The Saunterer

James Baldwin on one’s responsibility to society

    The responsibility James Baldwin had in mind is this:
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions. . . . But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it - at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
    (Quoted from page 1 of Critical Encounters in High School English, by Deborah Appleman. Teachers College Press. 2009.)
    For a brief biography of James Baldwin, click here. For images of and relating to James Baldwin, click here.

Diana Wynne Jones’s account of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien lecturing

     Like most, the Saunterer enjoys human interest stories, and Diana Wynne Jones, fantasy writer for children, remembers this one:

    [C. S. Lewis] was just a marvelous lecturer: he made the dullest topics absolutely shine. He lectured in the very largest of lecture halls, which was a huge “L” shape, and it was packed, with people standing in the aisles, even early in the morning. Everybody drank it in. Obviously a whole lot of people took this away and thought about it, and began writing - mostly for children because in those days you couldn’t write fantasy for anyone else.
    Tolkien was a different matter. He was just a kind of eminence grise and a legend. You couldn’t hear him lecture. He worked at not letting you hear, because he wanted to go away and finish writing The Lord of the Rings. So he had the very smallest lecture room. First of all it was packed out, so he spoke with his back to the audience and mumbling. Unfortunately he was talking about - meditating on, really - what a plot is like and how it mutates into other plots, and this I found so fascinating that I went back the next week as did one other person. And this meant that he couldn’t stop lecturing and still get the money, which apparently in those days you could if no one turned up - it was a dreadful racket, really. He could have given just the one lecture and then been paid for a term if we’d all stayed away. But this other person and I attended diligently week after week, so he was forced to go on meditating about plots mutating, and what I could hear was fascinating, because he was busy with the really large orchestration of the latter part of The Lord of the Rings at the time. But all I retain is a sense of how marvelous the way plots work is. That was all I got out of it, but I kept going in case I might understand a bit more next week - let alone hear a bit more.   

    (Quoted from “Interview with Diana Wynne Jones, 22 March 2001, conducted by Charles Butler.” Page 170 in Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom, by Teya Rosenberg et al. Peter Lang Publishing, 2002.)
    For a brief biography of Diana Wynne Jones, click here. For Diana Wynne Jones’ web site, click here. For images of and relating to Diana Wynne Jones, click here. For a brief biography of C. S. Lewis, click here. For a brief biography of J. R. R. Tolkien, click here.

The Saunterer on the necessity of getting a field’s backbone right

    Every field - all of the arts, sciences, religion, education, law, . . . - has a backbone to which most of the rest in the field attaches. Here’s how James Gilluly puts it for geology:

Stratigraphy is the backbone of the science. Without sound stratigraphy, structural studies are impossible, and all historical and most economic geology depends on it.

(Quoted from page 69 of Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs: Evolution, Extinction, and the Future of Our Planet, by Donald R. Prothero. Columbia University Press. 2009.)

    For a brief biography of James Gilluly, click here. For a brief biography of Donald R. Prothero, click here.