Incorporeal Works

…are killing reference books, a sweeping generalization for the day. Have you ever tried to get through the day without a sweeping generalization? That is so old school, like opening an unabridged Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary - which I still do, occasionally.  I bought my copy some years ago at a clearance sale for yet another dying independent bookstore. A different sort of endangered species. The 21st century marches on.

I have always had an advanced case of the Enclyclopedia Disease, unable to simply look up one topic. Flipping through pages looking for congress, I  would pause at aardvark, or sometimes make it as far as camera obscura. The same thing would happen with dictionaries, or thesauruses, or Bartlett’s Quotations.

Then came the internet, closely followed by the World Wide Web and those ultimate diversions of purpose, hyperlinks. Like the Enterprise hyperjumping entire galaxies at warp 5,  I could now follow an infinite branching network of paths into the densest thickets of information. Sitting down to my computer early in the evening, I might find myself still at the keyboard in the small hours of the morning, eyes grainy, mouse hand cramping badly, my mind growing numb from information overload.

I am getting better. Or age is forcing restraint where once was only appetite.  But…what was that link I saw on Facebook a little while ago…

Stop me before I click again, somebody, please! Lead me back to my bookshelves. Save print media, the next casualty of technology.

Today was the feast of Pentecost, when the infusion of the Holy Spirit into the Disciples lent them eloquence in every language, the better to spread the Gospel. St. Paul’s was decked in liturgical scarlet, even to the dominant color of the altar flowers, with red balloons tethered to the first few pews in the nave.

For the second lesson, members of the congregation who were if not fluent, at least able to speak with appropriate accents, several languages, recited in turn the lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, recounting the wind of the Holy Spirit, and the confusion of those that heard the babel of languages coming from the fisher folk and common men that Jesus had chosen.

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This past Sunday, the Chattanooga Times Free Press carried an article on higher education and the job market. The title of the article was:  ” Liberal arts? Think again.” The reporter had interviewed a student who had graduated with an English B.A. last fall. She is still looking for a real job while she picks up service industry jobs. Educators scrambling for dollars themselves are reacting to shrinking markets for Humanities graduates and dwindling interest among students by emphasizing a “market-driven” approach to curricula and degree programs.

Where is Sir Francis Bacon when we need him? Among many other things he said about education, he asserted, “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.” Sir Francis would not have understood the merchandising of education. The liberal arts have been losing ground to technical and business courses for years. Some years ago I read that not a few English departments had dropped Shakespeare courses for general degree requirements. If an English major did not select a concentration in drama, or Elizabethan/Jacobean literature, there was no need  to take courses on W. Shakespeare. No Hamlet, no Romeo and Juliet, no King Lear - no Falstaff! - ah, never banish Jack Falstaff!

…banish not him thy Harry’s company, banish him not Harry’s company : banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.  - Henry IV, I

Indeed. Cold fish that Prince Hal - Harry - was, he would probably give a wintry smile at the demise of literature as important to higher education. Literature, along with history, art courses and the humanities all give “all the world” to students wanting a complete education, to learn readiness, conference, writing and all the context of western thought, education and civilization. Exact and exacting education is basic, not vocational training only.

It is axiomatic that teachers remember few of their students over a career, they have so many. Corollary to that axiom is the observation that students quite often remember one or two teachers to the end of their days.

I had several teachers who mattered through the years. A couple of them stay fixed in my memory, as though the dusty light of sunlit schoolrooms past trapped them like pedagogues in amber. One such, who only taught me for one semester, when I was a junior at The Baylor School for Boys, is probably the best English teacher I ever had, perhaps the best teacher of any I ever had. Frank P. Steele was one of the young teachers at school, a tall, smiling man with sandy hair already thinning. The crusty old men who dominated the faculty at Baylor often gave short shrift to young teachers, but the head of the English department had commented to a class I attended the year before that Frank Steele was “a poet, and knows how to teach it. If any of you pissants have him next year, maybe he can get you to appreciate poetry. I can’t.” Mr. Hitt, aptly named, was not much for positive reinforcement.

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