know that we find the key to understanding what metaphysics is.

Between childhood and wisdom stands the long process of education, of inquiry, and of discovery. The purpose of education is to enable the desire to know that comes spontaneously to children, to focus it, to catalyze it with the great intellectual achievements of the past, and to prepare it to set out on its own.

1. METAPHYSICS AS A SCIENCE Metaphysics originates in the desire to know. But so do all intellectual disciplines. Among all the branches of human knowledge, where does metaphysics fit?

Metaphysics is a science. In that respect it is more akin to physics or biology than to penmanship or literature. The term "science" is used in a broad sense to include, first, all knowledge that is sought for the sake of knowledge (rather than for a practical purpose), second, all knowledge that is expressed in an abstract theory, and third, all knowledge that is verified in experience.

Science aims at understanding things not insofar as they are useful, pleasant, or practical, but as they Thomas Cothran lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife and three children. He is a tutor at Memoria College, and he writes on philosophical and theological topics.

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What Is Metaphysics?

are in themselves. In a music class the aim is to be able to play an instrument well, not to understand the nature of music for its own sake. In a Latin class the aim is fluency, not a general theory of language. Music theory and linguistics, on the other hand, are sciences: Their objective is a complete explanation expressed in a theoretical framework.

The outlines of a science are neatly summarized by the table of contents of a textbook. In chemistry we learn about the periodic table and its properties; in biology, we learn about living things. What the science teacher is trying to instill in his students is the theoretical framework that defines scientific knowledge.

2. WHAT IS METAPHYSICS ABOUT? Because metaphysics is a science, like chemistry or geometry it must have a central theory. But unlike other sciences, metaphysics does not seek to answer particular questions. Metaphysics tries to explain how the entire universe makes sense as a whole in light of scientific knowledge. And it asks whether this scientific universe can completely explain the universe, or whether some ultimate cause of the universe is required.

It is true enough that our current sciences do not have final answers. We are still in the process of learning about our world. But metaphysics goes beyond current scientific discoveries. It asks what we can know now about what a final explanation of the universe must be like.

Individual scientific discoveries change, but scientific understanding itself has an unchanging structure. Whatever the final scientific theories may be, they must involve experience, theoretical understanding, and judgment. You may have noticed this in yourself: You see something you do not understand, you form a possible explanation, and you try to figure out if you have it right.

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So too for scientific explanations. They must involve experience, such as looking through a telescope or measuring with an instrument. They must involve theoretical understanding, as theory is the core of a scientific explanation. And finally, theories may be useful but not true. If we do not prove that a theory survives all possible criticism, we do not know whether the theory explains the real world, or is just a convenient fiction. Euclid, Aristotle, and Newton all had some theories that were useful, but turned out not to be true.

This means that metaphysics can illuminate the general outline of the universe, even while scientists are still in the process of filling in the details.

Metaphysics clarifies the relation of the particular sciences to each other and to the objective world. All things in the physical universe consist of:

• Matter: Something that is known by observation.

For example: location in space and time or a thing’s individuality.

• Form: Something known directly by a theory. For

example: gravity, metabolism, or the nervous system.

• Existence: What we grasp in knowing that a theory is correct and correctly applied to the particular thing. For example: judging that some particular element is in fact a hydrogen atom reveals what truly exists.

3. MORE THAN A SCIENCE Can the empirical sciences one day explain everything? Or will that childhood question "Why?" remain?

Metaphysics allows us to stand back and reflect on everything we have learned in the course of our education, and everything that is left to learn. What does this all mean, and how does it fit together? We learn about chemistry and physics—is the world 1-877-862-1097

ultimately reducible to its underlying physical parts?

Are we humans just a part of the physical world? What does it mean that the reality of the world is not revealed directly to our senses, but to our intelligence and rationality? Is there a purpose to the universe? These questions are, of course, complex, but metaphysics can outline answers. Scientific explanations, even when complete, cannot answer why some laws govern the universe rather than other possible laws.

Scientific understanding is limited by its dependence on observation, and the desire to know the truth goes beyond any limit. The question "Is there more?" will always recur to those who, like children, refuse to be satisfied with arbitrary and inadequate answers.

The desire to know cannot be complete until it reaches an understanding that vanquishes all questions. Our acts of understanding are limited; our process of learning only goes so far. So long as something remains unknown, the desire calls us onward. Only an unlimited act of knowing would satisfy our desire to know.

Again, science explains the world as it in fact exists. But why does it exist? Why not, rather, is there nothing at all? Science explains the universe as it in fact is, but it cannot explain the fact of its existence in the first place. The only thing that would satisfy the desire to know is an understanding which leaves nothing unknown. So long as some question remains unresolved, mankind will search for an answer.

What are we seeking when we let the desire to know rule our thoughts and actions? Do we have a name for it? What do we call an act of understanding that is infinite, that has in itself the reason for everything, and for whom nothing remains unknown? What is it that we ultimately desire insofar as we are rational creatures? This, to paraphrase Thomas Aquinas, all men call God. What Is Metaphysics?

7

READING for

WISDOM

BY DR. DAN SHEFFLER

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding. —Proverbs 4:7

A

ncient cultures had a special wisdom literature, such as Proverbs or Ecclesiastes in the Bible, a literature which gives direct, sage counsel. To a great extent, however, all of ancient and medieval literature counts as wisdom literature. The authors understood themselves to be passing on wisdom to their readers, whether they wrote poetry or philosophical dialogues, and readers sought out literature as a principal means of becoming wise. Certainly, the joy of a story beautifully told or the delight in syllables ingeniously intertwined played a role as well, but these things were secondary to the aims of masters like Homer or Dante.

Contemporary education has lost this pursuit of wisdom through reading, and when schools read someone like Homer at all, he frequently becomes mere history.

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Wisdom involves two elements: one, gaining insight into the way of things (that is, into the objective structure of reality or what the Greeks would call the logos) and two, learning to shape our lives in conformity with this objective order.

Our ancestors understood that we inhabit a universe with real patterns and laws that all work together to form a whole, an order which could be discovered by the observant but could never be invented. In our own culture, we have limited this discoverable order to the purely mechanical operations of physical science, but our ancestors understood that life and morality, beauty and spirit occupy the same universe as rocks, rivers, and sky, and that all alike are subject to a pattern. In his masterpiece, The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis describes the way that ancient cultures the world over all noticed this way of things and sought to inculcate it through their literature. Borrowing a term from Chinese philosophy, Lewis calls this way of things the Tao, usually translated simply as "the Way." We can see an example of this expressed in the fourth commandment: "Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." Because it was created by God, the universe works in such a way that when children honor their parents it goes well with them. This pattern in the fabric of the world is so obvious that nearly all cultures have recognized it. Our own culture may scoff, but we can no more change this pattern than we can change the law of gravity.

Many parents in the world of classical education are anxious that their children pull all the facts from the literature they read. We may call this "reading for knowledge" rather than "reading for wisdom," and we should recognize right away that reading for knowledge is not a bad thing. We dutifully have our children read Caesar, and part of the use of this is that they learn certain facts of history (how the Roman army, the Senate, and the government of the provinces functioned, for example). They read all this in Latin, and we are right to drill the knowledge of vocabulary, case, mood, and tense. Facts like these, along with names and dates, are the kind of thing one can put on flashcards—and you had better have those flashcards. Classical education spends a great deal of time and energy on reading for knowledge Dr. Dan Sheffler is a professor of philosophy with Memoria College and has taught philosophy, logic, Latin, and history at the University of Kentucky, Georgetown College, and Asbury College.

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like this because we hope that our children will accumulate a body of canonical knowledge.

Without this body of knowledge they will not have the keys to unlock that great treasury of wisdom that is the Western canon.

If we teach our children only how to read for knowledge, however, we will justly receive the complaint that the work is boring and there is no point. (They'll probably complain no matter what, but we can do something about the justice of it.)

This means that as our students read we must walk with them through the text, helping them to see the world beyond it, identifying moments of insight into the laws of virtue, the patterns of good and bad relationships, the structures of temptation, or the ways that cities and peoples come to ruin. We can find this wisdom in any text of the Western canon, even when we read fiction or poetry—even (perhaps most of all) when we read fairy tales.

We may contrast reading for wisdom with the more prevalent method that is taught in many schools.

There, the objective of most discussions is to achieve something called "critical thinking" about what the students have just read. By telling students to think critically about a piece of writing, they are really being asked, for example, to identify any bits of evidence in the text of historical oppression along the axes of gender, race, or class.

If the instruction has a slightly more philosophical bent, the directive to think critically will focus on the "deconstruction" of the students' worldview, what Lewis calls "seeing through" or "debunking."

Students are taught to read the text to simply hunt for points where the text either reflects or challenges their worldview. If the point in the text reflects, the students are invited to critique the author; if it challenges, to admire.

What these students are never taught to ask is whether anything they read is true. As we read for wisdom, there may well be something like the deconstruction which is so admired in progressive pedagogy, but the point is never deconstruction for deconstruction's sake. The point is the pursuit of wisdom. From Virgil, for instance, we may discover a profound insight into the real nature of things, into what it means to have a call placed upon one's life and to labor long without seeing the fruit of that call. This insight, because it is true, because it reflects something about the way of things, breaks into our petty self-contentment and exposes to us a bigger, deadlier—though more beautiful—world, a world which was there all along, although we needed a Virgil to teach us how to see this side of it.

Reading for Wisdom

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don't remember the time or the day I heard it. I have no recollection of the person who read it to me or the place in which it was read.

I assume it to have been my mother, but I don't know that. It is one of the many things whose mental origins are lost in my primordial past, but there it is, as clear and plain as the day I first learned it: Hey diddle, diddle!

The cat and the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon; The little dog laughed To see such sport, And the dish ran away with

the spoon.

It is of no possible use to me, and presumably was not read to me because it might be.

But I learned it before I could know what it meant, and I will remember it until the day I die.

Certainly I have learned many other things on the long road of life that would seem to be far more important and useful, and yet I can't remember any of them half so well. Of what possible purpose could it serve? Does it convey any real information?

Is there anything a child could conceivably gain from chanting it—or an adult from having chanted it when a child? Looking at it now, I'm not even sure what it means or why anyone would have thought it up in the first place.

"Hey, Diddle, Diddle," "The Owl and the Pussycat," "Lobster Quadrille," "Green Eggs and Ham"—they all have the same mystical character of things that cannot Martin Cothran is the editor of The Classical Teacher and author of Traditional Logic Books I & II, Material Logic, and Classical Rhetoric.

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be explained. Why is it that we never question the value of these things? And why do we simply pass them along from one generation to the next, unthinking?

If we consider much of the traditional literature of childhood, we see the same character everywhere— that of seeming senselessness. In fact, we have a name for the entire subspecies of children's literature in which this characteristic is the most pronounced: We call it nonsense literature.

Many nursery rhymes are of this type.

They seem to have bubbled up in the English imagination from some fathomless cultural source, but there are a few of them whose origins we can easily trace.

There is a documented history of their production.

We know that "Tom Thumb" was the first proper children's story. We know that the origin of Mother Goose as the patron saint of this literature was probably the work of Oliver Goldsmith who, in the late eighteenth century, wrote a book called Mother Goose's Melody. And we know that it was John Newbery, he whose name now graces the most prestigious award for children's literature, who published it.

The authorship of most nursery rhymes is unknown, except for the obvious fact that many of them were likely conceived by those who cared for children: In other words, nursery rhymes are likely the creation of nurses.

But these are mere facts, and they tell us little of the nature of these curious creations.

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Of those works of nonsense whose authors we know, there are a few prominent names. The greatest and best known practitioner of nonsense was Edward Lear: There was an Old Man with a beard, Who said, "It is just as I feared!— Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren, Have all built their nests in my beard!"

Lear was the master of the humorous limerick, but wrote longer poems as well: "The Owl and the Pussycat," "The Pobble Who Has No Toes," " The Pelican Chorus," "The Quangle Wangle's Hat," and, of course, "The Jumblies."

Lear had a number of gifts that lent themselves perfectly to the art of nonsense. He could name a

nonexistent thing so perfectly as to seemingly call it into existence. Who or what the Jumblies actually are, for example, he never says. We have only this inadequate description: Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve.

As far as morphologies go, this is not much to go by. And yet, from it we can see the Jumblies as clearly as anything that exists in this world.

That such fantastic realities could be conjured may say something about the unique powers of our language. But whatever these powers are, Lear was their master: 1-877-862-1097

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!

How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring?"

They sailed away, for a year and a day, To the land where the Bong-Tree grows And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood With a ring at the end of his nose, His nose, His nose, With a ring at the end of his nose.

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."

So they took it away, and were married next day By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon, The moon, The moon, They danced by the light of the moon.

There were no such things as Bong-Trees until Lear spoke them into existence. And so far as we know, no Owl and Pussycat have ever been supplied with a marriage ring by a Pig (or, moreover, been married by a Turkey that lives on a hill).

The lines are colorful and vivid, but it is the effortlessness with which Lear casually mixes the commonplace with the outlandish that gives them the air of reality.

The "Torrible Zone," the "Chankly Bore," and "the great Gromboolian plain" are a few of Lear's other creations. Nobody has ever located them, but they sound so legitimate that we are tempted to attribute our ignorance of them to the fact that they have yet to be discovered. Neither has anyone ever heard of a "runcible spoon," but, whether it exists or not, Lear convinces us somehow that it is the perfect utensil for the eating of mince (and slices of quince).

Lear is joined in the pantheon of nonsense writers by others, most notably Dr. Seuss, who created his own improbable but compelling world.

What is it about this literature that has caused us to take the time and bother each generation to hand it on to the next?

The world of make-believe has, as its culmination, the fairy tales of the Grimms, Perrault, and Andersen, but "[i]t is Mother Goose," says John Goldthwaite in his book, The Natural History of Make-Believe, who first introduces us to who we are in the world …. Our infant imaginations are jollied awake as she translates the toes on our feet into pigs going to market, sends a cow over the moon, and tucks the world's biggest family into bed in a shoe.

The Metaphysics of Amazement

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The most significant quality of this literature is its freshness. Its extravagance makes us continually see the world as if it were new. Says Goldthwaite, There is an accidental charm to stuff extracted from the world. Put enough of it between the covers of even a small book and something felicitous happens.

Out of apparent chaos the world reappears. There is nothing to Mother Goose but random snatches of silliness, and yet it is all here: cast, history, scenery, weather, the piecemeal world somehow arguing itself whole again in song.

It was J. R. R. Tolkien (himself no mean writer of children's literature) who conferred upon man the title of "subcreator." As creatures created in the image and likeness of God, our natures yearn to create. But since we cannot (as is God's sole privilege) really bring something from nothing, we are left with merely bringing something from something. It is the quintessence of true art that it looks as if it had been conjured ex nihilo.

How does God create? According to the first sentences of Genesis, He does it by giving form and content to chaos. This is the character of nonsense and nursery rhymes: They take a seeming chaos of facts, and put them together in a new way that is hard to imagine anyone could have thought of— through the magic of poetry.

These nursery rhymes and nonsense lyrics collect the seemingly chaotic content from the mundane world around us—cats, cows, dishes, dogs—and, in imitation of the first chapters of Genesis, meld them together and give them a new shape through words—and not just any words, but the musical words of poetry. We do not have the ability to create ex nihilo, but through the godly gift of language— particularly poetic language—we can create a semblance of the first few moments of the world. We can make reality dance.

What poetry does is to help us see the original creation again through the subordinate magic of our own subcreation. Goldthwaite again: The mind is stubborn in its need for order. Upset its expectations with a spiel of gibberish and, like a turtle looking to right itself, it will seek the stability of meaning every time. Nonsense might be defined more accurately as a flirtation with disorder, a turning upside down of the world for the pleasure of seeing it come right side up again.

G. K. Chesterton argues that nonsense verse and fairy tales clear away the existential debris of life that obscures our view of the actual wonder of reality. By taking the ordinary things of this world and casting them into new juxtapositions that are 12

The Metaphysics of Amazement

no less strictly logical and orderly than things as they are, we see the real magic in the things that we have become blind to through familiarity. We recapture what he called the "ancient instinct of astonishment." He said of fairy tales that they say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

The world is best viewed, he once said, by standing on one's head. It is the same world, only seen from a new and different perspective.

The man in the moon Came down too soon, And asked his way to Norwich; The man in the south He burnt his mouth, With eating cold plum porridge.

Nonsense verse is a pure reenactment of creation that is—through a trick of language—available to us in this mortal existence. As human beings created in God's image, we have an innate desire for order precisely because we have an innate desire for existence. To see the original ordering act redramatized before our eyes by the magic of musical words provides us with a glimpse of the primordial joy that must have been the angels'.

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NARRATIVES THROUGH MUSIC: Peter and the Wolf

BY DR. CAROL REYNOLDS

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tories travel from a writer's mind to the heart and imagination of a reader. In the Western tradition, the written or spoken word serves as the primary vehicle for conveying stories. Yet the visual and performing arts excel at telling stories too, and a combination of the two often makes a story more expressive and memorable than one told using words alone.

For children, a story combined with music is especially powerful. Large-scale forms like opera and ballet come to mind when we think of telling stories through music, but smaller-scale forms also bring stories to life, starting with the irreplaceable genre of "song." Songs tend to be the first music most children hear and understand.

Melody, harmony, and rhythm can invigorate— indeed, transform—a text. Plus, there is an immediacy to words that are set to melody or associated with musical sounds. What happens, though, if text is not present? Can instrumental sounds alone convey the drama and substance of a story?

This question figured prominently in one of history's loudest aesthetic debates, called "The War of the Romantics." Starting around the mid-nineteenth century, Western composers, critics, and audiences Dr. Carol Reynolds is a widely acclaimed author, speaker, and educator. She regularly leads arts tours throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, recently in partnership with the Smithsonian Institute.

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grappled with a sharp ideological divide over whether instrumental music, sans words, could, or even should, convey stories. By the dawn of the twentieth century, that battle had been won by those championing the narrative possibilities of instrumental music. To that victory we owe a long line of vivid narrative compositions (tone poems) by composers like Richard Strauss and Franz Liszt that still today wow audiences in concert halls. From that same victory evolved a new genre of music essential to today's most popular method of telling stories: the film score.

So, yes, instrumental music all by itself has grand potential to convey stories in highly effective ways.

Still, for children the appeal of combining words and music is undeniable, particularly when presented through a form I like to call the "musically illustrated narrative"—a form used by Sergei Prokofiev to create his children's masterpiece Peter and the Wolf.

A musically illustrated narrative, combining a spoken text with expressive music, offers a freshness and directness that pleases audiences. It facilitated Prokofiev's pedagogical purpose in writing Peter and the Wolf, namely teaching children to identify the instrumental colors in an orchestra. But these factors alone do not account for the irresistibility or ongoing popularity of this particular work.

Peter and the Wolf benefited from the enormity of Prokofiev's intellectual and artistic gifts. He was a Narratives Through Music: Peter and the Wolf  13

complex man whom today we might call a "musical geek"—a brilliantly talented pianist and composer who displayed notable prowess in mathematics and chess. Yet his life was slammed by the cataclysm of the Bolshevik Revolution, which brought a violent dissolution of traditional Russian life and culture.

Prokofiev fled the chaos of the Revolution and spent significant time abroad, including in Paris and the United States. But making a living as a composer outside of Russia was not easy. His homesickness, plus a misplaced belief that Stalin's policies would allow a nurturing creative arena, drew him home in the mid1930s. Alas, he spent the rest of his life kicking against cruel restrictions that rebuffed his imagination and limited his productivity. It remains a wonder that he was able to compose at all.

But he did compose. And he survived challenges and disappointments at times by turning from the imposed political narrative of Soviet ideology to fairy tales and classical literature (e.g., his ballets Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet). His strong commitment to creating new pedagogical repertoire for children also gave him a relatively untroubled avenue for creativity.

animals at the core of the story: Cat, Duck, Bird, and Wolf. What pleases children more than a theatrical drama where costumed "animals" play a role?

Instead, he chose a musically illustrated narrative wherein the story is proclaimed segment by segment, between which the orchestra responds with expressive musical passages. For the sonorous identities of the characters, Prokofiev employed longestablished conventions of Western music: menacing horns depict the wolf, flutes twittering in a high register evoke the bird, the slinky tone of a clarinet mimics the cavalier steps of the cat, and the bassoon intones Grandpa's forceful, belabored steps. Peter himself receives a jaunty, unforgettably cheerful theme played by the strings.

We will never be able to calculate the number of children captivated by Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

The work dissolves the complexities of the symphony orchestra. Charming moments in the story gain more charm when sounded by the instruments. Scarier aspects of the story triple their power when painted in music. And the final victory in the form of a march (which is, if jubilant, also ambivalent, since one

PETER’S THEME Prokofiev loved children for their boundless imagination, joy in play, and piercing honesty— qualities difficult to find under a Communist system dedicated to masking the truth. He also managed through most of his life to keep a biting sense of humor that can be sensed often in his music.

Biographer Harlow Robinson writes that "Prokofiev was a boy of forty-five" when he composed Peter and the Wolf in 1936, during one of the worst periods of Stalinist purges. He rejected the original text provided for him and wrote a timeless tale of a boy who disobeys his grandfather's warning and enters the dangerous woods where wolves dwell. Prokofiev could have cast his tale as an extended "story song," much like his earlier work The Ugly Duckling. He might have framed it as a children's opera with roles for Peter, Grandfather, and the Hunters, plus the four 14

 Narratives Through Music: Peter and the Wolf

character remains trapped inside the wolf's belly) stirs child-sized feet to prancing and puts a smile on adult faces. How impoverished this story would be if the music were to disappear!

Peter and the Wolf reminds us, too, of ancient traditions for conveying stories. Many of our treasured classical works were designed to be sung or recited with instrumental accents. Music and story have long needed and desired one another.

If it has been a while since you immersed yourself in Peter and the Wolf, give it a try. You may be surprised by the number and variety of narrators available in recorded versions. As you enjoy the piece, tally up the ways in which words and music enliven and transform one another. And think of the quietly heroic composer who, in dark times, nonetheless wrote measure after measure of pure joy.

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SIMPLY CLASSICAL

WELCOME HOME

by Cheryl Swope

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lassic works of children's literature might be greater than the Great Books. Few of us can tackle Rabelais or Rousseau, but most of us can appreciate Heidi and Homer Price. Classic children's stories welcome us to partake with wonder and wisdom.

This is not to say that those of us who can read the Great Books ought not to. When the Memoria Press staff book club read Anna Karenina, I accepted the challenge. To my surprise I experienced the same impulse Andrew Pudewa described when he finished the daunting novel: Immediately I wanted to read the 880-page work again.

But none of us begins with a Tolstoy novel. When I was little my mother and father read to me The Little Red Hen, The Gingerbread Boy, and The Three Little Pigs.

Decades later I shared these same stories with my children.

The pencil inscriptions on Heidi and Little Women in our home bear my mother's maiden name because she read the hardbacks seventy-five years ago.

She gave them to me when I was a girl.

Heidi's Children, Little Men, Jo’s Boys, and Eight Cousins round out those collections because my grandmother added to them for my birthdays. Now my daughter Michelle has read them all.

Reading is not, of course, merely a feminine pursuit. In our family, my husband read picture books to our children, most memorably 10 Little Puppy Dogs, which my husband can recite to this day.

As the children grew, he looked at our son Michael one day and, as if in a rite of passage, he began to read Watership Down to him.

One summer my husband announced to the family: "We're going to read The Lord of the Rings Cheryl Swope is the author of Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child and Memoria Press' Simply Classical Curriculum, as well as editor of the Simply Classical Journal.

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series. We will start with The Hobbit." At this time the movies had not yet been made, nor had our children heard of these books. They protested the length, the odd title, the unfamiliar illustrations.

Undeterred, my husband began. With shrugs, the children acquiesced. Within days, at the end of each reading they would chant in unison, "Read some more! Read some more!" They finished The Hobbit and then the trilogy. My husband urged our children never to see the movies but to keep the characters in their minds as they imagined them. To this day "An Unexpected Party" from The Hobbit now ranks among Michelle's most often read and most giggled to chapters in all of children's literature.

Recently, with so much time at home, Michael mentioned to us that he needed a new book series. Michelle overheard, thought for a moment, and pulled from her bookshelf Anne of Green Gables. She assured him that this first book would, in her words, "whet his whistle." She then pulled the remaining books from the top of her shelves: Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, and so on. She told Michael that the books were not just for girls, but Michael already knew this, for he had listened years ago to a faithful radio drama of Anne of Green Gables and deemed it "exquisitely beautiful." As the author L. M. Montgomery noted, "Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again." Michael gratefully scooped up all of the books. Before the books were my children's, they were mine. I loved them. I had never met in person anyone like Anne Shirley, who named the paths and places in her life. With her Violet Vale and Lake of Shining Waters, Anne opened my mind's eye and was about to do the same for my son.

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Classic children's literature connects boys and girls, parents and children, and people of varying backgrounds. Over the summer an older couple visited our home. With gray hair tucked in a loose bun, the wife had smooth skin, a curious mind, and a thirst for conversation. When she described her childhood farm life, the woman said she had loved horses as a girl. When Michael and Michelle had mentioned a love of books, the woman asked them, "What was the name of that famous book about a horse?" "Black Stallion by Walter Farley?" Michael offered. "Yes, Walter Farley! Black Stallion," she said with a wistful look. She added, "Oh, I read that book many times." My children smiled. The woman paused. "Then there was that other book about the mistreatment of horses in the 1800s." "Black Beauty?"

Michelle suggested. "Oh, yes," said the woman, shuddering. "I never need to read that again."

Michelle agreed. On they chatted.

We must preserve classic children's literature because stories unify. For example, not only do we share books with our children; sometimes our children share books with us. Such was the case with The Chronicles of Narnia. Somehow I missed these books as a child. My son introduced them to me.

"You must start with The Magician's Nephew." I did.

With the exception of Genesis, Job, the Psalms, and the Gospel of John, never have I felt from words on

a page such a deep appreciation for Creation and its Creator. My son urged me to read the next book, through which my soul grieved for the Crucifixion but also thrilled with the Resurrection. In Aslan I sensed the theological paradox of terrifying magnificence and merciful compassion embodied in our Lord Jesus Christ. My son and I share this understanding. Little else matters.

When gripped by the cares of life, we can turn to a classic children's story for warmth and comfort.

As we grow older or weary, we can refresh our imaginations. When our minds are too full of academic pursuits or the daily logistics of life, classic children's literature renews our thinking. The stories welcome us home.

In the dedication of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis wrote the following words to his goddaughter Lucy: I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it.

We never outgrow classic children's literature. On the contrary, may all of us grow old enough to start reading such stories again.

Memoria Press works with schools all over the country to assist in understanding the vision of classical education and to help implement a cohesive classical curriculum. Cheryl Swope has joined forces with the Classical Latin School Association training team to help your school start or improve education for your struggling students and students with special needs.

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 Welcome Home

SimplyCl assical.com

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LITER ATURE

The Story We’re In

by Martin Cothran

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alker Percy once speculated about a world in which the problem of death had been resolved, the eventual result of which was that everyone killed himself out of misery. For most people the quantity of life seems secondary to its quality.

Mere survival may be adequate for beasts, but it is not so for rational animals. Life alone is not satisfying for human beings; there is something more that is wanted, something beyond life itself that makes life worth living.

One of the themes of great literature is that a life truly worth living is one that has meaning and purpose―a goal much higher than growth, nutrition, and reproduction. Literature itself is narrative in structure— it has a particular setting in which the story takes place, it has characters that act out the drama, it has a plot with a conflict, a climax, and a resolution, which together produce the meaning of the story.

Martin Cothran is the editor of The Classical Teacher and author of Traditional Logic Books I & II, Material Logic, and Classical Rhetoric.

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The things that make a story meaningful and satisfying are the very things that make life meaningful and satisfying. Just as there is no good story that would not make a good life, there is no good life that would not make a good story. The best kind of life will have a great setting, great characters, and a great plot. It will have a compelling conflict and a convincing resolution. A great story is one worthy to be lived, and a great life is one worthy to be written down and read.

The ancient Greeks thought that no one could say he was happy until the end of his life, partly because what constituted a happy life was one that had meaning and purpose, and that could only be determined at its end—perhaps even after its end—because the meaning and purpose of a life (as with a story) could only be determined by seeing it as a whole—with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Any experienced reader knows that he cannot know a book as a whole until he has read to the last word.

The Story We're In

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Indeed, outside a narrative context, it is easy to see our lives as meaningless. This is the situation in which the soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front find themselves. In what some have called the greatest novel to come out of World War I, the soldiers are fighting in the trenches, and the daily routine of random violent events—futile charges, mortar attacks that bring a chance of being blown to pieces at any moment, stray bullets shot by someone across No Man's Land—all make the reality around them seem random and absurd.

They cannot see the overall picture as the generals in the war room can see it. From the generals' perspective it all makes sense—the war has an opening, a middle game, and an endgame.

Their every act is dictated by the overall purpose of the war. But the soldiers in Erich Maria Remarque's great work are not able to see this. They see only the individual events that make up the war. They are necessarily blind to the overall purpose. They just follow orders.

In fact, one of the reasons the First World War was such a significant event was that so many young men witnessed what seemed to them a meaningless slaughter. The ennui that followed the War and the nihilism that grew among the intellectual class were the result. The rise of the existentialist movement after the War took the seeming absurdity of what had happened and made a whole philosophy out of it. Writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus wrote numerous works articulating the absurdity of existence and the meaninglessness of life.

Because of this there ensued a sense of lost innocence and a skepticism about basic cultural institutions. The War helped bring about the end of the old order—the aristocratic system that had dominated Europe for centuries and the older religious order that was already teetering as a result of the defection of the intellectual classes in Europe to atheism and agnosticism in the late nineteenth century.

The crisis of confidence that followed in the basic moral, social, and political assumptions brought all of this into disrepute. But there was confusion in what should replace it. The meaning and purpose of human culture that had supported human societies was eliminated and there was uncertainty about what life was for, and therefore about what the exact nature of societies and political institutions should be.

Our world had lost its story. We all live today in the wake of this crisis.

But there was one soldier who charted a different path. He had fought in the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles of the War. When sent into reserve, he was diagnosed with "trench fever," a malady transmitted by body lice which caused weakness, 18

The Story We're In

headaches, and fever. He was hospitalized and sent back to England, where over a number of years the experience of the War helped him construct one of the great epic works in English: The Lord of the Rings.

In one scene of Tolkien's masterful work, Sam and Frodo have entered Mordor. Sam turns to Frodo and says: I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We're in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: "Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring!"

Why does Sam ask the question at this particular moment—a moment in which the two hobbits find themselves in a place where there seems little hope that the quest they set out on will succeed?

Sam understands implicitly that in order to make sense of their situation, they need to know why they are there, why they are doing what they are doing. If they see their trials as part of a larger story, one that someone someday will tell by a fireside, then it will all somehow make sense, even though they can't see it in the moment. It will have meaning and purpose, and, as miserable as they are, that meaning will give them the power to go on. At this point in their journey, they are hungry, not just for the little food they have, but for something to feed their souls.

In his excellent book Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong, William Kilpatrick says this: The same impulse that makes us want our books to have a plot makes us want our lives to have a plot. We need to feel that we are getting somewhere, making progress.

There is something in us that is not satisfied with a merely psychological explanation of our lives. It doesn't do justice to our conviction that we are on some kind of journey or quest, that there must be some deeper meaning to our lives ….

What confers meaning on our actions is a narrative context. We need to see ourselves in some kind of story in order to make sense of our lives. It is this vision of a meaningful life in a meaningful world that must undergird our view of ourselves and of the society we live in. But it is hard to see our own lives as a meaningful story and the lives we live among others in community as having any kind of purpose or theme when many of us don't read stories anymore.

If we want to see the significance of our own lives we need to gain the kind of practiced insight that comes from a wide reading of great stories. We may find that some of these stories, like Remarque's, posit that there is no meaning. But we should focus mostly on those stories, like The Lord of the Rings, that clearly affirm the centrality of narrative—that there is meaning, there is purpose, if we would only seek it. By immersing ourselves in stories, we can see the story we ourselves are in.

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Civility AND

Civilization

BY LEIGH LOWE

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classical educators, we recognize that we seek for our students (and ourselves) not simply knowledge, but wisdom. Our goal is to master not simply our content, but our character. Refinement in both thought and deed is the ultimate reward of education.

Of course, we can never fully know what the head or heart of another holds, but we are afforded clues to the nature of individuals by the way they behave.

Consequently, we are either attracted or repelled. I met my husband when we were eighteen years old, week one of college. Our first conversation (as complete strangers) included a joke about marrying in the future. When I accepted this arrangement at eighteen as a freshman it was because he too thought station wagons were cool.

When I agreed again at twenty-five, it was because I loved him and believed him to be a good man. Why did I think that? Among other things, I found him smart and brave and faithful. But I also think of these stories when I consider what formed my opinion: Once, on a date, we were taking a walk and he casually stepped to the street side of the sidewalk. Once, when we were riding in a jeep with a friend who was speeding and showing off, he quietly whispered instructions that might protect me should we flip or wreck. Once, when I was sick, he brought me a little bag full of cough drops and ice cream and tissues. Once, when we were taking a country drive, he pulled to the side of the road as a funeral procession passed in a show of respect for the deceased. Individually these are pretty small acts of kindness, but in a series with many other similar acts, I pegged my husband as a man with manners.

Though at the time I didn't consciously associate manners with morality in judging my future spouse, author Paula Marantz Cohen points out that literature illuminates the connection, crystallizing this idea for us in an excellent Wall Street Journal article, "Jane Austen Knows That Manners Make the Man." Cohen makes the point clearly, concisely, and correctly that literature, Austen in particular, can show us that "politeness is tied to deeper morality." Cohen says: "In Austen, bad or amoral people are generally vulgar and rude. Some of these characters can pretend to be mannerly when it serves their interest.

The point is that they cease to be so when their guard is down or when they are no longer invested in getting what they want." As we know, literature helps us understand truths and reality that we might not see otherwise, simply by giving us the distance to see with more objectivity. Looking back, I can recognize that those cough drops were more than a display of rote courtesy; they reflected the heart of a man.

Alerted to this truth, we see that Austen isn't the only author who demonstrates the manners/morality relationship. Our literature has long recognized the importance of manners and civility. Xenia, or hospitality, is a central theme in Homer's Odyssey. In the Odyssey, we see the contrast of obedience and disobedience in regard to xenia multiple times. We see that a breakdown in manners is a breakdown in virtue. The suitors wreaking havoc on Odysseus' home are not just socially debased, they are morally corrupt. Breaking the laws of etiquette equated to breaking the laws of humanity: disregarding prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude—the cardinal virtues.

In the example of the suitors, Homer also shows us the seven deadly sins—pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth—and ultimately the consequences of letting sin rule our lives. The suitors' behavior in ravaging Odysseus' home is set up as the antithesis of xenia from the beginning. Their actions are defilements of virtuous character. They show utter disregard for mannerly conduct—and also for people, property, and right action. Ultimately, the suitors show us life without love for our fellow man.

We can see this theme not only in a great canonical piece of literature like that of Homer, but also in enduring stories for children. In Kenneth Grahame's The Wind Leigh Lowe is the daughter-in-law of Cheryl Lowe, founder of Memoria Press and Highlands Latin School. Leigh was one of Cheryl's first hired teachers and worked closely with Cheryl for years, as a teacher, editor, and writer, helping to develop Cheryl's vision for classical education. Leigh is currently busy raising her five children (all students at Highlands Latin School) with her husband, Brian, but she finds the time to consult on curriculum, train teachers at conferences, and speak publicly about education and the vision of Memoria Press and Highlands Latin School.

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 Civility and Civilization

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GOOD MANNERS ARE BEST UNDERSTOOD AS GIFTS OF THOUGHTFULNESS GIVEN FREELY TO OTHERS.

in the Willows, we see a drastic change take place in Toad's social demeanor—his manners—after a life-changing adventure. A totally "converted" Toad celebrates his triumphant return to Toad Hall in a dramatically different way than expected. Civility, previously misunderstood by Toad as an association with fine possessions and lavish events, is finally, truly, achieved when he sheds his pride. He submits, denies the spotlight, and instead redirects attention by "pressing delicacies on his guests, by topical small-talk, and by earnest inquiries after members of their families not yet old enough to appear at social functions." Toad finally (mostly) understands that selflessness and humility are required of truly civilized individuals.

Literature shows us time and again that to those who value civilization, civility is a necessary ideal.

"Civility" has its etymological roots in the Latin word, civis (citizen). But civility, I think, is better understood as rooted not in a word, but in the Word, specifically the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Cohen tells us that "Austen presents [manners] as the need to treat others humanely rather than instrumentally." As Christians, we can recognize that acting with civility essentially means acting with love and charity. If motivated by humility and sincerity, manners should stem from a conscientious effort to act in accordance with our faith; they should encourage us to "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

In Anne of Green Gables, this is exactly how Marilla explains etiquette to Anne when Anne questions the appropriateness of certain actions ahead of a highly anticipated tea party. "The trouble with you, Anne, is that you're thinking too much about yourself. You should just think of Mrs. Allan and what would be nicest and most agreeable to her."

As many do, Anne was thinking of manners as rules and personal restrictions; Marilla recognized that good manners are best understood as gifts of thoughtfulness given freely to others. Keep your elbows off the table—so you don't crowd your neighbor. Don't chew with your mouth open—because it's unappealing and diminishes the dining experience of others. Write a thank you note—to acknowledge 1-877-862-1097

with gratitude the generosity and thoughtfulness of a giver. Having manners is not about operating within a set of narrow constraints or exalting oneself in a show of superiority. Having manners is about humbling oneself to make others more comfortable—even in the smallest ways (like walking street-side on a sidewalk).

The point is, if having manners makes us proud, the purpose has been defeated.

This emphasis on humility is important because it illustrates the fact that being mannerly doesn't mean being fancy. Just as we are all capable of being good, we are also capable of being polite. White tablecloths are not required. As C. S. Lewis tells us, "Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making." Importantly, Lewis extols self-forgetfulness, not self-deprecation.

Humility is not a denial of the blessings God gives us; we should use our good gifts, not flaunt them.

The same is true of good manners—they should be bestowed, not brandished.

Beyond the intrinsic goodness of treating others with kindness, manners and civility can serve us in practical ways. For example, on the way to middle school basketball tryouts I explained to my (short) son that though he may not be the most gifted athlete, he could distinguish himself by being hardworking, polite, and coachable. It may not be enough, but the quality of his manners, in addition to (or instead of) the quality of his free throws, could help get him on the team. I explained that it does us little good to have extraordinary capabilities—or a head full of sound ideas—if we are disagreeable, impolite people with whom others would rather not interact. In general, we prefer being around people with genuine manners because we know that we are being considered and valued in their presence.

At their core, however, good manners are not about getting ahead—they're about getting along.

They are about being servant-hearted in our relationships. Our commitment to manners should be unwavering because they demonstrate our desire to be good. Literature repeatedly reminds us that Manners do, in fact, Make the Man. Civility and Civilization 

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