The Gift of Fire, Richard Mitchell [best e books to read txt] 📗

usually use. Age. But, in asking yourself how to talk about goodness with the little girl you hope to rear wisely, and realizing that she has not yet found the grasp of her own mind, you have already come up with a far better definition. To understand that children are those under the age of eighteen is an idea that we are stuck with. We do need some such arrangement for the sake of ordering affairs in the body politic. But you need not be stuck with it. If you should prefer to understand that children are those human beings who have not yet found the grasp of their own minds, then the task you have given yourself, that task of rearing a child wisely and well, is suddenly transformed from indoctrination to education, in its truest sense, and made not only possible but even likely - provided, to be sure, one little prerequisite, which is that you are not a child, that you have come into the grasp of your mind.

Bad news, eh? I know just how you feel.

Understanding what I do think, and why I think it, and whether I should think it, is, at best, an occasional and fleeting condition. I would be delighted beyond describing, but utterly astonished as well, to meet anyone who was always secure in such understandings. I have no such hope. But if my mind, like any operating mind, can reach that condition once in a while, why is it that it so often doesn’t?

For an answer to that question, and for another valuable hint about the rearing of children, we can go to Aristotle. He provides an intriguing definition of “children,” a simple little idea whose implications are tremendous. Children, he said, are those who are completely governed by their appetites. He didn’t mean to insult them, as mere brute creatures. He meant only to name their nature. It is by nature that children are whatever it is that they are. And it is equally by nature that they become, or can become something other than what they were.

He is, if he is doing any judging at all, excusing children by saying that they are governed by their appetites. If that is so, then we can not say of children that they are “bad.” To be bad requires an act of the will, a knowing choice, and, strangely enough, self-government. Children can’t govern themselves. Not yet. By the same token, however, we can not say of them that they are “good.” To be good is not simply to refrain from being bad. It is an act, a willed and chosen act. I suppose, therefore, that he would not have found you or me either good or bad because of the act that we commit, but because of the choosing that informs it. If I do refrain from throwing grapefruit in the supermarket, it does not prove me good simply because I don’t happen to want to.

The rearing of children thus must begin at home. I mean really at home. In me. In anyone. In those times when I am governed by my appetites, I am the child who needs rearing. I am not able to talk about goodness, for my appetites have already done the talking, and told me that goodness is getting what I want.

Imagine what sort of a teacher I must be in that condition. If it is my appetite for admiration and self-esteem that has seized me, an appetite which we are strangely encouraged to arouse in each other, how likely am I to remember, as a teacher should always remember, that I am standing between my students and the light? I am not that light, and it is my job to open my students’ eyes to the light, not to the flash of my own cleverness. But which will I do? Would you want me, in that state, to rear your child?

Are we any less mindless if we depend on others to tell us what is good? How have those tellers escaped the regular recurrence of childhood that strikes you and me? I wish they would tell us not only what is good, but how they came to know that. If they have learned to take so firmly the grasp of their own minds that they can always recognize and disarm the insidious and amiable promptings of appetite, which they must have done to become experts on the good, I wish they would just give us the secret of that power, so that we too may become experts on the good. Then we could understand in principle the difference between the better and the worse, and those who now counsel us so assiduously would be spared the trouble of rating as good or bad all of the countless particulars of human action.

And while we are asking such questions of those who would counsel us, let us ask them as well of ourselves, who are also setting out as counselors of others, as those who would rear this little girl to be good and happy.

Many of those who counsel us as to goodness will say that it is not by the power of Reason that goodness can be understood. They do not agree, however, as to what power it is by which we can understand goodness. Some will say “character,” in some rough sense of the word, believing that some people are just inclined that way, others less so, and some few, in fact, are remarkably disinclined to goodness. Some will say that it is by example, a sort of subliminal experience, that we learn to be good or to be bad. Some will even say that it is out of the frustration of appetite that we do bad, and out of its satisfaction that we can afford to be good. Many will say that goodness is known by the conscience, an invisible table of laws that can somehow be generated in the mind, thus disputing themselves if they also say, as they tend to, that it is not by the mind that we can know the good. And many more will say that we can know the good by precept, by hearing and believing some Truth that is provided for us, and not by some power of our own, but by some power that is outside of us. And there are lots and lots of people who say all of those things, at one time or another, and lots more who don’t say anything at all. They just live.

I do not know which of them is right, or if any one of them is right. But I keep thinking of the square of the hypotenuse, and a strange kind of truth that can be known by Reason, and only by Reason. Example and experience will never show it. No instinct or hunch or deep feeling, however sincere, will lead me to believe it. No authority, no voice of this world or any other, however sonorous, will convince me by force. But when my reason has walked the path, which is the proof of it, I have pure knowledge that carries its own license, and not the badge of any interest. It may be that goodness can not be known by Reason, but I will be ready to accept that only after I have done all that Reason permits and found it wanting.

I won’t be able to do that until I manage to grow up. Child-rearing is not some special part of life, set aside for some temporary purpose and put aside at a certain age. It is the principal business of life, the search for the condition that is naturally promised for us by the fact of our life. And we must do it in ourselves, one by one.

The Perils of Petronilla

Here is an entertaining and instructive story about the rearing of children, those in us as well as those out there, and about goodness and happiness, and how they can be known.

Saint Peter, the tale tells, had an only and much beloved daughter named Petronilla. Peter knew all too well the wicked ways of the world, and the terrible temptations it had to offer, especially to attractive young girls. He wanted, as we all do, to keep his daughter safe, lest she fall into any badness, and thus, I suppose, also to keep her happy, for badness is a notorious provider of unhappiness.

He was a man of considerable and very unusual powers, so he brought upon the girl a deep slumber, almost like that of death itself. And so she slept her young years away, safe from the world and its wickedness. Peter’s friends, however, knew only that the girl was always unconscious, like one deathly ill.

One day, when some of them came to visit and chat with the great man, one of them said:

Peter, we find one thing hard to understand. We have seen you work wonders with the sick and even those at the very door of death. How is it then, that you seem to be able to do nothing for your own child, your lovely daughter, who lies as one dead in the next room, and has so lain for years?

Ah, my friends, said Peter, you misunderstand. Petronilla is not sick at all. She sleeps, and I have provided her the safe haven of that sleep. Thus she will escape that which so threatens and often undoes even the best of mortals, the corrupting influence of this world and its ways. She is far from sick; she is well in virtue, and sleeps exactly as I want her to sleep. Here, let me show you that what I say is true.

And he called the girl to awaken. And she awoke. Come, said her father, and meet my friends. Bring them food and drink, that we may be joyful together. And she brought them food and drink, and Saint Peter’s friends found the girl just as he had said, pure and good and gracious in every way, and uncorrupted by the world. And when she had done all that was asked of her, her father sent her back to bed. Sleep now, Petronilla, he said. And she slept.

That’s one of my favorite stories. It provokes endless thought, all of it fruitful, but unfortunately a bit facetious. We don’t educate children that way anymore, but we have gone to the opposite and equally ludicrous extreme. We don’t let them get any sleep at all. Even as tiny tykes, they are led to worry about any and every great social issue from abortion to nuclear war, and cajoled into believing that they have done something about such matters once they have expressed themselves. Their geography books require them to speculate as to what they would do to put an end to poverty in South America, and their civics books call on them to imagine a solution to the problem of toxic waste which requires nothing more than the miraculous appearance of some currently unknown technology. They are thus led to believe first of all that great human mysteries can be boiled down into something very much like a train problem, and thereafter that anyone at all, whatever the depth of his ignorance, can make the world a better place by relating well to others and muddling through. The condition of children thus deluded is, of course, very different from that of Petronilla, but it isn’t any better.

The story of Petronilla, obviously apocryphal but once popular among the faithful, is a clue to a great and influential event of our history that goes unmentioned in our texts. When, exactly, it befell us all, I don’t know, but by simple logic I do know that it must have happened.

There was a time, and we can easily see it in the five or six centuries