Hollow Men

This is from The Hollow Universe, by Charles de Koninck, and reminds me a bit of CS Lewis's Abolition of Man which we were discussing this fall:

The prevailing 'scientific outlook', above all in the Commonwealth, is now more than ever dominated by Hume. His critique does not affect science as a tool; indeed, mathematics is now largely recognized for what he thought it was—a tool, and a quite reliable one. But his treatment of induction and causality is now being used to snuff out that first type of wonder : wonder about what a cause is, what is cause of what, what movement is, what place and time are, and so on. His apparently cold analysis has met with considerable popular success; and its effect is to drive from the human mind that primordial curiosity, the parent of all other motives of inquiry, which Aristotle describes in his account of the beginnings of science and wisdom.

Surely it is disheartening to reflect that we live in an age when it can be necessary, not merely to explain Einstein's speculative goal, but even to defend it against another type of mind which would have it that his time might have been better spent in the practice of plumbing. But the spirit of intellectual nihilism is gaining ground. It is frightening to think of the extent to which people are now being encouraged to banish from the minds of their children great questions as devoid of all meaning; to dispel the wonder which is a young mind's birthright; to confine their spirit to petty problems that can be answered once and for all to the satisfaction of reasoners incapable of raising a question to begin with. We now have a philosophy to show that there are no problems but those which it has shown to be no problem; and to decree that there is no philosophy other than one that is a denial of philosophy. Under the twinkle of a fading star, Hollow Men rejoice at a hollow world of their own making.

De Koninck was a Belgian Thomistic scholar who taught on the topic of "the compatibility and complementarity of philosophical knowledge and scientific inquiry".  Apparently the late Dr Ralph McInerny studied under him.   There are several writings of De Koninck's linked online at Good Catholic Books. 

Interesting factoid, if Wikipedia is to be believed:

De Koninck and his family hosted and entertained many notables in their Quebec City residence, among them Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his fiery writer-artist wife, Consuelo Suncín, during their five week stay in the province in the spring of 1942. The De Koninck's precocious eight year old son, Thomas, whom Saint-Exupéry met, may have served as an inspiration for the extraterrestrial visitor of his most famous novella, The Little Prince.

Abolition of Man: The Way, part 2

Continuing the book discussion of Abolition of Man with part 2 of chapter 2:  The Way

Does this mean, then, that no progress in our perceptions of value can ever take place? That we are bound down for ever to an unchanging code given once for all? And is it, in any event, possible to talk of obeying what I call the Tao? If we lump together, as I have done, the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew, shall we not find many contradictions and some absurdities? I admit all this. Some criticism, some removal of contradictions, even some real development, is required. But there are two very different kinds of criticism. 

I'm glad that CS Lewis brought this up because I had started to puzzle a little about whether you could talk about a "Tao" or "Way" in any meaningful sense.   Was it just a cover label for "whatever moral system a given culture happened to have?"   In that case, wouldn't it be a variable, that could mean vastly different things in different contexts, even opposing things?  

Just by chance I have been reading Christian Reflections (a collection of essays by Lewis compiled by Walter Hooper after Lewis' death) and his essay On Ethics covers a lot of the same territory as this chapter in Abolition of Man.  The essay isn't available online but I did find a paper that discusses On Ethics alongside of Abolition of Man from a Reformed perspective Transcendent Natural Law in CS Lewis (pdf)

In On Ethics, Lewis makes the point that most civilizations or rather, most moral systems, overlap to quite a degree on their understanding of ethics.   Where they differ, it is usually in extension or limitation of the basic principle.  For example, some moral frameworks limit "do not kill" or "treat others as you would be treated" to the person's own clan or people, while others extend it outwards.   And so on.   

When Christianity came into being, for example, it wasn't revolutionary in its ethics.  There were a few extensions and changes in emphasis.   But the radical nature of the Christian message wasn't so much in its understanding of moral norms, as in the new covenant and the new hope that this involved. 

Lewis doesn't base his case on the overlaps.  So in that way his "Tao" is a variable.   It stands for something that all cultures have had -- that he would argue no one can do without if they are ever going to recommend anything as a "should".    But it also happens to be the case that most venerable cultures have a lot of overlap in the details of their ethical code (there is more about that in the Appendix of the book, which we haven't gotten to yet).  

Lewis  makes the point in On Ethics that he does in this chapter, that we can't critique the Tao, the code of ethics, from outside it.  This is because there is no way to get to a moral imperative, a "should", unless you have already started with a "should" of some sort.   I like the way he puts this:

A theorist about language may approach his native tongue, as it were from outside, regarding its genius as a thing that has no claim on him and advocating wholesale alterations of its idiom and spelling in the interests of commercial convenience or scientific accuracy. That is one thing. A great poet, who has 'loved, and been well nurtured in, his mother tongue', may also make great alterations in it, but his changes of the language are made in the spirit of the language itself: he works from within. The language which suffers, has also inspired the changes. That is a different thing—as different as the works of Shakespeare are from Basic English. It is the difference between alteration from within and alteration from without: between the organic and the surgical. 

 In On Ethics he hits harder on the logical impossibility of choosing a system of ethics from outside a system.  If you have not started with some type of ethical framework, you can't develop one.  

The way I understand it, this is mainly because you can't get an imperative from the indicative mood; you can't get a prescriptive from a descriptive;  you can't make "is" add up to "ought".  Apparently, it's a fallacy:     Is-Ought Problem I also remember reading about this fallacy on Drew Campbell's old blog (I quoted it here but you have to scroll down to near the end of the post).     There has to be some value scale linking the "is" to the "ought" -- one thing has to actually be considered "better" than the other, so that it is to be desired and sought.   For example, something like "Look out for Number One" adds up to "self-preservation and happiness are good things" even if in a narrow, impoverished way compared to the richness and reason of the traditional Tao.   But "self-preservation and personal happiness are good things" is an assumption.    

Lewis puts it this way:

From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible. We must therefore either extend the word Reason to include what our ancestors called Practical Reason and confess that judgements such as society ought to be preserved (though they can support themselves by no reason of the sort that Gaius and Titius demand) are not mere sentiments but are rationality itself; or else we must give up at once, and for ever, the attempt to find a core of 'rational' value behind all the sentiments we have debunked.

 Lewis says that all civilizations, all workable moral systems, start with a pre-existing Ought, a code of ethics generally held if not generally followed to perfection.   Within that Ought, you can develop further by contraction or expansion. Thus Jesus could say, "Moses told you this... but I tell you now...."   and develop and fulfill the understanding of the Law.   But not by destroying the Law; by fulfilling it.    Lewis says the revolutionary has to work from within. 

I thought that was interesting aside from the point he is making about morality.  It seems to apply to a lot of things, from literature (the example he gives above) to philosophy to faith ("I believe in order to understand") and even to the way a mother can be a good teacher without special credentials, because she knows and loves her children.    You can coherently work from inside, and in fact you must.   A scientist can do fine work within his own discipline.  The problem comes when he thinks his discipline can sustain itself by itself; that it is a closed system.  

Lewis says that a crank or ideologue is distinguished from a wise man in taking one bit of the Tao and making it supersede everything else.    Whereas a wise man can put the better above the worse, the higher above the lower, and find unity in multiplicity, the crank distorts the ethical framework.

In On Ethics, Lewis writes:

I deny that we have any choice to make between clearly differentiated ethical systems. I deny that we have any power to make a new ethical system. I assert that wherever and whenever ethical discussion begins we find already before us an ethical code whose validity has to be assumed before we can even criticize it. For no ethical attack on any of the traditional precepts can be made except on the ground of some other traditional precept.

 So the bottom line is that when someone is debunking moral values, it is inevitably from a moral framework, even if the debunker does not realize it or does not acknowledge his framework.    If you trace it backwards you often find that the debunker has chosen some particular favorite value and hyperfocused at the expense of the others.  I already mentioned the Look out for Number One, where the perpetrator is hyperfocusing on personal good.  He ends up defeating his own narrow purpose, of course; Aristotle deals with that quite thoroughly in the Nichomachean Ethics.    In Lewis science fiction book Out of the Silent Planet, as quoted in the article I linked to above, the Oyarsa of Malacandra says to Weston, who wants men to colonize and plunder the planets and the stars:

I see now how the lord of the silent world has bent you. There are laws that all hnau know, of pity and straight dealing and shame and the like, and one of these is the love of kindred. He has taught you to break all of them except this one, which is not one of the greatest laws; this one he has bent until it becomes folly and has set it up, thus bent, to be a little, blind Oyarsa in your brain. And now you can do nothing but obey it, though if we ask you why it is a law you can give no other reason for it than for all the other and greater laws which it drives you to disobey.

You can see this with a lot of the moral debates that go on nowadays in the public square.  One moral imperative is pushed at the expense of all others, and with no agreed-on grounds for the framework.

It seems to me that one of the hardest things to teach our children is to be wise -- to be able to balance out and prioritize different values without letting one of them get a stranglehold on all the others.   Literature, it seems to me, helps develop this moral sense because it lets the child (or adult) participate in moral decisions and their consequences.  It helps the child work from within the body of ethical thought.  It adds another, thoughtful dimension to the instructions and training in his home and school and church.   It's hard to make an ideologue or a crank out of someone who has read widely and imaginatively, because cranks and ideologues have a narrow focus and a reader has a wider and broader outlook. 

As Charlotte Mason said, quoting the Psalm, the task is to set the child's feet " in a wide room" (or a spacious place).    Literature allows the child this room to think and imaginatively experience within the terms of the moral framework.   To me literature seems particularly important nowadays when we are less dependent on nature -- the seasons, the weather, the ground we live on -- to survive and thrive. 

It's possible nowadays for people to go through life without any of the tempering you get from living on the land and from folk stories and literature; it's unfortunate that our schools, with their artificial lighting and heating and their emphasis on second-hand information, not to mention the unfair power wielded by the lowest common denominator of the peer group, only perpetrate this problem, so that if a child learns wisdom in the school environment it is accidentally or negatively, not because the setting is geared to support it. 

Abolition of Man: Dulce et Decorum

This is for Cindy's book discussion of Abolition of Man by CS Lewis -- this week we are discussing the second chapter of the book, The Way.  Go to Cindy's blog Ordo Amoris for her comments and for links to more posts).  

Probably most everyone has read Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfrid Owen.   I read it in a poetry anthology my parents gave me when I was junior high age.   It's a gripping poem describing the horrors of war (Wilfred Owen was a soldier in World War I, the "war to end all wars", in which he ended up dying) and it ends: 

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
    To children ardent for some desperate glory,
    The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
    Pro patria mori.

There is no questioning the truth in the experience he recounts; it is I think a blazing corrective to facile jingoism, especially the kind that plays fast and loose with young generous lives.  War is certainly ugly enough that we should not rush into it without just cause. 

And yet....

CS Lewis was a World War I veteran too.   He was wounded, and two of his buddies killed, in that war.   One of them was "Paddy" Moore, who had asked Lewis to care for his mother in the event of his death, a commission Lewis carried out conscientiously, to the point of caring for her as his own mother until she died.

It was much later (in 1943) that Lewis wrote Abolition of Man, in which he uses the same tag from the ode by Horace as what he calls the experimentum crucis of the case:

Let us continue to use the previous example—that of death for a good cause—not, of course, because virtue is the only value or martyrdom the only virtue, but because this is the experimentum crucis which shows different systems of thought in the clearest light. Let us suppose that an Innovator in values regards dulce et decorum and greater love hath no man as mere irrational sentiments which are to be stripped off in order that we may get down to the 'realistic' or 'basic' ground of this value. Where will he find such a ground?

He's certainly chosen a good example to test differences in systems of thought.   "Greater love hath no man..." seems easier because most of us, no matter how we were brought up, can imagine circumstances in which we would die to save someone else.  Even Gaius and Titius, the writers of the Green Book, might risk themselves a little bit for the sake of a true affection, even if against their calmer judgment.

I think the dulce et decorum bit is a little more difficult, perhaps, because it's usually a case of a country sending out its young men to fight for that country.    Here trust and gratitude are implied as well as love and loyalty -- trust in the country that is sending you out; trust that your efforts and possible death will mean something to that country; gratitude for the country that has given you a place to stand.  You are dedicating yourself to the ideal of honour. 

CS Lewis has a footnote in this chapter  in which he allows himself an acerbic conclusion to a rather detached though telling list of the Innovators', Gaius's and Titius's, "approvals" and "disapprovals". 

Disapprovals: A mother's appeal to a child to be 'brave' is 'nonsense' (Green Book, p. 62). The reference of the word 'gentleman' is 'extremely vague' (ibid.) 'To call a man a coward tells us really nothing about what he does' (p. 64). Feelings about a country or empire are feelings 'about nothing in particular' (p. 77).
 Approvals: Those who prefer the arts of peace to the arts of war (it is not said in what circumstances) are such that 'we may want to call them wise men' (p. 65). The pupil is expected 'to believe in a democratic community life' (p. 67). 'Contact with the ideas of other people is, as we know, healthy' (p. 86). The reason for bathrooms ('that people are healthier and pleasanter to meet when they are clean') is 'too obvious to need mentioning' (p. 142). It will be seen that comfort and security, as known to a suburban street in peace-time, are the ultimate values: those things which can alone produce or spiritualize comfort and security are mocked. Man lives by bread alone, and the ultimate source of bread is the baker's van: peace matters more than honour and can be preserved by jeering at colonels and reading newspapers.

You can hardly blame him for that note of acerbity considering his own war-time experience and that of his friends and peers (the UK casualty rate was horrendous; hardly a  family was left untouched).  Lewis was not talking from an ivory tower when he brought up death for one's country as the test case for a moral system. 

Who was it, after all, that had helped ensure that Gaius and Titius could continue to earn their bakery bread writing textbooks which smugly dismissed such things as bravery and honour as mere sentiment to be debunked?  Who had been wounded himself, and seen others die, and then had to read that such things were "nonsense" and "about nothing in particular"?

You can see echoes of this same dichotomy  in Charlotte Mason's introduction to her last book Philosophy of Education, written shortly after World War I (1922).   Mason writes:

These are anxious days for all who are engaged in education. We rejoiced in the fortitude, valour and devotion shown by our men in the War and recognize that these things are due to the Schools as well as to the fact that England still breeds "very valiant creatures."

.... But what about the abysmal ignorance shown in the wrong thinking of many of the men who stayed at home? Are we to blame? I suppose most of us feel that we are: for these men are educated as we choose to understand education, that is, they can read and write, think perversely, and follow an argument, though they are unable to detect a fallacy. If we ask in perplexity, why do so many men and women seem incapable of generous impulse, of reasoned patriotism, of seeing beyond the circle of their own interests, is not the answer, that men are enabled for such things by education? These are the marks of educated persons; and when millions of men who should be the backbone of the country seem to be dead to public claims, we have to ask,––Why then are not these persons educated, and what have we given them in lieu of education?

I am not in the military service myself, but I imagine that the reason that soldiers go to fight, suffer and perhaps die is not so much that they long to preserve the steady arrival of bakery vans to suburbs, nor leisure for suburbanites to pronounce smug platitudes about peace and tolerance;  rather, that they want to protect things that are precious and yet immaterial, things like freedom and happiness for their mothers and siblings and wives and children, aid to the weak, honor for their nation, so that it doesn't have to kowtow to tyranny.

In other words, precisely the intangibles that men like Gaius and Titius scoff at and debunk for the sake of "realism".   

I would take it that when the Roman statesman told his son that it was sweet and seemly to die for his country, he was speaking for himself as well; it was something he would have done himself when he was younger, and he was willing to risk his own progeny to preserve the fatherland.    As CS Lewis pointed out, he was telling his son what he believed to be the truth.

After all, if everyone dies (the ancients were more in touch with their mortality than modern suburbanites are) then how you die is what matters in the end.   This is something Gaius and Titius probably would not understand.  

When Gaius and Titius dismiss all those things as meaningless nonsense, they leave themselves and their country only two alternatives.   If they can get everyone else to agree with them, the days of suburbs and timely bakery vans will be numbered, and they will have to learn to be smug organs of whatever tyrannous state results, whether sooner or later.  Their death, when it comes, will be a craven and ignominious one, honor and courage traded off for a false peace. 

If they realize that their pragmatism is fatal for the survival of their state of life, they are going to have to do something even worse -- brainwash the children in their schools to do something that they would never risk doing themselves, something they believe is "nonsense", though convenient for their country and those that stay at home.    They will have to restore some version of Dulce et Decorum, but it will be manipulative propaganda.  Their death when it comes will be the death of traitors and exploiters of the young.

(I can think of a third possible alternative -- the path of a conscientious pacifist.   I am leaving that option entirely out of this because this path draws from an appeal to conscience and tradition that Gaius and Titius would think just as nonsensical as the Roman one... they are realists, after all.)

Whether or not I ever have a son who joins the military service, I hope to raise children who realize that these two "realistic" alternatives are no rightful alternatives at all; that when you perceive their bitter toxicity, "dulce et decorum" do not seem like such ironic adjectives anymore.

Abolition of Man: Correlatives and Science of Relations

In Abolition of Man, CS Lewis says something that really struck me this time through:

Before considering the issues really raised by this momentous little paragraph (designed, you will remember, for 'the upper forms of schools') we must eliminate one mere confusion into which Gaius and Titius have fallen. Even on their own view—on any conceivable view—the man who says This is sublime cannot mean I have sublime feelings. Even if it were granted that such qualities as sublimity were simply and solely projected into things from our own emotions, yet the emotions which prompt the projection are the correlatives, and therefore almost the opposites, of the qualities projected. The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration. If This is sublime is to be reduced at all to a statement about the speaker's feelings, the proper translation would be I have humble feelings. If the view held by Gaius and Titius were consistently applied it would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them to maintain that You are contemptible means I have contemptible feelings', in fact that Your feelings are contemptible means My feelings are contemptible.

The whole passage is good, but the part that struck me was about the correlatives.   Surely, that is a key point when we are talking about objectivity and subjectivity.

The distinction between the two has always, always confused me, even back to my teenage years when I first encountered what you could call World Views.  Granted something I never seriously doubted for a second -- the existence of a World Outside Myself, things that would have existed even if I never had come into being.    Granted that, still, confusion remains.  How do we come to know, and know reliably?  In what way do our inner perceptions reflect outside reality?  If I can only come to know something insofar as I am a Subject (the person who knows) then is not Subjectivity in some way a part of Objectivity?

These aren't questions unique to myself (I found out later).  Everyone seems to be trying to get on some sort of solid footing with regard to epistemology nowadays.  

Plus, I always saw problems with what passed for Objectivity in our modern world.   Case in point:  "Objective" history or science.  It was very clear indeed to me that supposed Objective Historians and Scientists were in fact engaged in a semantic dodge.  You can't have an Object without a Subject, grammatically, except in the passive construction, and I agree with Richard Mitchell that the passive construction is subject to suspicion.   Who are these shadowy figures who move and pronounce without revealing their identity?    Who watches the watcher?

Besides this distrust of the "outside the universe" position for its naivety and lack of realism, I also could see for myself that it was really a very incomplete truth.

Who do you go to when you want to learn something?  Surely someone who loves their subject enough to be both comprehensive, insightful AND rigorously fair and honest.  It's true that such teachers are rare, but they are rare because real love is rare.

An "objective" observer is by definition detached, and insofar as you are detached, you are the opposite of participatory.  And it is through connection that knowledge comes.   It can't be any other way.   Your eyes have to encounter something in order to see it, and so on.  


To me, it seems that this correlative thing helps solve some of the difficulty, and so, as well, does Charlotte Mason's "Science of Relations."   In fact, I think most sciences do boil down in some way to relations.  Even science in its broader conception as scientia,  "knowledge", comes down in many ways to relation, interaction. 

To know something is to stand in relation to it, and Gaius and Titus' confusion of language reflects confusion of thought in this regard.  


Piaget says that children are born with certain capacities in potential.   But they are triggered by environment.   The children develop their latent capacities through exposure and practice.   This exposure and practice, along with some physiological maturation,  trigger the onset of new abilities and understandings.

Correlatives are things that exist in relationship.   This from Aristotle, in Categories:

Those things are called relative, which, being either said to be of something else or related to something else, are explained by reference to that other thing. For instance, the word 'superior' is explained by reference to something else, for it is superiority over something else that is meant. Similarly, the expression 'double' has this external reference, for it is the double of something else that is meant. So it is with everything else of this kind. There are, moreover, other relatives, e.g. habit, disposition, perception, knowledge, and attitude. The significance of all these is explained by a reference to something else and in no other way. Thus, a habit is a habit of something, knowledge is knowledge of something, attitude is the attitude of something. So it is with all other relatives that have been mentioned. Those terms, then, are called relative, the nature of which is explained by reference to something else, the preposition 'of' or some other preposition being used to indicate the relation.

You can see how this applies to what Lewis was saying about the relationship of sublime to humble, or contemptuous to contemptible.   He makes the point that part of education is getting to a truer sense of how we stand.   If we don't recognize sublimity, we may be contemptible, but we are not humble.  Humility is the recognition of where we stand in relation to something sublime.   In education, our perceptions must be formed so that we see rightly, and it is too delicate a process to be taught mechanically.   A waterfall is sublime, but we are educated to know it is not to be worshipped, for instance.   A magnanimous education has room for a host of paradoxes, of delicate balances.   There is really no substitute.  A Gradgrind "just the facts" type of training can't encompass things like that.   Moral formation would become propaganda and brainwashing; in fact, this is what you often see in schools nowadays.  

But it seems that this correlative rule may also apply to how we come to know.   Since our learning starts in our senses, even though it does not end there, we learn necessarily in relation.   A child doesn't just learn.  He relates to things.  He learns about mama and papa and juice and toast before he learns about the planets in the solar system.  

Say there is a Truth out there.... take your pick of what it is.   Let's say a Giant Sequoia that was already a tree in Julius Caesar's time.  It existed even before I was born.   It would continue to exist even after I die.   Yet the truth doesn't exist in ME, except in potential form, until I come to know it.  If I never saw red, the concept of redness would remain latent inside of me.    If someone told me red was evil (I think I read a book that had something like this one time, was it The Giver?) then I would know red, but in erroneous form.

I know my biology post last week went on and on, but I really learned something when I was writing it.  One thing I realized was that there is very often a triangular relationship between the learner, the teacher, and the content being learned.   And the relationship has, or should have, many elements.  Like the magnanimous education Lewis was talking about, it is something that can't be gotten across in a lesson plan or tested by an exam.    In the beginning of Poetic Knowledge, James Taylor quotes Frank Smith in regard to literacy.  Frank Smith says that when children learn to read, they are students of the author.   Reading is not just phonics rules, it is a relationship with words, with meaning, so it really matters that literacy is taught in the context of real books.

This matters to me because I am noticing that now that I'm trying only to teach my kids the things that I really love, I am not limiting our homeschool, but expanding it.  I find more to love, and my love provides a kind of light.   My love for my kids shapes how I impart the material to them.

I'm talking ideally here.  I saw this like a sudden vision; I don't live it moment by moment.   I just see for a moment how it SHOULD be, but I am not sure I'm explaining it well.  But "enthuasiasm" is etymologically of divine origin, and doesn't mean talking in a loud peppy voice or faking something you don't really have.  It is something that seems to light things up, but it comes from within.  It may be subjective, in that it resides in the subject, but as Lewis said, it is a correlative.  The inner thing is responding to something outside, to an object.    So the confusion between the supposed dichotomy between subjective and objective is partly resolved for me, thanks to Lewis.   My subjective self responds or relates to the objective thing, but it can respond truly and deeply, or not so much so.    If I think a waterfall is "pretty" I am missing the point in a real way, because it's not just about what I contain within me, but how in tune my response is with the real nature of things.  

All true Love comes from God, so God is in the mix too .  CS Lewis talks about how we don't see the light itself, but we see things BY the light.  I was thinking about this while walking home after dropping off our (red) Dodge for brake repairs.   I was noticing how what I see is not the leaf or branch or stone, but the way the light acts upon them.    But that is true with Knowledge too, and with my REAL love for my kids, not just affection (born of close proximity and sometime cuteness and charm in the children) or biological partiality.    The real love is directed towards something beyond the contingencies, to something that endures when other things pass away.   So ultimately, my love of whatever it is that I want my children to know and love, is God showing these things, as light shows me a leaf.