Brief Educational Prospectus for Wee Scott Maximos

Now we have an actual kid, not a potential one. But since he doesn't even know how to put his hand in his mouth, piano lessons and Homer seem just as distant as they did before he was born. Still, this is what I think I'd like to teach him.

The Big Three
If he leaves my tutelage familiar with Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible, I will give thanks to God and sit back and have a drink. It seems to me that those three bodies of work are the foundation of Western humanity, and provide a reference point for most of the thinking that people have done since then, but also that if you grew up on a deserted island with only those books (+ Euclid and some other people to talk to and love, and someone to administer the sacraments to you on occasion?) you could lead a completely full and happy human life. In fact, your life would probably be fuller, happier, and more human than the lives of most people who were not on that island. (Speaking of islands and imaginary restrictions on book availability, Jean-Jacques wants Robinson Crusoe to be Emile's first book. It's a charming idea; so charming that it just might work...)

The question is how to promote a love of these works in a child, since we swear that we are not going to be his teachers in his adolescence. First of all, I think that children are capable of understanding more than we commonly allow. Matt led some pretty normal nine through eleven year old kids in a truncated (but not abridged) production of Julius Caesar, and I think they nailed it. They didn't understand it all of course, but they got a lot of it, and they've stored those lines away for later when they will need them. So with that in mind, I would read excerpts from those books with Scott, and have him memorize bits, and talk about them. We could always have something brewing from those three books, and let him read according to his taste in the rest of his time. One always hopes the child's taste will be good, but if not, he's getting some good stuff with his parents.

Mathematics
I worked with very low-ability (?) second graders on math homework last year, and I am just baffled as to why they don't know any math facts. That's their one job. That's all they have to learn in math, pretty much. Bubby is going to hammer those math facts. I also think you have to do some imaginative stuff with math but hammering the math facts is important if you're going to have any fun with the imaginative stuff. Euclid is the other desert-island-biggie; once again, I think you can introduce this at a younger age than most people imagine. I don't see any reason why we couldn't start dipping the child's toes into the Elements around age ten, and slowly work through at least books I-V by the time he is thirteen. That's when I'm probably going to sit back and have that drink, so I hope he knows some Euclid by then. 

Language
It'd be great if we had a French nanny or one of us were fluent in a modern language, but we're both dabbling dunces and we can't speak any language but English. Phooey. I sometimes think we could learn a language together as a family-- Matt is going to take German to fulfill a requirement in his program. Maybe Scott and I can Duolingo along. All we know for sure is that we'd like to teach him Latin from about ages 7-12. Once again we are into exposing him to the real thing here. Luckily we both know Latin well enough to be able to teach him from original works without having him depend on a textbook too much. (We like to have a textbook on hand under the table, but to have the student go pretty much bookless.)

We both love Greek, and Matt is definitely good enough to teach classical Greek, but I don't know if it makes sense to try to cram in both classical languages before high school. We want to teach Scott a few really important things really well, and let him have lots of free time. Still, I'd like for him to know at least how to read and pronounce Greek. It's nice to be able to read the inscriptions on icons, and to sing along in Greek churches. If we go to a Greek church with a Greek school, I'd totally sign him up for that. I'm also down to learn and teach him lots of hymns in Greek.

Church
We're not going to cram it down his throat. We will keep the feasts and the fasts as prettily as we can, read Scripture and sing hymns and pray, but I'm not going to do much in the way of Religious Instruction. I think he'll get what he needs from church and from living in a Christian home. Mommy paints icons and Daddy reads theology so that will make some kind of impression. I like what St. John Chrysostom says-- children should be taught to always have three things on their lips: Thank God, God willing, and Glory to God. I'm working on that myself, so that perhaps Young Bubs will pick it up as well.

Other stuff
Piano lessons. Singing at church. Being a Nature Boy- learning the names of plants, animals, and stars. Taking a class in martial arts or ballet or whatever his thing is. Doing good works and helping people. This stuff does not worry me. What worries me is that he's going to absorb more lessons from watching me fumble around in the world than from any sermons I might give him.

First things first.

Here is something that I keep wanting to say on Facebook in re: extremely immoderate debates about the Hobby Lobby brouhaha, but I'm not sure it would be helpful. So I will say it here where only a bunch of my cronies who agree with me will read it. Great.

Do you people (not you people, the other people not reading this) not understand that Christians are opposed to abortion primarily because we believe it to be murder? MURDER. Sexual ethics come into it for most of us, in at least a secondary way, but the main problem is that we believe it to be the destruction of a human life, a soul that's just been united with a body, and either is or has the potential to become a person.  That's it. That's the reason.

Why wouldn't you want to respect that belief? Don't you agree that Murder Is Bad, especially murder of an innocent? You do not agree that abortion is murder because you do not agree that an embryo/fetus is a human life, and you do not like the consequences of calling it murder, but can you see why we would be upset about it? If you can't hold the idea that somebody thinks abortion is murder in your head for more than a second before rejecting it and moving onto women's rights, then I think Western civilization is over.

Murder is pretty much the worst thing you can do. If there is any question in your mind whether you are murdering someone or not, would you not want to err on the side of not murdering someone?

This has been my question pretty much since sixth grade or whenever I learned about abortion. It is a very simplistic and probably childish one, but I don't see how you can get around it without absolutely proving that an embryo/fetus is not a human life. That is not a provable thing one way or the other (although in the case of a viable fetus it seems so obvious to me,) but I think that you don't have to be a Christian to give the potential victim the benefit of the doubt. You can talk all you want about the sex stuff and the social consequences of "stigmatizing" abortion as murder, but you have to do it in the shadow of death, or the truth is totally not in you. That is why I appreciate, in a murky perverse way, people like Naomi Wolf, because at least she admits that abortion is murder, and even child sacrifice. She continues to support it, but at least she is barefaced in her wickedness and does not hide it behind the mask of humanitarianism.

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I could write a very long post about breastfeeding and changing diapers today, but I probably won't, because I have other plans like walking Barnacle Boy down to the Farmers' Market to buy some more ravishingly sexy tomatoes, mailing all the thank you cards (no more extremely generous favors, please! I'm running out of cards!), going to the library, having a friend visit and maybe visiting a friend, and probably doing some breastfeeding and some diaper changing. My main question is how to get poop off of cloth diapers without getting it onto everything else.

Haven't been blogging because baby. I have plenty of sitting around and thinking time, and I'm feeling verbal and spry enough in my brains, but it's hard to type with toes. Even holding the baby takes fingers. Thought I could get away with sitting with baby in Moby but now he's crying, never mind, goodbye.

Husband: Hey, have you ever seen lightning strike the ground?
Wyf: No... but it just happened in my book. In fact a horse was killed.
H: What?! So many things happen in these books!
W: Oh yeah...  also people keep having sex and breast milk goes everywhere...
H: Either one of those events is enough for a whole book!!
W: A Horse Gets Struck By Lightning.
H: In a John Updike novel you would just have a hundred pages of wandering around, then the protagonist would have sex and breast milk would get on him, and then he'd question his existence and it would be over.
W: Don't worry, there's some of that too. Plus she has sex with the king of France.

Mothers will plan on having their way and only their way, when in ghostly form and when killed by their sons.

-Stunning finale to a student's essay on the Oresteia, which I just dug up

Love songs

Here are some songs that have been stuck in my head as I search for lullabies. They're songs that I've always liked, but now they mean more to me than they did before.

I've seen you laugh at nothing at all
I've seen you sadly weeping
The sweetest thing I ever saw
Was you asleep and dreaming
Well you may not be beautiful
But it's not for me to judge
I don't know if you're beautiful

Because I love you too much

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

The first time ever I saw your face
I thought the sun rose in your eyes
And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave
To the dark and the end of the skies

And the first time ever I kissed your mouth
I felt the earth move in my hand
Like the trembling heart of a captive bird
That was there at my command, my love

And the first time ever I lay with you
I felt your heart so close to mine
And I knew our joy would fill the earth
And last, till the end of time, my love

choses varieuses

I bought a journal a few days before Scott was born, for the purpose of turning inward and being quiet and thoughtful and stuff in the several weeks I had left before the child arrived and my life changed forever. I think I've written in it three times. One entry just says "It's kind of hard to find time to write with a baby around," and then it stops because the baby woke up.

Tomorrow is the fourth week since his birth, and things still aren't quite back to "normal." My body is basically functional for non-gestational purposes again, barring some weird little quirks like sore knees? Itchy chin? I expected a flabby stomach, bags under my eyes and huge boobs but not an itchy chin (it is a common post-partum complaint, I discovered.) Our sleep patterns will never be the same, but we're settling into some kind of pattern, anyway. Breastfeeding is starting to go well, although Bubby-ji and I still have some very frustrating moments. Walk away from the baby, take a shower or at least a deep breath, try again. He doesn't seem to like it when I try to multitask while nursing, so today, when I nurse, I am shoving away all distractions such as the internet, books, and my cup of coffee. I wonder if it's that my body shifts subtly when I'm looking at something else, or if he can sense in some other way that I'm not thinking about him. In any case, it seems good to return to him.

In addition to the Outlander series, I am reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia by Rebecca West. That may sound random but it is totally awesome. The author documents her trip through the Slav states in 1937, but it's more than just a travel journal. I think the fundamental task of any artist and thinker is to relate the universal to the particular in a way appropriate to the scope, topic, and audience of the work. Dame West glides between these spheres in such a way that each movement is welcome as refreshment, comfort and delight. Of course she relates amusing and poignant anecdotes about people and places, but one never knows when a little vignette will open up into something wide and cosmic. She often reads little details as symbols (for example, she and her husband find a Slavic fairy tale a telling statement of Slavic attitudes toward government) but never too neatly. The history of Western European imperialism in Eastern Europe is woven deeply into even her minute observations because she is not only a very perceptive novelist, but a well educated woman with a long view of things.

Virginia Woolf notes, with Coleridge, in A Room of One's Own that a great mind is androgynous, that the sexes are unselfconsciously united in someone like Shakespeare, Shelley, or Keats. 

...when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life. 

Ever since I read that I've been on the lookout for androgynous minds. I feel a little shy about actually bestowing such a compliment on anyone, but instead I take it as an ideal by which I measure all artists. And I think that Rebecca West measures up very well.

Now my baby is pooping and crying. So much for a room of my own!