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

be a chooser. Literature is about persons choosing, or failing to choose, or not knowing how or why to choose, and about the world that such persons make, and in which other persons must live. Every book is a portrayal of a kingdom, a system of related persons living in a land whose borders are the first and last pages. That land has its Politics.

That is why some wandering around in the kingdoms of literature is essential to a true education. It has nothing to do with “culture,” with the presumed social advantages that accrue to those who can recognize, or even use in just the right place, a line from_ The Taming of the Shrew_. And it is not for the sake of “appreciating” the great works, which, in practice, can mean nothing more than feeling, or claiming to feel, some traditionally approved sentiment in the presence of Goethe and Flaubert. And it is useful as a ticket of admission to our “common heritage” only if that common heritage is understood not as the library of this or that historical tradition or culture, but as the permanent reservoir of everything that makes us all human, in all times, and in all places.

The difference between that literature most suitable for “children,” whatever that might mean, and that most suitable for “grown-ups,” whom we will be able to identify once we have identified the children, is this: Children learn what they most need to know from happy stories of the birth of kings, and grown-ups learn again and again what they most need to remember from sad stories of the death of kings. The birth of the king is the coming into the world of Justice, and the death of the king is its passing. In the birth of the king, children recognize the Right, and in his death, grown-ups recognize the Wrong, and, having been children, know where to look for the return of the Right.

Everybody remembers the famous story of the Princess and the Frog, and its happy outcome. Give yourself a little test on that story. It is not a test of “intelligence.” Who was it that brought about that happy outcome, and how? It was not the frog, who is, after all, strictly speaking, a monster, a monster pro tem, to be sure, but still a monster. It was not the princess, who is, after all, a child, a child pro tem, to be sure, but still a child. It was the only grown-up in the tale, who is not only the father of the princess, but the king. And a just king.

When the princess returns to the table, saying that there was no one at the door, her father knows that she is lying. He requires of her the truth, and then says:

Listen, young lady, your rank gives you not privileges but responsibilities. To be royal is to be “right.” A false princess is no princess at all. We do not break our given word. We do not abandon those who helped us in our need. Do you now go down to the door and let that frog in and treat him as you ought.

And the result is that on the very next day, the princess, now a queen, goes off with a king, newly reborn out of unnatural monstrosity, to rule in her own land. And that, all the stories tell us, the stories for children and the stories for grown-ups as well, is the goal of this life - to rule in one’s own land. It is the goal of education as well, and equally the goal set for us by Prometheus, for to rule in one’s own land can mean, for each and every one of us, nothing different from the mind’s grasp of itself as the informer and the director of the will.

There is an important difference between that story and a story that we looked at earlier. The king assumes that the princess is nothing but a child, and must be taught by precept; Jesus assumes that the accusers are the strangely double creatures that most of us are, children here and there and now and then, but also, if in moments only, grown-ups who can be taught by a very different process, and a process that has, significantly, no convenient name among us, and which I have had to call, for lack of a more descriptive term, the “occasion of education.”

What a risk he took. Suppose that those accusers had been completely and only children. Suppose they had been utterly under the control of their appetites, and incapable of self-government by any means; with no thoughtful grasp of their own minds, and unable to “talk about goodness,” to give thoughtful consideration as to what they believed, and as to whether they ought to believe it. Stones would have been thrown that day.

He sent them into their minds, each into his own kingdom, and told them to learn to bring it into order and to rule it, and not to be ruled by any foreign power. And each one declared independence. Each declaration of independence was a political act, committed after having asked and answered certain familiar questions. Who is competent to rule, and by virtue of what? How shall the realm live, by the force of feelings, or by the dictation of beliefs that can never rise to the rank of Knowledge, but take their strength from custom and tradition, and not from Reason? Who is to decide, in this land, what is the Good, and to live by it without regard to comfort or profit or the approval of the emissaries of other lands? Those are the questions that lead to the drawing up of a constitution, or the coronation of a just king, if one of those can be found.

In a person, there is a community, a society. There are many voices. They are all parts of the self, some immigrants from the world out there, and some the native-born, the remnants of earlier selves, which never go away. The little child I once was, I still may be at any moment, either delighting in some fresh wonder as though Beauty had appeared in the world for the first time, or whining for favor and pleasure. And then there’s that teenager, and his only slightly older alter ego who knows everything. The_ dramatis personae_ are countless, and, while few are on the stage in any given scene, they are all waiting, some of them panting, in the wings. They all hold the script, to say nothing of the plot, in the deepest contempt, barging on stage whenever they please. And, while the turmoil they cause is quite enough to make life, over and over again, into a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, far behind them there lurks the constant threat of the Great Idiot himself, skulking in the subbasements like the Phantom of the Opera, and waiting for his chance. You know him as well as I do. He is the one who suddenly appears at center stage and takes over completely when you discover a tarantula in the glove compartment. The Idiot is in charge when you fall into rage, or panic, or utterly into appetite.

Who can direct these actors? How shall these citizens be governed? If the land is to have order, and the plot, meaning, who is to be at once their author and king? Can their proper roles be found, and can they be brought to play them, so that each can contribute usefully both to the health of the body politic and to the theme of the piece? Will some of them just have to go, incurable sociopaths beyond all hope of rehabilitation? And who can send them away? After all, they can all claim to have been born here, and they all know that they have their rights.

Such a state of affairs makes a sad story indeed, and it is all the sadder because the king seems to be dead. There is no one in charge. Accident and happenstance spin the plot. It is as though my life were a story being written by no one, but also by anyone, or anything. It has no consistent theme, and not even a clearly identifiable main character. Which of this motley crew is me? Do I have a choice? Who is the chooser? What will the others say, and, even worse, what will they do next?

Those are all political questions, questions about government. That it happens to be my own government makes the answers not less important but actually more important than the equivalent answers for the land in which I live. A citizen who governs himself but poorly, to say nothing of a citizen who will not govern himself at all, lays upon his fellows not only the terrible burden of doing what he could do for himself but won’t, but also the temptation, often, indeed, the necessity, to resort to coercion and violence. In that degree to which I am unable to govern myself, I become to you exactly the opposite of the “occasion of education,” for you will be driven, in handling me, to choose something other than Reason.

And my self-government is more important than “the government” for another reason. About the latter, I can do almost nothing, and that “almost” is only a quibble. About the former, I can do something. Will I? Even about the willing, I can do something. Perhaps if I stop to think about some Petronilla, whose own powers of self-government will depend on mine, I might strengthen even my obstinate will. And if I go on to think about my own child, the whining brat that interrupts some of my best scenes and writes his own script by lung power alone, and remember that unless I can govern him all the rest of you will have to, and in a way that I may find as unpleasant as he will surely find it, I may suddenly discover that self-government and self-interest are sometimes happily served at once. That should make it easier.

All I need is a good king.

The examples of the world, however, will not provide one. The kings of this world are just like me, and perhaps even a bit worse off, owing, for kings, a surprising amount of obedience to all sorts of powers and pressures outside of themselves. Plato once took a job with a king, Dionysius of Syracuse, who had been his student. He wanted to test whether wise and just government could be established out there in the world. The result was bad. And poor Voltaire, even knowing what had happened to Plato, undertook to make the philosopher-king out of the amiable and enlightened Frederick the Great. The result was bad.

As to the government of the self, however, there is no shortage of models, not in the kings of the world, but in the kings of the mind. We have all seen them, and we can all recognize them for what they are.

Home Rule

There are such nourishing and reasonable, and even obvious, ways of describing and understanding education, and then pursuing it, that some strange species of credit must be given to our schoolers, who have ingeniously concocted countless other ways that are debilitating, silly, and unlikely. Then, having made themselves an unlovely idol, and bowing down before it, they have licensed themselves as nothing but “realistic” in its service, as though it were simply part of the world, and not of their own making. So too, somebody’s notion of intelligence is granted the rank of “reality” and the power to bind us all.

But education, like intelligence, is not a thing in the world, and what it “is” is, truly, nothing more than a “manner of speaking.” It is what we say it is, and what we