Archie Goodwin
@ArchieG1946
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English Professor || Classical-Christian education || Literary traditionalist || Father & husband || Foe of faddish fanaticisms || Laudator temporis acti
An antique land…
Joined November 2018
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Men of letters at work.
—Jacques Barzun, W. H. Auden, and Lionel Trilling.
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Rainer Maria Rilke.
“Your task is to love what you don’t understand.”
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Roughly eighty percent of my literature students employ the word “trauma” when describing the hardships and conflicts faced by fictional characters. Is this the triumph of the therapeutic, or merely a trendy word they’ve absorbed (or both)?
First time I’ve encountered this.
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Successfully defended the dissertation today. Six brutal years over with. Now looking toward the future. Onward and upward!
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A haul from the local consignment shop. Got all of these in a bag for a dollar. Building up a classroom library for next year’s students.
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“One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.”
—Wittgenstein
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“I have only three criteria for what I go on reading and teaching: aesthetic splendor, intellectual power, wisdom. . . . The mind always returns to its needs for beauty, truth, and insight. Mortality hovers, and all of us learn the triumph of time.”
—Harold Bloom
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“Evil is unspectacular and always human, / And shares our bed and eats at our own table.”
W. H. Auden, from “Herman Melville”
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@RafFaithfull
There’s more bravery in his voicing of the word “library” than in all of the empty slogans that these mindless duplicates will ever be capable of uttering.
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From Allan Bloom. We “live more truly and fully in reading Plato and Shakespeare.”
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Works I’m teaching this year. Nothing I specialized in yet, but at least I get to expand my own learning along the way. Very exciting.
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“is not civilization the agreement, slowly arrived at, to let the abyss alone?”
—Allen Tate, The Fathers
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Milton on the debasement of the language:
“I am inclined to believe that when the language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin or their degradation.”
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Emersonian aphorism: “Trust men and they will be true to you.”
Melville’s response in his marginal comments: “God help the poor fellow who squares his life according to this.”
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“A society in flight from death is also in flight from life. Refusing to believe the worst will happen, we cannot see that the best requires it—that whatever makes life worthwhile, be it love, adventure, children, settling, has death as its price.”
—Roger Scruton
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“To possess a culture is not only to possess a body of knowledge or expertise; . . . . It is to possess a sensibility, a response, a way of seeing things, which is in some special way redemptive. Culture is not a matter of academic knowledge but of participation.”
—Roger Scruton
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“Every time a poem is written, every time a short story is written, it is written not by cunning, but by belief. The beauty, the something, the little charm of the thing to be, is more felt than known.”
—Robert Frost
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Poems covered with my high school students
“Sonnet 29” Shakespeare
“Sonnet 60” Shakespeare
“Death Be Not Proud” Donne
“Huswifery” Edward Taylor
“Light Shining Out of Darkness”Cowper
“The Tyger” Blake
“Ozymandias” Shelley
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” Wordsworth
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List of the British/European novels, poems, plays, and short stories I had my ninth graders read and analyze this year. Not much adjustment from my teaching of college students. They read these complex works deeply and well. I’m quite proud of them.
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“they asked me if I believed in Satan….I guess as a boy I did. Come the middle years my belief I reckon had waned somewhat. Now I’m startin to lean back the other way. He explains a lot of things that otherwise don’t have no explanation.”
— McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
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“All who aspire to literary excellence in democratic nations, ought frequently to refresh themselves at the springs of ancient literature: there is no more wholesome course for the mind.”
—Tocqueville
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Had my class read this alongside Wilbur’s “Boy at the Window.” Turned out to be one of those rewarding class days where students made one significant aesthetic discovery after another. Rich discussion ending in genuine insight for all involved. I live for these days.
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“But it is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality;—these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.”
—Herman Melville
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“For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the Great Art of Telling the Truth,—even though it be covertly, and by snatches.”
—Melville
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Simple, direct, and politically incorrect.
Make guides to style and usage great again.
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“The current obscurantism which attacks the Western tradition with the zeal of censorship, comes not from those supposedly unrepresented in the curriculum, but from academics and other intellectuals who 𝘢𝘳𝘦 represented and hate their own heritage.”
—Jacques Barzun
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“There is unfortunately no method or gimmick that will replace teaching…. Teaching will not change; it is a hand-to-hand, face-to-face encounter. There is no help for it—we must teach and we must learn … using words and working at the perennial Difficulties.”
—Jacques Barzun
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“The greatest poetry has always depicted the world as a little citadel of nobility threatened by an immense barbarism, a flickering candle surrounded by infinite night."
—Harold Clarke Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
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Email from a student who hasn’t attended class, turned in a single assignment, or reached out in over two months:
“Hey, can I get at least a C by the end of the class?”
Outrageous insolence. Excuse me, but pandemic or no pandemic, this doesn’t fly.
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Without Louis L’Amour Westerns I never would have moved on to Melville, Shakespeare, and others. He was an important gateway for me into the realm of great literature. Between the seventh and twelfth grade, I read everything he had written (and I still revisit the Sacketts).
In a way, L'Amour is America's Homer: Like Homer, who taught Greeks their country's national myth (the Trojan War), L'Amour best articulates our national myth (the conquest of the West). Like Homer, he's not a highbrow writer, just a good storyteller.
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Jacques Barzun on the enduring relevance of the classics.
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For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the Great Art of Telling the Truth,—even though it be covertly, and by snatches.
—Melville
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“The Self-Unseeing,” Thomas Hardy.
Astonishing short poem. A favorite.
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“There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.”
—Ambrose Bierce
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“Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance.”
—Northrop Frye, The Well-Tempered Critic
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“[A] student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: the most conscientious student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.”
—Northrop Frye, The Great Code
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The enduring fantasies of radicalism.
“The Four Reformers,” Robert Louis Stevenson.
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“Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years."
—Willa Cather
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“Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.”
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No utter surprise can come to him
Who reaches Shakespeare’s core;
That which we seek and shun is there-
Man’s final lore.
—Herman Melville on The Bard
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“If fiction begins in daydream, if it relieves us from the burden of being ourselves, it ends, if it is good fiction and we are good readers, by returning us to the world and ourselves. It reconciles us with reality, or helps us deal with reality.”
—Robert Penn Warren
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“A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea."
—Cormac McCarthy, 1933-2023
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“I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism—that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything."
—Robert Penn Warren
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Emily Dickinson, poem 373 “This World is not Conclusion”
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“Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.”
—Randall Jarrell
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This weekend’s book haul for my classroom library. Quite a selection.
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“Non-conforming is the basis, the very fount, of all humour. A totally conformist society never laughs—laughter itself being a kind of criticism, an expression of the immense disparity between human aspiration and human performance.”
—Malcolm Muggeridge
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“[T]he poet is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist.”
—T. S. Eliot
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“Liberal education flourished only when it was possible to assume a belief in human excellence.” Roger Scruton goes on:
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A criticism of my dissertation is that it at times indulges in “too much literary appreciation.” I read this as the best unintended compliment I’ve ever been paid.
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“The repertoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so weak. We have no language for connecting our inner lives with the horrors that pass before our eyes in the outer world.”
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Motiveless malignity?
Robert Frost, “The Draft Horse”
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“It was easy to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.”
—Edith Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree
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A statesman is an easy man,
He tells lies by rote;
A journalist makes up his lies
And takes you by the throat;
So stay home and drink your beer
And let the neighbours vote. . . .
—W. B. Yeats, from “The Old Stone Cross”
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Rainer Maria Rilke
“Then, from His place of ambush, God leapt out.”
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“The pressure on language to deteriorate does not come merely from below, from the ‘democratic’ levelers. It comes also from above, from the fancy jargonmongers, idle game players, fashionable coteries for second-rate intellectuals.”
—John Simon
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“[F]or life to be large and full, it must contain the care of the past and of the future in every passing moment of the present.”
—Joseph Conrad, 1904
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From Bob Dylan’s new book.
A bitter pill to swallow for those who demand that culture must be contemporary and “relevant” and always reflect their narrow identity markers.
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Mario Vargas Llosa offers something of a response to this sort of reasoning.
This is obviously true, and a litmus test for rationalism
Only in subjective fields like literature do we see the "best" people having lived long ago.
No one thinks the best athletes lived 50 years ago, we can see data showing that people are breaking records all the time.
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“Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance.”
—Northrop Frye, The Well-Tempered Critic
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“But it is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality;—these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.”
—Herman Melville
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Why is everything, in academia and everywhere else, now considered a “community,” a “conversation,” a “space”—all of which we must strive to “navigate”? “Navigating Diverse Spaces”; “Navigating Difficult Conversations”; “Navigating Contemporary Discourse Communities.”
Stop!
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“What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Picked this up. Interested to see what insights Kaufmann had over forty years ago.
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Wow. Stanley Fish, writing in the ‘90s, could not have been more wrong about the reach of academic critical theory.
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Almost every student paper I’ve graded in the last two days employs the trite metaphor “diving deep” or “deep dive.” I’ve been handing out some stern warnings about the overuse of this overworked expression. Cease and desist!
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Herman Melville on his dead friend, the great Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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“‘The unacknowledged legislators of the world’ describes the secret police, not the poets.”
—W. H. Auden
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An extraordinarily moving video of Eisenhower reflecting on the allies on the beaches at Normandy. Please watch and remember their sacrifice:
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“Politics ought not be all-pervasive. Indeed, one of the first conditions of freedom is to discover the line beyond which politics may not go, and literature is one of the means by which the young (and old) find this out.”
—Robert Hughes
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“The importance of reading, not slight stuff to get through the time, but the best that has been written, forces itself upon me more and more every year I live.”
—Matthew Arnold
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I guess a college instructor is “passive aggressive” nowadays for telling a student, quite plainly, that he wouldn’t have written a paper unrelated to the course material had he attended class regularly or opened the syllabus. I’ve never dealt with this many brazen students.
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“Melville and I had a talk about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters; and if truth must be told, we smoked cigars even within the sacred precincts of the sitting-room.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
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“Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thought, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning towards error.”
—Joseph Conrad
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Today’s classic book haul. The classroom library grows…
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“The poet’s job is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always does take place.”
—Northrop Frye
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“Is not civilization the agreement, slowly arrived at, to let the abyss alone?”
—Allen Tate, The Fathers
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“Accustom yourself to reflect on the words you use. . . . For if words are not THINGS, they are LIVING POWERS, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and humanized.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection
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“Evil is unspectacular and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our own table.”
W. H. Auden, from “Herman Melville”
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“If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years' standing are as effective as ever.”
—Hawthorne
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“A deep-down, unalterable mournfulness is in me. . . . Away, ye chattering apes of a sophomorean Spinoza and Plato, who once didst all but delude me that night was day, and pain only a tickle. Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye cannot.”
—Herman Melville, Pierre
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