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

find such questions diverting, and worth some playful consideration. No, no, this one would probably say, the borders of my land are welcoming and open. Merchants and princes and sages bring treasures from afar. The land is thus full of beauty and light, which the king loves more than power and might. And I do suspect that he meant, by the word “kingdom,” some immense combination of a well-tended park and a well-stocked museum, probably not caring much about that one essential which makes one kingdom one sort of place, and another, quite a different sort of place. And that is Politics.

Aristotle held, and Plato too, and many others, that the highest and most important study to which we could devote ourselves is the thoughtful consideration of politics. An extraordinarily dreary prospect for most of us, who suppose that it is Politics that we see in action in election campaigns, and in all the unseemly scramble for office and power. But that is not at all what ancient thinkers meant by the word. For them, Politics, this time with the capital, was the study of “polity,” the consideration of questions about the art and nature of virtuous governing, and the inquiry into the possibility of a just state. It was not really about what we call the government, except insofar as this or that government might serve as an example, but about governing, and it was not confined to considerations of the state and its workings, but gave itself also to considering the just governing of anything or anyone. It was thus yet another way of self-knowledge, for the self is, just as much as the state, a place, and even a community, and it may, just like the state, be governed well or ill.

While it looks tame, a schoolteacher’s work can also be dangerous. A professor is, supposedly, one who “professes” something, who holds something both true and worthy, not merely correct and useful. The act of professing, therefore, arises at least partly from a condition that might correctly be called “loyalty,” and it is presumably out of the recognition that something deserves loyalty that a professor has chosen to profess. Thus, the special sin that always lies in wait for those who profess is treachery, the withdrawal of loyalty from that to which it had once been freely granted, and granted neither out of sentiment nor practicality, but out of recognition of merit.

None of that is mentioned, of course, in the oath taken by professors as they enter into their callings, because there is no such oath. Professors do not even, like physicians, promise aloud and in public that they will “first of all, do no harm.” Thus it is that there is not, among professors, a great central theme to which all, whatever their special corners of interest, have given thoughtful and willing assent, as there is among physicians the great theme of healing. In the lack of any public oath, it seems only decent for a professor to devise and utter a private one, and its first clause might well be, for it will apply equally to professors of philosophy and professors of media management,_ “Primum, non mentior._” First of all, to tell no lies. For just as surely as harm is the very opposite of healing, and thus the physician’s veriest adversary, the lie is the very opposite of what the professor is given to seek. Truth. Of course, for those who do not admit the existence of Truth, there is no lying, and they would have to devise some other oath. Or do without.

I do hold, for instance, that in the readings that I study and consider with my students, there is Truth, the continual search for the truest possible understandings of how it is with us humans. All good books are, whatever else they may be, the recorded work of some mind trying to take the grasp of itself, trying to bring into order the random and accidental universe of experience, and thus to find meaning. And to tell it, but to tell it not as a problem’s solution may be told, not as a “moral” or a bottom line, but as a grand metaphor, whose very boundaries are marked not by barriers but by signposts pointing outward and beyond.

Any truthful literature will admit: No, this is not life itself, it is only a serious sort of game, but it is like life, and the mind that plays here is like yours, and this vision is what you too can see, and consider, and find worthy, and by which you may know yourself better. For this book is about you. Every truthful and thoughtful book is about you, every story is yours.

My outbursts of treachery occur when I come to believe, or pretend that I believe, that literature is all a lie. Those so-called Great Books come to seem the highly specialized productions of exceedingly few people, elegant exercises of the elite, having nothing to do with humanity in general. I begin to imagine the little-suspected existence among us of the Great Mind Club, an outfit even more exclusive than Mensa, whose members are truly a race apart, not like us and whose conversations we can, at best, overhear, but into whose lives and minds, integrally united in a way that mine seems never to be, we can not truly enter. And their quaint notions of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful seem the stuff of elfin fantasies and dreams, charming whimsies for the idle hour between productive labor and sleep.

In those times, my students, although entirely innocent, seem to provide some new evidence to contradict the deepest theme not only of all literature but of all concerted and deliberate thoughtfulness, which is that the temporary and particular are always outward and visible signs of whatever is permanent and universal. There are times - I suspect every teacher knows them - when I can not for the life of me detect in some of my students any hint whatsoever of the permanent and universal. They seem to me not what they truly are, the legitimate sons and daughters - and heirs as well - of all the great and nourishing spirits from the time of the astonishing painters of the walls of caves right down to yesterday. They seem, rather, some new life form, with no past, recently come among us, and utterly without those qualities that humanity has always supposed to be its essentials, the unique qualities by which a person is a person, not only not another sort of creature, but not any other person either.

They seem to find no beauty in the Beautiful, and Truth and Goodness do not especially interest them. They give no sign of a desire to know. They seem not to have dreamed of even the possibility of actually examining and judging the life that they live. And, should they glimpse it, the prospect does not please them. It is as though they were synthetic, the dish-cultured product of some secret laboratory operated by demented bioengineers.

Straightaway I grow cynical and negligent, thinking of Saint Anthony preaching to the fishes, and pitying myself all the more to remember that the fishes did at least listen to the Saint, and even approve his words, for a while. It is a disgusting and childish condition, and I have, at last, learned to recover from it and do better work by bringing my students into some consideration of the topic that seems so dreary, stale, and even tacky - Politics. Thus, I recover my loyalty through seeking in them the permanent and universal, and always finding it. They truly are, and by nature, it seems, political, carrying in the minds that seem so empty the very ideas of good and virtuous government to which the ancients urged us all to attend.

Plato seems to have concluded that the idea of Justice is not one that we have to learn, but that we have it by Nature. As evidence, we can cite the fact that even little children can tell the difference between fairness and unfairness, and are quick to point it out, however privately. I’m not entirely convinced by that fact, because I’m not sure that it is a fact. It seems to me rather that little children, just like you and me, are very good at detecting only certain cases of Injustice, and have a way of not noticing it when they don’t happen to think themselves its victims. If there is something innate in us, therefore, I am inclined to suspect that it is not our recognition of Justice for what it is, but our incessant wanting, which is very quiet when satisfied but noisy when thwarted. No matter. I do not, in order to do my work, have to answer that ancient question as to whether anything at all can be innate in us. By the time I look for the idea of Justice in my students, it is there. That will do.

Even a mistaken complaint against Injustice is an appeal to principle. No one says, Your treatment of me is wrong because I don’t like it. Everyone calls upon some “higher power,” which finds that treatment wrong in itself ; whether anyone likes it or not. Someday, someone will say, What you propose to do in my case is surely well-intended and would please me a lot, but I must ask you to refrain, for it would not be just. Diogenes will blow out his lamp and go home to bed. Nevertheless, the latter complaint is alive and well in the former, and who makes the one can be led to see Reason in the other. When my students notice unfairness I notice that they are human, and hope returns, and loyalty with it, for I know that any one of them could, just could, send Diogenes home someday.

I do not mean by that the fact that they have adopted, willy-nilly, this or that party affiliation, although they usually have. I mean something deeper, the impulse that perhaps brings us all so naturally to join this or that party of opinion, by which we intend, however inarticulately or ineffectively, or even mistakenly, to serve nothing less than Justice. And my students, even the most lazy and self-indulgent - I might better say especially the most lazy and self-indulgent - are interested in Justice. They are more than interested; they are for it. They know that it is good, and Injustice, bad. That knowledge is the root of Politics and of our concerns with goodness in government, both the outer government of the state and the inner government of the mind.

All I have to do so that they will know themselves as inquirers into Justice, is to have them read Antigone. When they have done that, I ask them whether they remember especially any certain line or passage. It’s a gamble, but I usually win, and not by luck, but because I know that they are interested in Justice, and for it. And the passage that someone can always be counted on to choose is the one in which Haemon is dismissed by his father, Creon the king, as too young to question the wisdom of his elders. But if I happen to be right, answers the son, what does my age matter? That, every student, of whatever persuasion, or color, or I.Q., or previous condition of ignorance, understands. That may be only a first step, but it is the step that must be taken first. Refinements can come later.

Literature is always about Justice, about truth and falsehood, about harm and healing. It is always about the transactions between persons, which are the only possible dwelling places of Justice and Injustice. There is no more Injustice in earthquakes than there is Justice in sunny skies, for Justice comes of choosing, and there must