Fire and Knowledge

[I learned] that knowledge was less a means to an end than a matter of self-cultivation, a way of transforming this experience of the daily. To be curious, to study, to find out—this was the path to the world. Knowledge exposed connections, imparted significance to the incidental.

—Sven Birkets, The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), p. 60

Breaking news! More than half of our college students are stupid!

Study: College students lack literacy for complex tasks

More than half of students at four-year colleges — and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges — lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found….

Most students at community colleges and four-year schools showed intermediate skills. That means they can do moderately challenging tasks, such as identifying a location on a map.

Identifying a location on a map? As an “intermediate” skill? Let me guess, understanding basic newspaper prose is considered an “advanced” skill…

[L]anguage is the soil, the seedbed, of meaning. And the works of language, our literatures, have been the repository of our collective speculation.

—Sven Birkets, The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), p. 31

Today as never before in human history the child lives in an entertainment environment, among myriad spinoffs and products and commercial references, all of which reinforce the power, or should I say tyranny, of the movie.

—Sven Birkets, The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), p. 29-30

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented….

[I]n reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

—C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961), pp. 140-1

Sen. Clinton: House ‘has been run like a plantation’

I’m not sure what bothers me more: her speech, or the fact that she received “thunderous applause” for these kind of remarks.

Speaking during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event, [Hillary] Clinton… offered an apology to a group of Hurricane Katrina survivors “on behalf of a government that left you behind, that turned its back on you.” Her remarks were met with thunderous applause by a mostly black audience at the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem.

The House “has been run like a plantation, and you know what I’m talking about,” said Clinton, D-New York. “It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard.”….

“I predict to you that this administration will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country.”

We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves…. We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own…. We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors.

—C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961), pp. 137-9

I suggest that a ten or twenty years’ abstinence both from the reading and from the writing of evaluative [literary] criticism might do us all a great deal of good.

—C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961), p. 129