Kindle Book: The Life and Writings of Saint Augustine

I know I haven't blogged here for a while!  The little blogging I have been doing is over at Take Up and Read.

I am up at Wasilla visiting my mom and though I probably have more time in the day than I do at home, it somehow doesn't feel that way, so I have sort of gotten out of the blogging rhythm.

But I wanted to mention....

I found a good book for free for the Amazon Kindle (I'm guessing you can find it for the Nook, too).

It is The Life and Writings of Saint Augustine. 

It is a collection of some of his major works like Confessions, City of God, and On Christian Doctrine (and more as well, those are just the ones I can remember offhand) and there is also a section with some quotes of his.

Though the works are in public domain, this is an actual collection made by someone Wyatt North Publishing so there is a hyperlinked table of contents, and Kindle-specific formatting, which makes collections like this way more useable.  I don't know how long it will stay free, so I wanted to mention it!  

Speaking of Reading Books

.....and about thoughts on 2011 and plans for 2012,  I thought of another couple of things I wanted to change this year. 

One was that I didn't really read very many devotional books when I look back on last year.  I read lots of books with a Christian perspective, and particularly I am glad I read so many Christian novels, but I didn't finish many classic books on Christian living.    Next year I'd like to read more of these, particularly rereads.

Another related thing -- I had no way to record reading that wasn't book or was only excerpted from books.   So when I, say, browsed through a book on my shelves and read for about an hour, but didn't read from cover to cover, I just didn't write it down, even if it was good quality reading.  

I stayed away from some reading I would have liked to do because I wasn't sure if I could commit to reading the whole thing cover to cover.   This sort of ties in with the lack of religious books recorded because sometimes I did start reading an excellent religious book -- I started reading CS Lewis's Christian Reflections, I reread some of ST Francis de Sales' God's Will For You, I read quite a lot of a biography on St Francis de Sales, I reread a good bit of Imitation of Christ, and I read parts of a compilation of St Thomas Aquinas.   But I didn't really know how to count this.  Should I count pages next year?   That sounds too difficult and quantity-oriented for something like reading.  What about when I read an article online?   Do any of you keep track of this kind of reading and if so, how? 

The Year of Books

2011 was definitely a Year of Book Reading for me.   Right now I am up at 175 books.   

So I definitely met the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge. 

Because of the challenge, this is the first year I actually kept track of everything I read --- with the help of Goodreads.   

A few thoughts about that:

It was nice to really focus seriously on reading for a year.   In past years I probably simply couldn't have found the time.   Plus, in past years, I tried very hard to restrain my tendency to read voraciously.   I think even something good like reading can be disordered if it becomes too big a part of your life. 

On the other hand, I know that many people I really admire are great readers -- they have read widely and deeply.  There is no way around it:  that simply takes some time.  I couldn't do it when I had a special needs preschooler, a baby and five homeschool students of all ages.   But I have more time right now.  It may not last forever, but while it does, why not catch up on reading?  


I am especially proud of reading the books I had always wanted to read, like War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Consolations of Philosophy, Augustine's Confessions, and others of that sort, that are on Great Books lists everywhere.   Now at least I can say I've read them, and even learned from them. 

All in all, I think it worked out well to use 2011 as a sort of Book Sabbatical.  But I don't think I need to do that every year.  

Here are some thoughts on my Reading Challenge for 2012. 


Not Quite So Many Books.  Next year I probably won't push myself to read the equivalent of a book almost every other day, which is what 175 to 365 roughly comes out to.   

Books On My Shelves. I think I instead will try to focus more on reading or rereading the books on my shelves.  I know I have said that before.  But I really do want to.   If books are on my shelf, presumably it is for a reason --- so that they can be read.  If that is not happening, why are they there?  

Juvenile Books:  Most of the books on the kids' shelves, I have already read, but I probably will try to read the rest.   I found that when I was reading so much last year, I sometimes needed to read a lighter book after I had plodded through a more difficult one.   So in those cases I can read a juvenile book.    Now that my teenager and myself both have Kindles, I can read public domain juvenile books along with the ones for older folk. 

Rereading Books I think I will try to do a reread for every few new books I read.   In about a year I turn 50.  I think this age is a good time to read back through some of the most influential books in my life. 

Books that Changed the World.    My husband subscribed to Easton Press's Books that Changed the World.    So we have a shelf full of these handsome leather bound books that really want someone to read them.   I am not vowing to read them all, but I'm going to try to make a dent in them.  

Keep Track Of Books Read.  My father always kept track of the books he read and encouraged us to do the same.  I always tried, but rarely kept a consistent log.  This is the first year I really did record everything I read.   I would like to keep doing it.  

So there are my thoughts and plans.   Have you thought yet about what you are going to do about your reading in 2012?

A Tale of Two British Tales, or What I Read While Traveling

While we were on the road I read two atypical short novels by two major British writers, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy.   Both authors are deeply English and alike in that they wrote about the oddities of the class system, the moral dilemmas in English life, and both created their own fictional countryside to reflect their themes and perceptions.   Both the novellas were early works of eminent authors who are better known for very different styles of work.   I thought I would informally compare and contrast since after all, I have nothing better to do, but if you want to just skip on, the short version is that I recommend both the books if you happen to enjoy reading well-written, insightful depictions of the country from which our language originates.   I do enjoy that sort of book, so I enjoyed both the books. 

The Trollope novel, really more like a novella with a doom-laden trajectory, was called An Eye for an Eye. 

Trollope is better known for his lengthy and detailed Barchester Chronicles and Palliser cycle.   The former concern societal and moral issues among the Anglican clergy and the latter concern British political life. All his books deal with moral dilemmas that spring from the rules of upper class life in 19th century England.   I read both these cycles several times a long time ago.

This particular novella draws on his experience in Ireland early in his adult life.   The major events in the book actually take place near the Cliffs of Moher, which we got to visit a few years ago on a family trip to Ireland.  These cliffs are  the most beautiful and desolate I have ever seen, so the story of despair and tragic events seemed very suitably located.   My husband Kevin sacrificed a rear view mirror on our journey to that spot, because the only road to the cliffs is a one-laner along a steep drop, and he had to pull off to the side to let an oncoming tour bus go by.   In the process he scraped off the side mirror of our rental.  Not a pretty picture, but much easier to cope with than what happens to the main characters in this story.

Fred Neville is the Anglican nephew of a British earl and suddenly becomes his heir.
Kate O'Hara is the beautiful, Catholic and isolated only daughter of a gentlewoman who has shut herself away in this wild corner of Ireland because of a scapegrace husband.


The rest follows from the inflexible laws of English society and religion of which fans of 19th century British novels are well aware by now.  

I will not say more, but I do recommend the tale if you don't mind a bit of tragedy.  I am not spoiling anything by saying this because the tragic note is introduced clearly in a prologue where the woman in the insane asylum keeps repeating over again, "An Eye for an Eye!"

Now, Thomas Hardy is well known for this kind of tragic tale of ill-starred love, but the novella Under the Greenwood Tree, or The Mellstock Quire, is quite in another vein from his better known works.   While I have read several of his books, I do not like his writing.   I love his style, but I dislike the post-Christian pagan themes and plots.     Here I am able to get his literary style with a light touch and a happy-ish ending.    I had watched the movie version of the book with my daughter several years back.  It is charming and features Kelsey Hawes whom you may know from the movie versions of  Wives and Daughters and Our Mutual Friend.  She is so beautiful and charming on-screen.

Anyway, the book wasn't quite like the movie, which takes the love affair somewhat more seriously than the book does.   But the book brings out the full value of the robust Mellstock Quire (or choir) and the humanity of the players and their family.   I loved this book.  Some of the humor and careful description of the prosaic elements of the English working class reminded me somewhat of LM Montgomery.  It made me regretful that Thomas Hardy seemed to become so melancholic and arreligious in his later work, even though in this Pastoral or Georgic work, you don't quite see the full development of his talent.

I thought it was funny that I accidentally selected a Trollope work that was somewhat Hardy-esque, and a Hardy work that was somewhat Trollope-ian!  (though not really, because Hardy's book is firmly set among the working class, and Trollope doesn't really write about that class at all). 

I really enjoyed them both and if you have an E-reader, you can read them both for free in the public domain.

Keeping House Book Study: Chapter One

Housework is a beginning, not an end. But it is a beginning—not a sidetrack, not a distraction, but a beginning, and an essential one at that—in the properly Christian work of, among other things, meeting the everyday needs of others, whether those others be our fellow household members, our near neighbors, or people more sociologically or geographically distant from ourselves.

I divided this first chapter up into two weeks because there was so much content.  It covers both the history and sociology of housekeeping AND the scriptural references to housekeeping, which were both meaningful parts of the book for me.  So I thought we could easily find enough to discuss for two weeks.  After that we'll try to read a chapter a week.  The chapters are quite short so I hope it won't be too much even during the holiday seasons which are coming up fast!

This week I am reading What's Christian about Housework? and stopping just before the section called Divine Domesticity.   I am sorry that these two sections are not very practical.   I think as we go through the book we will get more into implementation and practical helps, but perhaps it's better to consider the principles before getting into how they work out in everyday life.  

In the first part of the chapter, Mrs Peterson tells about her upbringing from the perspective of keeping house.   As a child, she liked to cook and her mother showed her how to make a few simple dishes.   She doesn't remember liking laundry, but her mother taught her anyway, and one of her brothers got very good at folding, to the extent that he was widely admired by old ladies at the laundromat.   She never learned to like cleaning much, perhaps because her mother didn't care for it. 

As an adult in grad school, Mrs Peterson went through the severe illness and eventual death of her first husband.  During those years, she was made sharply aware that the basics of feeding, clothing and caring for one's loved ones are more fundamental and crucial than the academics everyone else was focusing on.   She carried that awareness into her second marriage and eventual motherhood.

I retained the long-held sense, of which I had been made so consciously aware during those difficult years of illness, that housekeeping—cooking, cleaning, laundry, all the large and small tasks that go into keeping a household humming along—was not a trivial matter but a serious one. People need to eat, to sleep, to have clothes to wear; they need a place to read, a place to play, a place into which to welcome guests and from which to go forth into the world. These are the needs that housework exists to meet.

Being an academic and Christian, she looked for books on this topic, but could find none, which surprised her.    She delved into the history and sociology of housework and found that as the actual amount of housekeeping done has declined, the "myth" of housekeeping has gone upwards.

There are lots of fancy magazines devoted to cooking and cleaning and "keeping house" but it is pictured as sort of a leisure fantasy activity.  The dailiness and sometimes hard work of housekeeping is not usually mentioned.  You are encouraged to believe (as with so many things in our culture) that if you buy the right products everything will be easy and look glamorous.

There is also a note of resentment in our cultural approach to housework.  Who should do it, especially as everyone is increasingly spending much of their time out of the home?   Does it change as circumstances change?  Why are women commonly given most of the responsibility even when they are the primary breadwinners in their family?   What about retired couples, or adult kids living at home?

Yet at the same time, everyone still seems to have a longing to have someone take care of us, somehow. 

This note of longing is the other side of the frazzled reality that is housework for many people. Shouldn’t home be a place of refreshment, of nurturance, of beauty? Why do the house, and the housework, seem so out of control? Isn’t there a better way?

There is also the promise of decluttering schemes and home improvement projects that organizing your house will make deep changes in your life.    So keeping house still seems to be thought of as deeply connected to our inner selves. 


Finally, there is the fact that while keeping house is somewhat glamorized in magazines and our own nostalgia for "someone to take care of us", and seems to be deeply connected with our sense of self and of family relationships,  it is also looked down upon.

In fact, anyone who takes too much time to cook (or clean or iron) runs the risk of being regarded as a parasitic blot on society. One study on attitudes toward gender and the workplace found that “while ‘business women’ were rated as similar in competence to ‘business men’ and ‘millionaires,’ ‘housewives’ were rated as similar in competence to the ‘elderly,’ ‘blind,’ ‘retarded,’ and ‘disabled.’” Attitudes like these appear not to reflect gender bias pure and simple, for if they did, businesswomen would presumably rank lower than businessmen. They appear, on the contrary, to be a reflection of judgments about housewives as such. I have a friend, a housewife, who says she cringes every time she fills out a form and is asked to state her occupation. Is it any wonder why?

Mrs Peterson says that all this tangled mixture of attitude towards housework is a legacy of our society's history.    Before the Industrial Revolution, the idea of "staying at home" would have little meaning since almost everyone worked at home -- man, woman and child.    The etymology of "husband" as well as "housewife" both derive from "house" and were related to the primary tasks of man and woman -- caring for their house and land.   The spheres of work were different but fairly complementary.

This changed as factories and industries grew.   Now man, woman, and child all left the home to earn their keep.  Child labor laws changed this for children, and compulsory school replaced compulsory labor.

But though now women went out to work as well as men, the house seemed to become the main responsibility of the woman.   Things like World Wars and feminist movement would flux the situation and bring more women out into the workforce, but nothing changed radically.   Outside the home work was still considered somehow more real and dignified than keeping house.

Again, sentiments and attitudes run very deep and complex in these areas.   Whether work is "paid" or not seems to be more important than whether it is important or not.    Chesterton remarked on this when he said: 

How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone?

It seems to come down to a couple of things.  People think public work is more important than private, and paid work is more important than unpaid.   The book does not go into why this would be.   I think that it could probably become a book in itself.  But certainly, industrialization has had a major impact.

 Another quote from Keeping House:

The “problem” of housework thus became not just that it was “women’s work” or that it was low-status but that it was widely suspected of not being work at all, even by the men who benefited directly from it and by the women whose lives were consumed by it. The seemingly endless amounts of work actually involved in housework (whose pace and quantity only increased with the introduction of every new laborsaving device), the absence of any help at home, and the lack of any recognition of the value and necessity—or even the reality—of the housewife’s work surely went a long way toward fueling the fires of feminist theorizing about housework. For many feminists, the “housewife” embodied the very antithesis of the self-actualized human being. Germaine Greer, in The Female Eunuch, characterized the life of the full-time housewife as one of absolute servitude. Housewives, she said, “represent the most oppressed class of life—contracted unpaid workers, for whom slaves is not too melodramatic a description.”

Mrs Peterson's historical sketch is just that, a sketch.   To me this seems like very rich territory.   I certainly am personally not immune to the feeling that housekeeping is less distinguished than, say, intellectual work or work of public usefulness.    This tradition goes back a very long way.   Greeks and Romans had slaves to do the dirty work, so that they could focus on the nobler things, in the intellectual sphere.

Later, Christianity rehabilitated the idea of domestic labor.    It became noble purely because it was service.  The Son of Man chose to be born into a humble working home; He worked for His own living, and He washed the feet of His own disciples.

Perhaps it is because we live in a post-Christian society that we have lost that idea of the dignity of productive service?  It is not really intuitive, after all.   In some ways it is paradoxical.   It is something that has to be cultivated, and domestic cultivation is the very thing we are short of nowadays.  You don't pick it up in school or in the workplace, where functionality and standardization are key values.  

At the same time, I think it's very true that there is a deep sense that we are lacking when no one is "at home" -- when no one is taking responsibility for the most fundamental things.   There is still a wistful ideal of the well kept, nurturing home.   Even if no one really wants to be the one doing it. 

I personally think a well kept home needs the involvement of both man and woman.  It's not just a girl thing.   Indeed, it's probably a family, shared responsibility.   There is more to it than who ends up doing a given chore.   It is more that, it seems to me, that it is ultimately a communal enterprise and one reason that resentment simmers is that people are trying to hand it off to other people rather than pick up their share. 

However, it does seem that women are more likely to feel personally responsible for the state of the home.   I'm not sure why that is, but would be interested in any thoughts on the topic  I don't think it's JUST cultural. 

Please follow your own rabbit trails here, or consider these questions:

1. Have you read anything else recently that seems to tie into this topic of the mixed feelings towards keeping house?
2. Why do you think it seems to be more of a woman's issue than a man's?  Do you think that husbands/fathers have a part to play in making a home, too?
3. What was your own background with regard to keeping house and its importance?  How do you think that affects what you do nowadays?
4. Any favorite quotes from the chapter (or from elsewhere related to this topic?)

Next week is the second part of Chapter 1, from the beginning of "Divine Domesticity" to the end of the chapter. 

A Book Post

My family went to Disney last week!  It's the first time we've been there since the older kids were younger than this set is now   That's why I wasn't blogging.   But this post isn't about Disneyland.   I am suffering from The Flu That Stayed Too Long, the same one that's been attacking me ince early October, and so yesterday I was lying around recuperating.  

Since I was taking advantage of my enforced idleness by updating my IPhone's operating system and didn't feel good enough to read any of the heavy books on my bedstand, I checked a couple of books out of the library.

One was called "Fiction Ruined My Family."  Great title and nice cover.   The memoir of a youngest daughter of four who grew up with a defeated writer Dad and a onetime child equestrian/debutatnte mom who has become an alcoholic.  I didn't finish it.  The part when she was a child was rather interesting though cynical but when she got out of high school the book just got grim.   To me, anyway.   I was hoping it would be sort of like one of Anne Lamott's books -- another girl with a writer father who goes on to tell her own story -- but the writing was much less clever   She doesn't have the turn of phrase and insight that Lamott does, at least not yet.  She was not getting across a message of real humanity under the dysfunction of her family as Lamott does   At least, it wasn't working for me.   

The other book was called The Rules of "Normal" Eating:  A Commonsense Approach for Dieters, Overeaters, Undereaters, Emotional Eaters and Everyone Else in Between .  Another food book!  I checked it out from the library because (1) it was immediately available and (2) I was curious about "Normal".

Anyway, this turns out to be quite a helpful book!

For one thing it made me realize  rather sadly that I don't really have many food/eating/weight issues anymore  She wrote out lots of lists of irrational beliefs and feelings in regard to food issues and I saw ones that I used to have but hardly any that I still really feel.   I am just one of those middle aged people that can't rely on my metabolism like I used to.   But basically I am what she calls "normal" in quotations because of course, there is no one "normal" -- there's a range.

It's slightly sad because those issues were a significant part of my life for so long that I miss them.

On the other hand, I should be proud because I've spent so many years working on changing and apparently, I've accomplished the bulk of it.    I guess that shows that you really can change over time.  As the book points out, it's not a fast process most of the time and probably for good reasons.  If you could change yourself right away, you would lose stability.  

So I didn't feel like I needed the eating advice so much anymore, but as an introduction to 21st century operative theories of habit forming, this book is quite accessible and clear, at least so I found it.   I noticed several times that her method for working on Beliefs/Feelings/Behavior is not too different from Charlotte Mason's.   So the book, or another like it, would probably be useful for someone trying to get a better grasp of what habit is and how to change habits.

This author pictures Beliefs, Feelings, and Behavior forming a triangle.  Beliefs influence feelings and behavior, Feelings influence beliefs and behavior, Behavior can influence beliefs and feelings.     She points out that when we have a strong feeling, a belief is often tied to it.  If I'm enraged by some bad driver on the road, it's because I have a belief that bad driving is an intolerable insult.  Then I may do something as a result, like drive too close or shake my fist or swear at the driver.   Feelings can also affect beliefs and behavior.   If I'm already high on adrenalin and rage after the traffic experience, I might think some incidental thing at the workplace is way more important than I would have if I had come to work in a happy mood 

The book points out that we can modify these influences -- we don't have to just react.   Engrained habits are difficult to break -- if I always head for the donuts to calm down when I'm in a rage, I will feel that pull to the donut tray, but if I replace that habit with another one, like some stretching exercises, a new track will start forming.   Eventually if I persist this track will be deeper than the old donut one.

Feelings are just inner sensations like our outer senses.  They are meant to make us aware of what we should seek and avoid, and they also increase our awareness and understanding in general, just as our outer senses help guide us to learn and stay safe in doing so. 

Behavior is what results from our feelings and beliefs.   Behaviors never come out of nowhere.    They can be traced back to our feelings and our perceptions of what they signify, our beliefs. 

I think Beliefs (as the author calls them) are the strongest influences, since they have a way of justifying our feelings and behaviors.    Especially, she says, "core" beliefs can affect our working beliefs.  So if you have a belief that you are basically unworthy, you might end up with a working belief that you don't deserve good food, or that your body isn't worth taking care of.

When she talks about "beliefs" there is some ambiguity because of course, "belief" can mean lots of things.   But I think she is talking about them as "operative assumptions" rather than doctrines or statements of Faith.  They are the messages we grow up with.  Often our parents are our deepest influence, but there are other influences too, including our own temperaments.     I don't think it's quite the same thing as our "will" but perhaps it is the content that forms our wills.  

Everyone has "beliefs" in this sense, including materialists and rationalists who don't have any religious faith   They can be irrational (distorted) or rational (informed by reality).    They often go way deeper than our cognitive processes and in fact almost shape our thinking in some ways, providing a "framework" for perception.   Charlotte Mason talks about this a bit in her work on the insufficiency of formal reasoning  

The author says that it's important to keep examining our "beliefs" especially when they seem to be affecting our behavior in ways that we don't like.    For example, if I have an engrained notion that I MUST clean my plate or I will be wasteful, and wastefulness is bad, then it may be good to "reframe" that belief.   Perhaps I can realize that it's just as wasteful to eat food in excess of what is good for me.   Then I may adjust my behavior -- choose smaller servings, plan to eat only half of what's on my plate at the restaurant and save the rest for later, or whatever.

The author says that you can usually tell nonfunctional beliefs by their rigidity and negativity, by their "all or nothing" approach and by the way they trigger panic and shame.   Related to this is mental "chatter" which are those voices you hear in your head that send you negative, scolding, often ridiculous messages that are still very powerful.  

Basically, she makes a case for informed intuition.   Most people tend to shut away their perceptions, their inner sense of what is good or not good.    So they eat and do other things according to rigid rules that aren't in accordance with reality.   Rules aren't bad in themselves.   But some kinds of rules are ineffective because they try to override where they shouldn't   

There is way more.   As with most books of this kind, there is nothing professedly Christian, but the advice tends to implicitly cover ground already broken by Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis de Sales, and other past thinkers with an interest in human psychology.  Buddhism is invoked as a kind of doctrinally neutral self-optimization wisdom, but not as frequently as in many self-help books.  

The author also mentions the work on Rational/Irrational beliefs done by Albert Ellis.    Someone called Maxie Maultsby formulated a system for reflecting on and reframing faulty beliefs For some reason, after reading  The Abolition of Man and The Grand Design, I have been sort of skeptical of anything called "rational".    This term seems to be itself a cloaking device for another set of assumptions.   But with that reservation,  I think it can be helpful in living an "examined life".   The set of assumptions need to be thought through, and this is something the author recommends -- thinking through and tailoring for oneself, since a key trap for distorted thinkers is following someone else's "system" without thinking it through, and expecting some kind of magical result.  It seems to be a peculiarity of our free will (this is me talking) that it has to be home-made, a matter of relationship, not "mere" rules.   We don't seem to be able to just lift "what works" from someone else's life -- the results will be different   That doesn't mean we don't learn from each other, but there's a difference from learning and just sort of accepting. 

I suppose we all accept many, many things because I've found it's mentally exhausting to work through EverySinglePremise in my life, at least, but when something isn't working, again and again, it may be time to think of changing.    She makes the point that Discomfort + Awareness =  Change.  In other words, you may be uncomfortable, but until you become aware of your discomfort and have the ability to do something about it, change probably won't happen.  She uses an exercise to show this.  Are you sitting comfortably right now?  Perhaps if you were watching a gripping movie, you might not notice your arm was going to sleep.  But if something made you aware, you might try to shift your position to get more comfortable. 

Long, rambling post, sorry!  After I've been away from blogging for a while, I have trouble getting back into the swing of it.   

I also finished reading Quo Vadis, but this is already too long to talk about that.   I liked it, though.

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. 

The Grand Design

Now that I've read Stephen Hawking's and Leonard Mlodinow's book The Grand Design, thanks to my library's Kindle lending program, I want to write out some thoughts.  I blogged about it before I read it, back when it first came out.    This isn't really a review but just about some issues the book brought up in my mind, that seem to want to keep spinning around in there until I write them out. 

So here goes ---

Sean Carroll, another physicist and author, writes in a review of the book:

The Hawking vs. God debate has featured prominently in the news of late. He and Mr. Mlodinow don't claim to have proved that God doesn't exist; their argument is somewhat more confined, but still important in its implications. We understand enough about the ultimate laws of physics, the authors say, to conclude that we don't need God to understand the universe.

 Or, as the book says,

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does nature have the laws it does? Why do we exist? Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a God who chose to create the universe that way. . . . We claim, however, that it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking any divine beings."

Father Stanley Jaki, a physicist and theologian who wrote many books about the relation of science and religion, has written that physicists, if they are not careful,can confuse the operational with the ontological.

The way I understand what he is saying, good physics does not add up to good philosophy or good theology.  When you have explained the steps by which you think the universe has begun, even supposing your model meets all the standards of a good model, you have perhaps accomplished a wonderful feat of theoretical reverse engineering, but you have not even started to say anything about metaphysics (which is the study of things beyond matter and motion).   You are still in your own field. 

Also, at the very least, the epistemological presuppositions upon which physical science is founded are metaphysical.   We have to presuppose that we can say something meaningful about the physical world before we can even start writing a book of this sort.  And that is a giant metaphysical presupposition.    It can't be verified physically. 

It's important to get that out on the table at the start, I think.   I am not sure whether Hawking and Mlodinow would disagree, though I suspect that they would, and that is one of the ambiguous elements in the book.   I definitely think they intended to fire a shot over the bow of traditional metaphysics, but in spite of their provocative "Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead," I don't think they have managed to fly their flag on the mast yet.  

As far as physics go, Hawking and Mlodinow posit an "M-theory" which I will have to simplify even more than they already did in the book, in order to fit it in this post.   They hold that any universe that can exist, will exist; that 

the universe does not have just a single existence or history, but rather every possible version of the universe exists simultaneously in what is called a quantum superposition.

So, given this theory, what looks like extraordinary odds that our universe should be as it is, habitable and capable of producing beings like ourselves (I believe they give a number of 10 to the 500th power for all possible permutations of the basic physical laws, which is a number beyond staggering), is actually not a highly improbable thing at all but demonstrably inevitable for this universe.  The very fact that it does exist means that it could. 

The conclusions that they draw from this, if it were true, are:

•  We are not special  -- sentient human beings are the inevitable byproduct of the particular set of laws that exist in this particular universe.  
•  God did not custom-design our universe  -- it's just one of a vastly, mind-boggingly number of alternate universes. 

The only way I can make these conclusions follow the premise is by including an assumption that sheer quantity has any kind of relationship to qualitative importance.  Such an assumption certainly isn't a given, and I think it would be somewhat difficult to defend. 

To  prepare the ground for their multiverse theory,  Hawking and Mlodinow explain their philosophy of model-dependent realism.  They say that it is meant to short-circuit the philosophical debate between what the book calls "realists" and "anti-realists". 

"There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we will adopt a view that we will call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. This provides a framework with which to interpret modern science."

"According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If there are two models that both agree with observation ... then one cannot say that one is more real than another. One can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration."

As I understand it, this approach allows them to speculate a bit past the normal grounds of our physical universe, while still staying within bounds of natural science.

I sort of  like this concept of model-dependent realism because as they say in the book, it speaks to something we are aware of in ordinary life as well as in science.  A lot of times, what we see is dependent on what we have seen and understood in the past.  A new baby is awed by the swooping of the mobile above his head, whereas his mother, who has snapped it together and clipped it to the crib and turned it on, is seeing it very differently -- probably looking past the mobile watching the baby with his big eyes and dancing motions.   When Hawking and Mlodinow look at a physics equation they see something very different than I do.   Last year, Kieron read a book called The View from the Oak which was about the sometimes radically different ways different creatures perceive things.   For example, a dog's nose is hundreds of times more sensitive than mine, so he can almost get a 3D representation of something by its smell, where I would be only vaguely aware that there is a smell at all.

Yet it strikes me that we humans do not really practice model-dependent realism even though in some ways we are somewhat subject to it and hopefully, somewhat aware of it.   In other words, no one ever REALLY says, "That is just my model of reality" though they might say it to someone else "That is just YOUR model".

All of us, from the baby in the crib to the physicist, are trying to come to some absolute truth from our relative stance in the universe.  We hope to transcend our model-dependence at least partly, by taking it into account and attempting to compensate for it, even though we know our attempts can never totally succeed.  We may not see a whole truth given our limits (Thomas Aquinas said that a natural philosopher can never totally understand even a fly), so the understanding that our knowledge is limited induces a healthy humility and wonder that induces us to find out more, but we don't rest in our partial perspective.   (A flea or dog, on the other hand, does rest in its limited knowledge, because it doesn't care to KNOW so much as to meet its biological needs).

Even the baby is striving to universalize his initial impression of the world.  As soon as he is physically able  to get his hands on the toy he has previously only observed, he turns it, tastes it, shakes it, pulls it, throws it.  He is not content until he runs out of ways to study its behavior and sensory properties.   Then he turns to something else.  And we all do the same thing in our own way.   Hawking and Mlodinow are not really, really content to say "this is our model and we're happy with it."  They will want to defend it and refine it.  They will want it to be true in some way, though they may be completely and humbly willing to admit it is not the whole truth and some future genius may springboard from their theory to a more explanatory and predictive one.  

Plus, though Hawking and Mlodinow want to propose model-dependent realism as a philosophical approach that "short-circuits" the debate between realism and idealism, I don't think it can work this way.  It does more and less than short-circuit (their term) -- it simply sidesteps the issue by not confronting it.

Model-dependent realism seems like it must be a form of realism -- by using the example of a goldfish bowl, it brings up an image of a "real world" out there even if we can only see it from our vantage point.   The goldfish is seeing things accurately from his perspective; his perception only "works" if you are in a bowl, but it is realistic from that perspective.   Knowing that he is in a bowl he could theoretically compensate for the distortion and "see" the world outside of his glass. 

But model-dependent realism also echoes idealism or anti-realism in its radical subjectivity, in its agnosticism about whether what we perceive is real or not.  It starts from inside our own heads.  Inside our own heads, or inside a fishbowl, we can never really say anything about reality, only about what appears to our inner minds as reality.    All statements then are self-reports and no more.  The only way the goldfish can compensate for his subjective perspective is to presuppose that there really is a world outside the goldfish bowl, that the outside world is not just a deceptive Matrix-like stream of images on the surface of the glass.

So model-dependent realism works as a procedural or operational approach, not as an ontological or epistemological one.   Or so I would think.  

As a physical-scientific protocol or tool, I would imagine that model-dependent realism is quite effective.  It allows physical scientists to posit certain hypotheses without getting embroiled in scientific dogma (which is, as every high school text will tell you, an obstacle to the pursuit of the physical sciences, though I have started to wonder just a bit about that).   When a new model is (1) more elegant (2) more explanatory (3) more predictive it can replace the old model, no hurt feelings.   Ideally it would keep the natural sciences from infringing on fields outside their own, though in practice with respect to individual scientists it doesn't seem to fully avoid this. 

But as a form of philosophy, model-dependent realism seems to add up to a form of scientism -- that whatever can't be quantified, isn't really worth thinking about.   Scientism unfortunately has a tendency to contradict itself -- because it tends to want to pronounce that because its procedures don't work on unquantifiables, that therefore those unquantifiables don't exist.  This is illogical.   You can see by drawing a Venn diagram that you can never stand inside a circle and make any pronouncements about what is outside that circle.   If the goldfish holds that everything that exists is within the view of his goldfish bowl, he can't then say that this is a proof that there is nothing beyond the view of his goldfish bowl.



Hawking and Mlodinow, in fact, do not make an explicit case that nothing exists that can't be at least determined probabilistically.   Neither do they, in spite of the publicity when the book was released, make a case that God does not exist.   Their case is considerably more limited:

Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing ..... Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

I was confused when I first read this.  Certainly no orthodox Christian, for example,  imagines that the role of their God is to act as curator of the universe.... someone to turn on the lights in the morning and turn them off in the evening, and keep things running during the day.   What God did the authors think they had pre-empted the necessity of?   Surely not my God, the transcendant and yet immanent, He Who everything else is through, by and in? 

I do not know if the authors are making this assumption, but I have seen some scientistis and even some theologians assume that the word "God" is a way for people to explain physical mysteries.   So when there are no more physical mysteries, there is no more need for God. 

I have never quite understood that line of thinking, but apparently it came about in the Enlightenment, when philosophy took a post-Cartesian credibility hit and physical science came to the fore as a presumably more realistic substitute given the terms of the Cartesian approach.   Most of the scientists of the time were still Deists, though many of them weren't orthodox.   And the same was true of many theologians.  So God did begin to become for them a way to explain what couldn't be explained by empirical methods of the time.   In that approach, God became a component of our thinking, a kind of placeholder, so as our thinking became more scientific, the place for God  in our heads got smaller and smaller.

A book by Father Stanley Jaki called Miracles and Physics (short, but difficult, at least for me) discusses this history of thinking in physics and philosophy.  I recommend the book.   He thinks many believers inadvertently fall into the trap of using God to explain things in the natural universe that are so far not well comprehended.     This is "the God of the gaps".   This is a mistake because not only is it subordinating God to the universe's laws -- making Him sort of a factotum or curator or even wall-moulding material, filling in gaps in our construction-- but it leads to the discrediting of theology whenever one of these mysteries is unpacked.

God is thoroughly outside the universe, though the universe is not thoroughly outside Him.  By studying science, we can learn more about Him indirectly and secondarily through His work.  For example, the descriptions of magnitudes in The Grand Design gave me a better look at "infinity" by showing it as something altogether different than a "very very very large number", even an unimaginably large number.

To God, who is infinite, even 10 to the 500th power is nothing to boggle at.   The only way I can picture Hawking and Mlodinow seriously supposing His agency to get lost in it as in a field of tulips would be if they really are presupposing that He is a figment of our minds.     In that case, of course, quantity would boggle Him as it does us. 

We can never find God while locked within physicalist presumptions, except in negative terms by finding our empiric presumptions unjustifiable (really not that unlikely, since strict empiricism runs into difficulties at every turn) and so looking outside the goldfish bowl.   Certainly we can never demonstrate His absence, any more than the goldfish can demonstrate the non-existence of the rooms beyond his range of sight. 

I would take it that Hawking and Mlodinow understand this, and that is why they do not pronounce the non-existence of God, though they clearly think of Him as an unnecessary hypothesis.  All in all, I think they do religion a favor by debunking (or at least exposing) a few of the methodological problems that believers and non-believers alike tend to fall into when discussing religion and science.   The book leaves enough questions hanging so that I am not entirely sure whether or not they are actually stating that philosophy and theology are dead and science has taken their place, or are just having fun stirring things up.

Certainly I can't imagine their book really means to settle any philosophical or theological questions -- rather, if anything, I take those elements to be an incidental part of the main objective, which is to extend the boundaries of what we think of as theoretical physics.   And that part of it is the fascinating and evocative part of this book; it is their area of expertise, and they take the trouble to write it in a lively and simple way, with lots of examples and illustrations.

Reading Update

While I was gone I got a lot of books from the library and I have been reading in between catching up on laundry and driving to dental appointments.   Here's a list:

--1 --


War and Peace -- this is what I was reading on my Kindle whenever I had free time up in Oregon.  This was the first long trip I've taken where I didn't have to bring a big bagful of books!   I am 3/4 through War and Peace.    It is 1812 and Napoleon has occupied Moscow.   Lots of other things are happening.  I have no idea how the story will end.  I had heard that it's really hard to keep track of all the characters but I am not having as much trouble as I expected.   

--2--

Home Education -- when I didn't feel like reading fiction, I was rereading Home Education by Charlotte Mason and taking notes.  I am almost through.  I realize how much of this book shaped my homeschooling.   You know, one thing I didn't really notice so much on the first few times through the book (and others by CM as well) is how much she read of the science, philosophy and literature of her day and how much she uses it as groundwork or illustration of her points.  I mean, I noticed it, of course -- lots of Tennyson and Wordsworth quotes, lots of references to books by psychologists and educationalists of her day -- but I just realized that this is really a Method in itself -- constantly filtering through the currents of thought of the day, taking what seems to fit with her line of thinking, discarding with careful, polite remarks the parts that don't seem good to her.    This is actually totally an example of what Mortimer Adler calls Synoptic Reading.  It is quite inspiring -- I want to try to follow her example on this more intentionally than I have done in the past. 

--3--
 
Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin.    I've read several articles by Temple Grandin and know about her life but this is the first book I've read by her.  It's very interesting, especially the parts about her childhood and how her mother raised her during the days when no one knew much about the syndrome.    Grandin also quotes passages from the books of others with Asperger's, which gives an inner view into the perspective and challenges of a person on the autistic spectrum.  There was a foreword by Oliver Sacks -- a favorite author of mine from way back.    I have been interested in the subject of autism for a very long time, ever since I read Dibs: In Search of Self when I was babysitting the sons of a couple with psychology degrees when I was about 12 or 13.     I haven't quite finished reading it yet.

--4--

Bird by Bird Some Instructions in Writing and life by Anne Lamott.    For years I kept reading recommendations of this book in different places.  So I decided to finally read it.   Very funny in places where the humor worked for me, some bad language, quite a lot of good advice.  The basic idea is that writing is its own reward, that it helps make your life better, and that trying to get published or on the bestseller list isn't really an adequate motive for writing.  

--5--

House Rules by Jodi Picoult.   I couldn't figure out why I had requested a novel by Jodi Picoult since I've never read a book by her and in general don't read modern chick novels, but from reading the back matter I saw that it is a novel about a boy with Asperger's.  So I must have read a review somewhere and decided it would be good beach reading.   After I finished reading Bird by Bird, I felt like reading some modern fiction so I could sort of see what Lamott was saying about fiction coming out of living with the characters and so on, so I started reading this and ended up staying up till about 4 am turning pages until I finished the book.  The plot had some weak parts; some reviews I glanced at thought that she put too much undigested research into the book, about Asperger's and forensics, for example.  But after spending two weeks with Tolstoy this did not seem like a problem to me, except some of the forensics stuff was pretty creepy (so are Tolstoy's hospital descriptions, though).    I am trying to figure out why the book was so absorbing in spite of some severe plot implausibilities and a lack of real development in the characters.   I think it was the immediacy.  Though the characters didn't seem to progress a whole lot or gain a whole lot of perspective, their voices did have a strong rhythm and immediacy.   Sort of like reading someone's autobiographical blog.  I especially liked Jacob, the super-intelligent but clueless Asperger's boy -- I liked his sense of humor.and I probably sort of identified with his social problems.    Another thing I admired about Picoult's writing was her way of using a thread or focus idea to pull the book together -- in this case, the "House Rules" idea.   That's something I really admire in some modern writers, and she made it relatively easy to follow the idea through the book, so I could actually see it pulling things together.  In fact, this probably was what made the story seem cohesive and developing even though the plot had some simplistic parts and the characters didn't really progress.   Maybe it makes sense that a book about Asperger's and how it impacts families ends up on a resolution of focus rather than lives. 

--6--

Scattered How Attention Deficit Originates and What You Can Do About It by Gabor Mate.    I got this because I recently reread Hold on To Your Kids which he co-authored and because it is about ADHD.  I started reading it last night because I was too wired to go to sleep after finishing House Rules.    Scattered so far looks like it is going to make the case that ADD is more about family environment than about genetics or simple biochemistry.   But I am not sure yet how he is going to support the point.   I do know that he is carefully avoiding the "blame the parents" line of thinking, which seems interesting --  certainly it seems like it would be somewhat challenging.  He starts the book off on a very personal note, describing his own adult diagnosis of ADD and the subsequent diagnosis of all three of his kids -- so perhaps he is going to be able to make a case for the parents not being so much to blame for aggravating ADD, as being affected by it themselves and this having a sort of ripple effect on the whole family.     That seems like a subtler case than many pop psychology books are able to make, but I do not know how it will be carried out or whether it will be successful at this point.  I try not to look at reviews of a book until I finish reading it!

---7--

So that's the recent reading!  In my library stack I have several more non-fiction books about Asperger's and also a book called Free Range Learning:  How Homeschooling Changes Everything which looks like it is going to be a good read, though too packed with information to quickly devour in a day or two like I did with the others.    There's also a book called The Mother Factor:  How Your Mother's Emotional Legacy Impacts Your Life which unfortunately seems to be more targeted towards dysfunction than I had been hoping -- I was hoping for a less "counseling" and more general type book, but it looks like it's going to be in sort of the Melanie Klein/Anna Freud school of thought.

Keeping House Book Study

In July, I am going to start blogging Keeping House:  The Litany of Everyday Life.   It's a very good book that I know several of my regular commenters have read.

Is anyone interested in joining in the discussion?  If there is interest, I will try to figure out how to do that Mr Linky thing so you can link to your posts. 

I thought I would start in mid-July and take a chapter a week.  There are 8 chapters so that would take us through early September, when many of us will be starting the fall term of homeschooling.  

If you think you might be interested in following along, please leave a comment (it's not a commitment --  summer doesn't seem like the right time to make extra commitments!)

Discovering Landmarks

From Clifton Fadiman's The Lifetime Reading Plan, which I found in a nice hardcover edition for a dime at the library rack:

I do not wish to claim too much for The Lifetime Reading Plan.  It is not magic.  It does not automatically make you or me an "educated man."  It offers no solution to life's ultimate mysteries.  It will not make you "happy" -- such claims are made by tooth pastes, motorcars, and deodorants, not by Plato, Dickens and Hemingway.  It will simply help to make your interior life more meaningful and interesting, as a love affair does, or some task calling forth your deepest energies.

Like many other men, I have been reading these books, off and on, for most of my life.  One thing I've found out is that it's easy enough to say that they enlerge you, but rather difficult to prove it in adance.  It is less difficult to prove (you'll sens it in short order) that they act like a developing fluid on film.  That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn't know you knew.  Even more than tools of self-enhancement, they are tools of self-discovery.  This notion is not mine.  You will find it in Plato who, as with many other matters, thought of it first.  Socrates called himself a midewife of ideas.  A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain."

Since Fadiman is very clear that he was requested to compile the list and that he thinks a "Reading Plan" is only a start, he probably wouldn't mind me putting CS Lewis's caveat alongside (from a letter he wrote -- HT:  The Scriptorium):

I don’t feel at all qualified to contribute to a ‘master’ list of writings. The languages I don’t know are of course very much more numerous than those I know; and even in the languages I do know there are a great many books I have not read. And I rather doubt whether a list of masterpieces picked from all over the world –mostly, I presume to be read in translations?- is a v. useful thing.

I would rather see young men beginning from where they are and being led on from one thing to another: e.g. that Milton shd. lead them either to Virgil and Homer (and therefore to a really serious study of Latin or Greek) or to Dante (and therefore to a whole course of Medieval and Italian studies). That, after all, is how every educated person’s development has actually come about.

The sort of culture one can get from the 100 or 1000 Best Books read in isolation from the societies and literatures that begot them seems to me like the sort of knowledge of Europe I shd. get from staying at big hotels in Paris, Berlin, Rome, etc. It wd. be far better to know intimately one little district, going from village to village, getting to know the local politics, jokes, wines, and cheeses. Or so it seems to me.

I am not sure if Lewis's analogy quite holds because we are talking about citizens who weren't educated like he was.  My son had to read Whirligig for sophomore language arts.   I'm sure it's good reading, but it means that this book was the Big Hotel and if he ever wants to read The Divine Comedy or Sophocles, chances are he will have to read it on his own.    The Big Hotels are falling into ruin as the tourists hang out in youth hostels and eat at the Paris McDonald's and maybe snap a quick picture of Notre Dame Cathedral on their cells as they pass by.

So there is a need for the guided tours like Fadiman's.   We are more like the barbarian tribes nowadays than we are like passive tourists.  If we are to inherit our tradition and make it our own, we may need to listen to someone from the old school so we know what to destroy and what to preserve and cherish.

Still, CS Lewis shows us how the old wonders are best to be approached -- not with passive, indifferent respect, but with a personal level of engagement, as if it really mattered.   As Lewis says:

beginning from where they are and being led on from one thing to another

or as Fadiman says:

delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.

Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry....

is free for a limited time on Amazon Kindle. 

Thought some of my readers might want to know! 

description

Writer and farmer Berry has long been an inspiration to the contemporary agrarian movement and a guiding light to people who care deeply about the health of their land and their communities. In his numerous books of essays, he has thoughtfully and articulately shown how the current consumer-based, profit-driven industrial society not only destroys our natural world but also increasingly harms our social and personal well-being. The 21 essays in this collection, written over the past two decades, provide both a splendid introduction to Berry's work and a stimulating compendium for those already familiar with it. These are beautifully crafted essays, replete with social criticism, righteous anger, moral guidance, and lyrical wording. Above all, they contain a reverence for the beauty and complexity of our natural world and a call to be good stewards of the earth and our limited resources. Berry states that we do not need to rely on constant technological progress to improve our future: "If we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us." 

Summer Reading

From a stack of books beside my bedside that I want to go through in more detail this summer:

Fine Arts as Therapy: Plato's Teachings Organized and Discussed by Constantine Cavarnos. I got this in an Orthodox bookstore in San Francisco when Aidan was hospitalized there for a month.

All You Who Labor: Work and the Sanctification of Daily Life by Stefan Cardinal Wyzynki.

Feeling and Healing Your Emotions by Conrad Baars.

I Believe in Love: A Personal Retreat Based on the Teachings of St Therese de Lisieux by Fr Elbee.

A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One on One

Little Way of Homeschooling.   Thirteen Families Discover Unschooling by Suzie Andres.   A nice review here by Mary Gildersleeve

Why We Run:  A Natural History by Bernd Heinrich.  I love Heinrich's natural history books, especially Mind of the Raven (caveat:  there is a definite secular evolutionist slant) and I thought this book might inspire me to take up running, or at least pre-contemplate it ;-).


I also have a few Kindle books I want to finish or reread.

Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life

The Education of Catholic Girls (has applications beyond just educating Catholic girls).

Hints on Child Training by Clay Trumbull. One of my favorite parenting books, written by the grandfather of Elisabeth Elliot and Thomas Howard.

Unschooling Rules:   55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know  about Schools and Rediscover Education by Clark Aldrich

Forever Young Diet and Lifestyle

My reading never sticks to plans, and I didn't list any fiction books, though I do want to read fiction this summer, but those are a few I want to get into in depth!

Forever Young? Maybe not, but a good book on nutrition and wellness

If you have a Kindle, this book The Forever Young Diet and Lifestyle is presently free, and it's really good especially for the price and in spite of the title.  It has a bit of everything.  It is written by a husband and wife couple.  A large part of it is how to proactively be healthy and fit (the "lifestyle" part).  Another part is about how to sensibly reduce your weight and improve your habits, if you are overweight.  There is also a section on family fitness, talking about how to give your kids a healthy life with good food and an emphasis on activity and exercise.

Clearly, the authors have done a lot of research.  They also have a positive, friendly style -- it isn't one of those books that make you feel guilty or overwhelmed.  It is easy to pick up and start with where you are.   Another thing I like about the book is that it integrates the research on anti-oxidants like coffee, chocolate, wine and tea.  For example, the book recommends having a daily drink (especially wine, especially dry red)  and an ounce or so of dark chocolate daily, along with some coffee or (green) tea in the morning.   At the same time, they mention that some people can't "do" alcohol or chocolate in moderation, so they recommend avoiding these things if you are one of those people. 

The main message is to live an active life, restrict or avoid processed foods which generally are filled with chemicals, white carbohydrates, sugar, salt and bad fats along with chemicals.   And eat a "hunter/gatherer" or Mediterranean diet.  So nothing radically new for those who have read several diet books, but plenty of sensible advice and an emphasis on the whole lifestyle (including family life) which I find very pleasant and positive.    It does not go deeply into any one subject, and barely touches on the emotional reasons for overeating, but  what it does do -- present a broad range of solid information on wellness -- it does well. 

When I saw the title I was afraid it was another one of those gimmicky, unrealistic books that seem obsessed with avoiding mortality, but it is not like that at all.  Rather, the emphasis is on maximizing quality of life and taking good care of what you have.

A New Homeschooling Book!

I am one of the contributors (see below):

A Little Way of Homeschooling

 A Little Way of Homeschooling:
Thirteen Families Discover Catholic Unschooling

By Suzie Andres

with contributions from:
Cindy Kelly
Amy Wagner
Leonie Westenberg
Terri Aquilina
Maria Peceli
Beate and Sabine
Susan Fuerst
Karen Edmisten
Faith Roberts
Melissa Wiley
Willa Ryan

Appendix by Tony Andres

Foreword by Mike Aquilina

Table of Contents

Excerpt from Chapter 1

Hallowing the House: Books for Lent

"I prefer the monotony of obscure sacrifice to all ecstasies. To pick up a pin for love can convert a soul." St. Thérèse of Lisieux

As you know, I have been slooowly working my way through Splendor in the Ordinary. I planned, and am still planning, to make a tour through my house, decluttering and cleaning while thinking through the book.   But I just realized that one reason I am going so slowly is that the book is mostly philosophical and theological -- it is written on a general level.  Which I like, but since I am weak in actually IMPLEMENTING metaphysical truths, I need some down-to-earth help and inspiration along with the rest.

Plus, now that Lent is almost here, I want to cut back on my fast reading and instead do more studying or Slow Reading.   And since our family has sort of outgrown our old housework systems I thought it might be a good time to study and upgrade our life skills curriculum such as it is around here! 

So last time I had to be in town all day (being out of the home is my other excuse for moving so slowly with the house cleaning and book study) I brought a pile of my cleaning and organizing books with me.   Here's a list

Speed Cleaning:  Tips, Tricks and Strategies to Get Everything Done in Half the Time or Less

My mom had a copy of this book.  I liked its focus on the simplest, most efficient way to get things done.   It assumes you don't want to spend any more time on cleaning than you have to, which in my case is increasingly true.  (I find solitary cleaning to be somewhat relaxing, but I never seem to find the time nowadays, and undone cleaning is the opposite of relaxing).   Plus, it includes strategies for doing cleaning as a team, so I can get my kids involved.  You can find some general strategies dealt with in the book here, plus newsletter archives:  Speed Cleaning Rules and More

Sidetracked Home Executives 
I found this book very helpful a few years back.   It's basically household management for ADD-types.   I don't use the system anymore, or rather, I sort of carry it in my head, but I want to go through the book again and see if I still need it or if I've outgrown it now.   Here's their site. 

Life Skills for Kids
This is one of those books I buy hoping that somehow the contents will transform out into the household without me using it or even reading it.  To be honest?  books full of lots of tips that tell you to "start young" and "be diligent" are a huge energy drain for me.  Just reading them makes me feel discouraged and hopeless.  Yet unread books are just clutter -- and even if I am going to pass it on, I should probably make an attempt to go through it and get a few useful tips from it.    So Lent seems like a good time to do that.  

401 Ways to Get Your Kids to Work at Home
 I actually liked this book and wasn't discouraged by it -- it had lots of options and nice charts.  I found it in a thrift store and it was falling apart, and so I comb-bound it.  Since then I haven't really looked into it, so it's a good time, perhaps, to look at it again.


How to Do It -- I found this little book for sale at a book store on the Oregon coast.  It is about 4 x 4 x 3 and I can't seem to find it online anywhere.   But I like the concept -- it's divided alphabetically into sections like Business, Car, Health, House,... 20 sections in all.  It certainly isn't comprehensive, but it has a wide variety of different things contained between its covers.   It occurred to me that I could use the book to help me come up with things to teach my kids.   Maybe I will read them excerpts at Morning Time. 

Don Aslett books and supplies.   

I have about three  Don Aslett books.  I bought them early in my homeschooling journey.  But when I glanced through them this time I realized that I had pretty much internalized everything that I was going to internalize with his books.   They were very helpful to me when I didn't know a darn thing about house-cleaning, and I still have quite an array of his strategies in my head, but I think I can let these go.  The site does include some demo videos and pretty decent cleaning supplies, so it's worth visiting.

So my Lenten plan is to work through these -- Splendor will provide the reflective part of it and the other books the practical resolutions.   Here are also a few more reflective-type resources that I have around the house and/or on the Kindle:

Familiaris Consortio -- actually quite closely connected to Splendor in the Ordinary, and I think it is good reading even if you aren't a Catholic. 

Holiness for Housewives and other Working Women by Dom Zeller.  
This one I will probably want to keep for my daughter but it may be a good time to look through it again.  Quite readable.

A Mother's Rule of Life.  I was planning to read through this again and maybe this is a good time.

The Family Cloister:  Benedictine Wisdom for the Home.   Actually written by an Evangelical pastor.  A friend had borrowed this and I actually forgot I had it, but since it's sitting on my shelves I'd like to look at it again.

The theme I want here is Ora et Labora -- balancing meditation and actual deeds.   I hope to make progress both in internalized skills AND in effective habits!   I'd also like to learn to pray while I'm working better than I do now.