He grimaced after he realized what I had asked. He thought of how to phrase what he had to say. He was not happy that I had asked the question. He took sip of his drink. While he was fidgeting, I figured out what he was thinking. He tossed around for what else he could do to avoid answering the question.

“You don’t think my writing has much potential,” I answered for him. I had heard it before, though before it had been about my poetry and not about my fiction.

“Well, here’s the thing, Matthew, you’re a friend and I like you.”

“That is true, but that doesn’t change the quality of my writing.”

I thought about what he had said about the piece I shared with him. At first he had thought it was a thinly veiled diary entry. When I told him I’d never experienced anything as painful as my character had, he complimented my imagination.

“I think you may well be published and you will well get some good reviews. But is it enduring? When I think of a novel, I think of a piece that is art for art’s sake. I don’t see the art there.”

I thought about Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft which I’ve been reading. He writes that he think it is possible for a competent writer to become a good writer, but it’s never possible for a good writer to leap the chasm, becoming a great writer. Since reading that I have been wrestling with the idea.

If, for example, there is a limit to how quickly an individual can run — only a limited number of people can run at Olympic speeds — does it follow that there is a limit to how well one can write? Perhaps writing talent is like singing talent: everyone is born able to sing in a specific range, with some training someone can reach some notes higher or lower, but a bass will never be a tenor.

As I sipped my own drink, I thought about how just the other night after reading a friend’s work, I told her that I wasn’t sure if there was any there there. And now I was hearing the same thing. I thought about what he said.

What I had shared were five and a half double-spaced pages of my first foray into writing after a long absence. Could Faulkner’s friends see the art in his first attempts? Didn’t Shakespeare’s genius develop through his first plays before he had fully mastered his craft? Some critics say that Shakespeare’s first plays show strong attempts to emulate the more established playwrights of his day.

My friend smiled. “What the hell do I know? Every genius was underestimated in his day. Here’s to your writing!”

In honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.

LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL
April 16, 1963

MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through all of these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants — for example, to remove the stores humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.

As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves : “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” We decided to schedule our direct-action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic withdrawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham’s mayoralty election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run-off we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run-off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct-action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling, for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor. will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may want to ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I-it” relationship for an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression ‘of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state’s segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to ace the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this ‘hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At fist I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self-respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best-known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do-nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.

If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble-rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides–and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist.

But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime—the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some—such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle—have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as “dirty nigger lovers.” Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful “action” antidotes to combat the disease of segregation.

Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a non segregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative .critics who can always find. something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of Rio shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leader era; an too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.” In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious. irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, on Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?”

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? l am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide. and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Par from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it vi lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ecclesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom, They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jai with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham, ham and all over the nation, because the goal of America k freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation-and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handing the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather “nonviolently” in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. There will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. There will be the old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” There will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

Martin Luther King, Jr.

In This Essay

The Art of Sinking in Poetry by Alexander Pope

The Epistles of Horace: Bilingual Edition (David Ferry, trans.)

The Odes of Horace: Bilingual Edition (David Ferry, trans.)

“For poet, classics translate into success” by David Mehegan, The Boston Globe, July 7, 2005

The other day I found a copy of Alexander Pope’s The Art of Sinking in Poetry in Barnes&Noble. As I began to read it, I began to think of Horace’s “Ars Poetica”, how long it had been since I had read it, and thought about when it began to take on a special meaning for me.

I felt myself floating after finishing my undergraduate degree.

I found myself fighting against ideas that I did not want to accept. But I did not then have the strength to put them down.

I still don’t.

Then one day I was reading The Boston Globe — only good things come from reading The Boston Globe — when I came across a story about a translator trying to revive the classics of ancient Roman poet Horace.

Since I first read Aristotle as a freshman in high school, I have had a respect for the classics. Seneca is one of my favorite philosophers, which is odd when I consider my love for Romantic poet John Keats and lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I had read Horace’s Ars Poetica in college and remembered liking it.

So, I read through the article. I was struck by this statement:

Some literary lights grumble darkly about the low profile of poetry in our time, but Ferry said its status is no better nor worse than it ever was.

What could he possibly mean? Was poetry always so marginal as it is today? Or is our — my — definition of poetry too narrow? Horace himself writes of the importance of poetry in his own age. I wrote “poetry” in high school, but had not then bothered to study it. And my verses, if I am allowed to call them that, were at their best only hints of something possible with more study. Did he know studies of the prominence of poetry that I did not know?

A few quick searches and I found Dr. Ferry’s email address. And with not a little trepidation, I set out to ask him myself.

The article about him, the few emails I exchanged with him, and his translation of the “Ars Poetica” in The Epistles of Horace, though I could not see it then, helped send me down the course towards my own serious love of poetry.

So, who do you want to contact? Why haven’t you?

Form your own opinion. Buy these books from Amazon.com.

• The Art of Sinking in Poetry by Alexander Pope
• The Epistles of Horace: Bilingual Edition (David Ferry, trans.)
• The Odes of Horace: Bilingual Edition (David Ferry, trans.)

May I also suggest…?

• “The Prestige in Poetry” by Matthew Koslowski, Literature&Literacy
• “On Dying Young” by Matthew Koslowski, Literature&Literacy
• “Memorizing Poetry” by Matthew Koslowski, Literature&Literacy
• “Living through Literature” by Matthew Koslowski, Literature&Literacy

In This Essay

Love: Ten Poems by Pablo Neruda (various trans.)

100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor (Bilingual Edition) by Pablo Neruda (Stephen Tapscott, trans.)

I’ve been reading a lot of poetry by Pablo Neruda in translation. And whenever I read Pablo Neruda, I wish that I were fluent in Spanish so that I could understand what he wrote.

I rediscovered, “Tonight I Can Write…”, a poem I have struggled with since college. My first reading of this poem lead to a fight with one of my favorite professors, Dr. K–.

And I learned a lot from the experience.

Writing Before Reading

I read little poetry, let alone study it, before college. And yet, I wrote a lot of “poetry” in high school, calling it free verse and the like. Like my friends who wrote poetry, I could not be bothered with such trivial things as rhyme and meter and form.

The Modernist poets of the early twentieth century liberated us from that, right?

But what makes the Modernist poems of those great poets masterful in their free verse is that they had studied verse and meter, had mastered those forms before departing from them. The followed the adage that you must know the rules before you can break the rules effectively. They did away with form and meter but they kept the focus of intense imagery that lead to meaning.

Concrete: It’s Not Just for Building Architecture

When I shared some of my “poems” with Dr. K–, he told me they were drivel. I have mentioned this story before, and talked a bit about its aftermath. What he criticized in my poetry was my failure to use concrete imagery to give shape to the abstract concepts that invoked.

But he failed to be concrete in his criticism. We did not discuss my poems themselves, nor what I was trying to convey. For example, he might have pointed out that I did not give shape to “love”, for example, — it is a small word, after all, that tries to capture galaxies of experiences — and pointed me to poets who had given shape to “love”. Use poets to learn poetry.

Rather, he stated that my poems were nothing and that he had read plenty of better poetry from his other students. He encouraged me to focus on my expository writing and become an essayist. If you’re reading this, you can thank Dr. K– in part.

I think he believed in the myth that genius comes to the young and, if you do not have it by your early twenties, you will never have it. And I believed it too and still fight with that, though my friend helped me see that not all geniuses achieve their greatness young.

An Abstract Sadness

Shortly after telling me that my poems were “abstract” and that they would never amount to anything, I came across “Tonight I Can Write…” by Pablo Neruda.

Neruda indulges in every fault which Dr. K– had called a failing in my work.

Tonight I Can Write…

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,’The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

–Pablo Neruda (W.S. Merwin, trans.) from Love: Ten Poems by Pablo Neruda

What so surprised me about this particular poem was how it differed from the other work by Pablo Neruda that I knew. Although I did not read much poetry in high school, I did read many poems from Pablo Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets. When Neruda writes to his wife Matilde, he writes of the items that inhabited their lives and that created her. He wrote of her hair, her breasts, her hands, and through those we come to see her as Neruda did.

I grew angry that Neruda could write the abstractly in “Tonight I Can Write…” but I could not in my works.

Beware of Falling Insults

For Dr. K–’s class, we had to keep a public journal of our thoughts and reflections on our class readings. Periodically he reviewed our journals and used them to lead class discussions. Although not assigned reading, I included what I wrote on “Tonight I Can Write…” in my journal.

From a well of raw feelings and disappointment, I wrote. And wrote. A diatribe, much of invective against the professor. Dr. K– was smart enough to ask us to write our journals on computers so that if we had reactions that we wanted to keep private, we could easily copy those to a different file. But I was not discerning enough at that time to leave what I wrote about “Tonight I Can Write…” in a private file. Nor did I have the discretion at that time to keep the discussion private.

After this Dr. K– took me aside and made me aware just what I had done.

Professors are just people, men and women, with their own opinions. And they are no more immune to being hurt by criticism than undergraduates are themselves.

“Striking out is short, but forgetting is so long…”

Sometimes the best lessons are the most painful to learn. Dr. K–, if you are reading this, let me thank you now for what I could not thank you for then.

I learned that I had not yet overcome acting childishly. Since that incident, I have striven to never let anything like it happen again.

And, if I am honest, there is plenty that I failed to learn. When I brought my poetry to Dr. K–, I wanted guidance. He gave me his opinion. Rather than listen to his opinion for what it was, I felt as if a sentence had been handed down. Then, I struck out. Now, I would have asked questions to seek more specific instruction. Now, In turning to other professors and other writer friends, I would seek models whose writing had the qualities I was seeking for my own work.

Buy the Works Discussed in this Essay from Amazon.com

• Love: Ten Poems by Pablo Neruda
• 100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor (Bilingual Edition) by Pablo Neruda (Stephen Tapscott, trans.)

You May Also Like

• Patrons & Saints
• On Dying Young
• The Songs of Solitude of Rainer Maria Rilke

To one of my saints, my dear friend, Emily Baum, with the deepest appreciation.

In This Essay

On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (C.D.N. Costa, trans.)

Late Bloomers by Malcolm Gladwell, The Annals of Culture, The New Yorker

On Dying Young by Matthew Koslowski, Literature&Literacy

William Stafford, Poet, Wikipedia

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell, trans.)

Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose by Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell, ed. and trans.)

The Second Four Books of Poems by W.S. Merwin

“Is there anything I can do to cheer you up?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say. “Just show me a writer — a poet, preferably — who did not a pickup a pen before he was 27 or 30, who amounted to anything, who history remembers.”

These conversations are common.

I expect the normal, well-intentioned platitudes. Often I begin to despair because I have not dedicated myself to my writing. I begin to think that my time is up. “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it,” Seneca whispers. “Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.” And I begin to think about how I have not invested my time well.

Rilke writes, “…if, as I have said, one feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn’t write at all.” Haven’t I been living without writing? I have not worked on my novel in weeks. Or have I been existing and drifting? Do I really feel that I could live without writing?

“William Stafford,” she says.

“Rivers of Ink, All on Good Poems”

I had never heard of William Stafford before she mentioned him. So, I did what any self-respecting twenty-something with an Internet connection would do: I turned to Wikipedia to get a quick overview of the man’s life.

Born in 1914, his first work a prose memoir was published in 1948 called Down in My Heart, when he was 34 years old, and his first major collection of poems in 1962, when he was 48 years old. Eight years after publishing his first collection he was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

That last honor is better known today as Poet Laureate.

And I began to think about the dualities in Rilke. He writes in his Letters to the Young Poet that one should not write unless one cannot do otherwise. Yet, in a prose excerpt that Stephen Mitchell includes under the title “[For the Sake of a Single Poem]” in Ahead of All Parting, Rilke writes:

Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) — they are experiences. … For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves — only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
–Rainer Maria Rilke from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge quoted in Ahead of All Parting, page 250.

Am I wasting my investment? Or am I burying the seeds deep within the soil of my being so that at the end of summer I will find that I have a rich harvest?

Though his first poems were published when he was 48 years old, he “composed nearly 22,000 poems, of which roughly 3,000 were published.”

Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity?

This question is the subtitle of Malcolm Gladwell’s article, “Late Bloomers.”

It is a great question. When did our obsession with precocity start? Is it a simple function of our culture’s obsession with youth? An alluring thought but it is not so simple. I know yoke linking genius and youth is older. Beethoven’s father claimed that Beethoven was younger than he was so that Beethoven’s genius would be viewed as to the genius of Mozart.

John Keats died at 25 years old, leaving behind some of the most perfect poems written in English. I have written before about my own feelings of inadequacy when I think of measuring myself against Keats. But who wouldn’t feel that same inadequacy? Keats himself died thinking he was a failure.

John Keats may have been twice blessed. In addition to his talent, he had what many of the late bloomers had. A patron.

Patrons & Saints

Gladwell points out that for many artists and writers, there is a long period of experimentation and development before their fully ripened power emerges. If it were not of patronage of friends and family, Paul Cezanne may never have risen to greatness.

Keats is not the only of my favorite poets whose poetry flourished because of patronage.

Two others jump immediately to mind. Petrarch had a career in the church that had no real duties, allowing him to write while collecting a small salary. Rilke had numerous patrons who believed in his talents enough to give him lodging and food, and sometimes money, that he could write and develop his mind.

In the end, our fascination with youth and poetic inspiration may be a puff of smoke. University of Chicago economist David Galenson, interested in both poetry and painting, decided to look at the major modern poets and their major anthologized works and evaluate the idea of poetic inspiration as a young man’s game. While some poets’ early works were anthologized he found others whose later works were honored:

Forty-two per cent of [Robert] Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For [William Carlos] Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For [Wallace] Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.
– Malcolm Gladwell from “Late Bloomers”

In addition, Malcolm Gladwell points out that Mark Twain was 49 when he published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe at 58.

Perhaps great art only comes when patrons are there to support artists and writers. When I was in college, one of my dearest friends, Peter, would say to me in his thick German accent, “Matthew, I wish I was rich. If I was rich, I would pay your expenses so you can write. You need to write, Matthew, and you need to publish. I will start a publishing house just to make sure your work gets out there.”

Hope

After reading about William Stafford and reading “Late Bloomers,” I think for a little while. She asks what I think of the article. But I cannot address it directly. Instead, I share with her this poem.

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with is color.
– W.S. Merwin

When I first read “Separation” by W.S. Merwin, it came as a revelation. “Separation” is a perfect poem. With economy and dazzling imagery, W.S. Merwin captured an experience, shared it, and forever changed the way I think about loss.

We talk a little bit more. I build up my courage. I ask her if she would like to read one of my works. She says nothing would make her happier.

When you set my heart
ablaze, how did I not know
you would taste of smoke?
– Matthew Koslowski

She smiles. “I like yours better.”

As I have written before, I aspire to be a novelist.

But that desire to be a novelist does not come without a number of uncertainties and fears. Looking at the papers, it is not difficult to come across an article bemoaning the state of the publishing business or another article bemoaning the state of the American reader. Stories circulate within writers communities about the difficulties of finding first an agent and then a publisher. The story is so well known that it even appeared in the movie Sideways as the special lot of writers.

I know that many writers also share this fear. You need only look at the table of contents of any writers’ magazine to find an article addressing some one of these fears, and many other fears. And for further evidence you can go over to the writing instruction section of your bookstore.

But if you’re at all like me in mind, you’ll be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of paper on those shelves.

Another fear strikes me. I fear, for no reason I’ve ever been able to figure out, that I will die young. That my legacy will be cut short before I have delved deeply into my mind and found all the stories that are locked in there.

Only I can tell these stories. Even if I cover story arcs that have been covered before — there are numerous versions of the Don Juan legend, for example; and Shakespeare refashioned existing stories into pieces so distinctly his own that we have quite forgotten their progenitors — only I can tell the stories through my own vision.

One of my favorite poets did die young. John Keats was only twenty-five when he died. And he had accomplished more by that time than I have who has outlived in by two years. With him died his poetic vision, a vision that teaches us

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness. …
-From Endymion, lines 1 through 3

and whose vision birthed “Ode to a Nightingale”.

Yet, he died believing himself a failure. He thought he would be quite forgotten and asked that his tombstone be emblazoned with

Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.

His friend honored his wish. In fact, Keats’s tombstone does not contain his name at all, just calls him a “Young English Poet.”

But even Keats himself was afraid of dying young. Engaging with his own fears, Keats wrote a poem that every writer should keep framed on his or her desk. Any writer should read this poem before reaching for pen and paper, or keyboard.

When I have fears that I may cease to be
  Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,
  Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain:
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
  Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance
And think that I may never live to trace
  Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
  That I may never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
  Of unreflecting love;–then on the shore
Of a wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
–John Keats

In the film Bright Star, which introduced me to this poem, John Keats gets distracted by Fanny Brawne’s beauty and forgets the poem half way through.

I looked it up when I got home from the film. I wish that I could thank the screenwriter and the director directly. In reading this poem, I found a new strategy for addressing my own fears. Rather than focus on the fame and recognition I hope to receive as a novelist, focus rather on the characters and the symbols.

So let me stand alone to think, until to nothingness do both love and fame sink.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies?
–Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Elegy” from The Duino Elegies (Stephen Mitchell, trans.)

Saturday evening I felt overwhelmed.

My problems are not major. I have a roof over my head, food to eat, friends to pass time with, and a job. Though, in this economy, who can be sure of their job security? If this recession has done one thing, I hope that is has realigned people’s values to those things that truly matter. But my problems still distract me.

The Devil on my shoulder asks, “What have you got to complain about?” I start belittling myself and try to bury my problems. But some part of me remembers this piece of simple wisdom:

In the bottom of your shoe, even a small pebble is bigger than the whole world.

I looked through my address book for someone to call. The Devil kept whispering that I didn’t want to burden my friends with my problems, that they have real problems and that I was being whiny.

As I scrolled through my phone, each name with its own story, I thought about who I could turn to and who I could not; who were truly my friends and who were merely acquaintances.

My best friend Jenna has heard these problems all before. Although she’d have happily listened again, I wanted to turn to other friends. Besides, I had spent the afternoon with her.

I had already called another of my dearest friends, Tanya, earlier.

Other names and other stories. More memories of time spent.

Rather than calling friends, I decided instead to spend most of the night cleaning the clutter in my room. I broke down some of the towers of books I had built up. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats formed the base of one tower. I remembered a poem in the volume that, although sad, I find great comfort in. In remembering the poem, I decided to turn to myself and to my books.

The Sad Shepherd

There was a man whom Sorrow named his friend,
And he, of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming,
Went walking with slow steps along the gleaming
And humming sands, where windy surges wend:
And he called loudly to the stars to bend
From their pale thrones and comfort him, but they
Among themselves laugh on and sing alway:
And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend
Cried out, Dim sea, hear my most piteous story!
The sea swept on and cried her old cry still,
Rolling along in dreams from hill to hill.
He fled the persecution of her glory
And, in a far-off, gentle valley stopping,
Cried all his story to the dewdrops glistening.
But naught they heard, for they are always listening,
The dewdrops, for the sound of their own dropping.
And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend
Sought once again the shore, and found a shell,
And thought, I will my heavy story tell
Till my own words, re-echoing, shall send
Their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart;
And my own tale again for me shall sing,
And my own whispering words be comforting,
And lo! my ancient burden may depart.
Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim;
But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone
Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan
Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.
–William Butler Yeats

And, in reading “The Sad Shepherd”, I remember that the Devil was once an angel. Now, if only he would help me transform my sorrows into a poem such as Yeats’s.

The Weekly Reviews are a lot of fun to write. I enjoy scouring the web for interesting articles and blog posts. But, all the same, the project had begun to become a unmanageable. There are so many websites and blogs to check out everyday. I had been afraid that I was going to miss something.

What I repeatedly missed was my own deadline. You may have noticed that the past two weeks I had postponed my Weekly Review until Saturday.

I have been working hard but I haven’t been working very smart. Then I remembered a quote from one of my favorite writers:

Novels are written in the same way that farms are made productive, or houses are kept clean, or baseball penant races are won: with steady work each day.
–Andre Dubus

Substitute “Weekly Reviews” for “Novels” and you get the same concept. Rather than gathering up work throughout the week and then trying to throw something together slapdash on Thursday night, starting this week I will be working on the Weekly Review throughout the week.

Thursday afternoon I spent some time setting up a feed reader through Google. Though I’m not quite sure how I feel about it yet — unlike Gmail, the posts disappear after you’ve read them unless you ask them to stay — but I am glad to consolidate many of my different websites into one place.

In addition to that, I’ve also setup Literature&Literacy on Feedburner.com. You can now subscribe to Literature&Literacy through an RSS Reader or through email.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Fixing Education
• Fighting What You Believe
• Failings
• The Humbling of Philip Roth

Fixing Education

• Teach Your Teachers Well by Susan Engel, Op-Ed, The New York Times via nytimes.com
• Grade the Teachers by Michael Jonas, The Sunday Boston Globe via boston.com
• Teacher Training Termed Mediocre by Jennifer Medina, The New York Times via nytimes.com
• How to Improve American Education by Charles Wheelan, Ph.D., The Naked Economist, Yahoo! Finance
• Subversive Elevator Music by John Spencer, Musing of a Not-So-Master Teacher
• Former NBA Coach Switches Gears At Charter School by Mike Pesca, All Things Considered, NPR via npr.org

There has been a lot about this since Arne Duncan came out and said that he wants to improve teacher training programs. Newly minted teachers come out of these programs and feel overwhelmed by having to manage a classroom.

Most actual training for particular jobs happens on the job. I have read that it takes a year to just begin to feel comfortable at your job. When I first began my job at the bank, I remember feeling overwhelmed. I know that many of my other friends felt the same.

It is quite easy to take potshots at educators:

• They work in a rarefied realm where they are not held accountable for their results.
• They don’t work very hard because they cannot be fired.
• They work only half a year! Every time you turn around they have another vacation! They get summers off!

People pay lip service to the idea that educators play a vital role in our nation. But I do not believe they actually believe that. Teachers are paid very poorly for the work that they do, especially as class sizes grow and resources are reduced. If people truly believed that teachers and educators were vital to our economy, they would pay teachers more.

There is no end to commentators and news writers who are willing to offer advice on how to improve our education system. Everyone has an opinion on this matter.

One idea that is being passed around is the idea of merit pay for teachers. I believe in what Alfie Kohn writes in Punished By Rewards that you can get diminishing results when you attempt to tie rewards to performance. And there are economists and business theorists who believe that as well. I remember seeing articles arguing that Golden Parachutes are necessary because CEOs who are not allowed to pursue ideas that may fail will not innovate and will not advance the economy.

I also fear that you will get unethical behavior. I have met salesmen and saleswomen who will do whatever they can to get a sale, tell customers whatever they want to hear. Do we want teachers and principals who are fighting to get rewards rather than educate our children?

We need to go back to basics. We need to have a national conversation about the why of school, its purpose.

If we decide public education is vital to the lives of our children and our success as a nation, we need to align our teachers paychecks with that belief. People choose careers in college based in part on what they expect to get paid after leaving school. There are some people who want to be teachers and would be excellent educators, but instead become engineers or computer scientists for fear that they will be unable to support their future families on a teacher’s salary.

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Fighting What You Believe

• Knocking Out the Beliefs That Hold You Back by April Dykman, Get Rich Slowly

Get Rich Slowly was one of the very first blogs that I started reading. Practical, down to earth financial advice for people who understand that there is more to life than earning money.

Much like Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Get Rich Slowly has a broad definition of rich. Rather than limiting richness to wealth, these blogs talk about living a rich life.

Granted they take it as a starting point that you cannot live richly if you are living in debt with no financial plans.

April Dykman is a new staff writer at Get Rich Slowly. And she never thought she would be able to make a living as a freelance writer. She had had this belief before she entered college. One of her professors reinforced that belief.

And for years she clung to that belief.

That belief became part of her personal narrative. Each of us keeps this personal narrative of who we are and what we can and cannot do. Many of these beliefs are locked away in our minds, invisible chains that restrict our realities.

Read through April’s article and ask yourself, what narratives are you carrying with you that are holding you back?

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Failings

• Analysis: College students need lessons in failure by Justin Pope, Associated Press via boston.com
• What If We’re Afraid of the Wrong Things? by John Spencer, Musings of a Not-So-Master Teacher

I found a fortune cookie fortune in the pocket of a pair of trousers the other day as I was cleaning:

The two hardest things to handle in life are failure and success.

And then I saw this article through boston.com. I think that it is timely, especially with all the talk of fixing education swirling around. But I also thought this so important that it deserved its own discussion.

I fear that my generation has been too mollycoddled. We grew up during the age of self-esteem and the idea that hurt feelings were too much to bear. Self-esteem means nothing. Self-respect means everything and the only way to gain self-respect is to earn it.

Throughout my life I have been told that I am a gifted mind, that I can do whatever I set my mind to, and a lot of other things that I believe are platitudes. These were fed to me to encourage me. I don’t know whether they served their purpose.

When I was in college, I shared some of my poems with a professor I admired. He thought my works were utter drivel and told me so. Afterward I discussed the conversation with my adviser, thinking he would keep the conversation to himself, and let vent to my feelings.

I had been hurt and because I was not used to being told that I couldn’t do something. I gave up. My adviser tried to encourage me to think of this time as an apprenticeship.

But I had never been given the tools to handle failure.

So rather than think of this failure as a temporary setback, as an assessment of where I was on that day, I became a failed poet. There is a world of difference between being a beginner with a handful of failed poems and being a failed poet.

And perhaps if I had had experiences with failing prior to that, I would have been able to see the difference. Perhaps I could have picked myself up and begun to work again.

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The Humbling of Philip Roth

• Darkness visible by Richard Eder, The Boston Globe via boston.com
• Roth on Roth by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal via online.wsj.com

As with John Irving, I am not familiar with the work of Philip Roth. And, again as with John Irving, after reading these two book reviews though I want to read Philip Roth as well.

The Humbling follows a down and out actor. The theme is the end of inspiration and the end of creativity. I don’t know Richard Eder’s taste in books but I can tell that The Humbling is not his cup of tea.

A great actor is suddenly unable to act; the misery and the humiliations to which this leads bring him to the verge of suicide. It is not the business of a review to be telling what happens. It is telling, though, that the reader rather wants him to go ahead with it.
–Richard Eder on The Humbling

Yet even that dismissive review entices me on. Philip Roth is considered one of our times’ greatest writers. I want to read the book for myself and see if I can detect Roth trying to convey the struggles of creativity after a life time.

In This Essay

Steppenwolf: A Novel by Hermann Hesse (Basil Creighton, trans.)

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (Richard J. Finneran, ed.)

Don Juan in Hell: From Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw

Last night I finished rereading Steppenwolf. I had put it down for a while and flitted among the arts.

I know for certain I am in the middle of two other novels. But I think I may have forgotten that I am in the middle of any number of others.

The past few weeks have been filled with theatre and opera.

As if that were not enough, I have been reading from the poetry of Rumi, W.B. Yeats, and John Keats. In fact, I have been working on memorizing Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” I have the first stanza of ten lines memorized; only seventy lines left to commit to memory.

“Why are you spreading yourself so thin?” I asked myself earlier.

Castles Built in the Air

I looked at the stacks of books piled up around my room. Looking at my room, I could not stop thinking of the descriptions of Harry Haller’s room nor the scenes of Will Hunting’s room. I have towers and towers of precariously balanced books; so many that I spend much of my time at work worrying if my cats have knocked them over.

These towers of covers, these garrets of paper, these gates hinged with glue enclose a beautiful courtyard of thoughts and ideas.

But they are also doorways to the Magic Theater.

The Magic Theater: For Madmen Only

What is the Magic Theater?

This little theater of mine has as many doors into as many boxes as you please, ten or a hundred or a thousand, and behind each door exactly what you seek awaits you. It is a pretty cabinet of pictures, my dear friend; but it would be quite useless for you to go through it as you are. You would be checked and blinded at every turn by what you are pleased to call your personality. You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality.
–Pablo to Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, page 176.

Who has not had the desire to lay his personality, her self, aside for a few hours? Each of us, I believe, gets tired of the little dramas and games that occur in our day to day lives. We seek out the adventure and the relief of being someone else.

And this is why I am myself enmeshed in so many different books right now. I enjoy the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s characters who are both interior and self-aware while being bundles of chaos, drives, and impulses. But equally I enjoy the the relaxed stateliness of Jane Austen’s austere character dramas. I see myself as much in the personal poetry of John Keats as I do in the more affected poetry of W.B. Yeats.

The times that I most enjoy a book are those times when I can lose myself in a book. That is what Pablo is asking Harry to do on entering the Magic Theater. That is what so many of us do when we sit down with a book or in front of a television screen, when we enter a theater or a cinema.

Many great thinkers since the time of Socrates, if not before, have had their own variation on this theme. Socrates asks us why we run when what we run from is ourselves, the very thing we cannot escape through running. Seneca writes the same.

And Laughing Break the Mirror Sweet

And looking in the mirror, I asked myself again, “Why are you spreading yourself so thin?” And laughing, I realize it is because I want to escape for a little while from myself that I have spread myself so thin.

The mirror breaks.

And the image of myself dissolves. In my pocket I find a number of figures, each of them my self — each at least a sliver of self — that I can assemble into a number of different constellations. Some grow big, take on aspects that I do not recognize, while others recede, shrink away until they have almost disappeared.

I observe all this happening to me just as it happened to Harry.

The Wolf and the Scholar

As I was reading through Harry’s adventures in the Magic Theater, especially when he enters the box “All Girls Are Yours”, I found myself thinking of one of my favorite poems by W.B. Yeats.

The Scholars

Bald heads, forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

–W.B. Yeats

Early in the novel Harry became disillusioned at seeing someone else’s painting or bust of Goethe, thinking his own image of Goethe — because it was in his mind and not vulgarly committed to clay or canvas — was any less a graven image. He believed he inhabited a more rarefied air than his contemporaries until he began to find the sweetness of popular entertainments.

Throughout the book, Harry Haller realizes that he has made quite a hash of his own life by creating these false dichotomies between the high arts and the low arts. Within his soul, Harry under Hermine’s tutelage found that he could find as much enlightenment in dancing a foxtrot as he could in listening to Mozart.

The Great Divide

I do not wonder, though, that he makes the dichotomies that he does, however. This idea of the gulf is pervasive. Shaw speaks to it in Don Juan in Hell. The Devil says:

The gulf is the difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament. What more impassable gulf could you have? Think of what you have seen on earth. There is no physical gulf between the philosopher’s class room and the bull ring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room for all that.
– The Devil in George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, page 15.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which Harry hints at throughout the novel but does not cite by name until the end of his time in the Magic Theater, and much of Goethe’s poetry is in praise of life’s pleasures. Perhaps Harry took Don Giovanni’s punishment too much to heart. That Harry takes things outside of the Magic Theater too seriously and that he cannot become enlightened because he has no sense of humor are major themes of Steppenwolf.

Entering the Magic Theater, Harry begins to take things less seriously. Through the illusions and entertainments of the Magic Theater, he begins to learn. At the critical moment, though, he lapses into his past thoughts and forgets the good humor he has learned.

And so it is with us, is it not? We close a book or leave a movie, in good cheer, in good humor, thinking we have learned to be better people — more loving, more generous, and more good-humored — and then our old selves come crashing down on us.

Is there no hope, then? Harry will tell us:

I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being.

One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.

–Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, page 218.

Each week, whenever I’m reading The Boston Globe, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal — almost exclusively online these days — I try to take note of interesting articles to share here.

And each week, I find there is both too much and too little to share.

I feel like my ability to filter which stories will be interesting and which won’t be is not getting any better as the weeks progress. I hope, though, that you are enjoying the pieces that I do choose to share.

And, further, I hope that if you find anything interesting that I missed you’ll share it with me in the comments below.

These Things Caught My Eye

• The Sparrow Takes Flight
• Happy 50th Birthday, Guggenheim!
• The Danger of a Single Story
• Is This the Bar to Raise in Public Education?
• Snow on Rilke
• The Speed of Thought: Forming Words
• Et Tu, Brute?

The Sparrow Takes Flight

October 22nd, 2009 through November 8th, 2009

• The Sparrow at Stoneham Theatre, Stoneham, MA.

A girl returns home after ten years. As she reintegrates into the school, her telekinetic powers appear. Why did she leave? And what does it mean to the community that she has returned?

I saw the opening performance of this play. The staging was excellent. In one scene, when a woman is hanging from the rafters, to show the difference, the actors who were on the ground laid down on the stage.

Pictures played a large role. When the town is gossiping, the actors would gather holding pictures of houses and talk and dance while holding the photographs.

Dance also played a big role in the performance. Emily, the girl with the telekinetic powers, takes flight one night and the actress does a lovely ballet-like dance to express Emily’s joy at being in the air.

If you’re in Massachusetts, do yourself a favor and go see The Sparrow.

Happy 50th Birthday, Guggenheim!

• The 50th Anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum, The Guggenheim Museum Website
• Happy 50th Birthday, Guggenheim!: A Life Magazine Online Gallery
• Brilliance – and wrenching struggles: Guggenheim show captures Kandinsky’s tragic arc by Sebastian Smee, The Boston Globe
• Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky (M.T.H. Sadler, trans.)

Apparently the 50th Anniversary celebrations started in May of this year. I just saw it on Digg on Wednesday night.

As a Bostonian, I have very specific dislike of New York. Well more specifically, a very specific dislike of a very specific baseball team. I have never been to the Guggenheim. This is perhaps something I should soon remedy.

Especially with a retrospective of Wassily Kandinsky’s work. Kandinsky wrote an amazing book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art that I read in college. I’ve been meaning to reread it and with this exhibition, I’m not sure I will find a better time.

The retrospective is setup along the spiraling ramp that most people are familiar with when they think of the Guggenheim. The paintings were hung in chronological order through the various periods of Kandinsky’s life.

The review by Sebastian Smee makes an interesting point that I would like to see. At one point, Kandinsky’s spiritual style seems to die. Around the time he joined the Bauhaus, the spiritual paintings that sought to paint symphonies and feelings, turn into angular graphic design projects. And you see that change as you walk up the ramp.

What happened to him to provoke that change?

The Danger of a Single Story

• The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Adichie, TED Lectures.

I had never heard of Chimamanda Adichie until Wednesday night. I was on TED exploring and her talk was featured on the front page. And I’m glad that it was. I was so moved by it that I embedded it right into this post.

This past summer I met Sandi, a poet, at a writers’ conference. When I first asked her where she was from, she was a little dodgy in answering the question. She explained that if she tells people she was born in Africa they bring all this baggage and all these expectations. By being dodgy about where she was from, she freed me from having those expectations.

Though, I do try to enter situations with as little in the way as possible of preconceived notions. Each of us develops heuristics, mental bridges that allow us to travel quickly without having to go deep into the valley of the unknown, that allow us to assess a situation quickly. We are able to say to ourselves, “OK. I know this, I am familiar with this. Let’s go.”

But in some situations ignorance is power. When using heuristics, we can fall victim to the fallacy of familiarity. One thing that I have found incredibly liberating in my own life is having the strength to say to someone, “You know what, I don’t know the answer. But I am sure I can find it out.” I would rather admit my ignorance than demonstrate it.

Is This the Bar to Raise in Public Education?

• Mass. Panel Calls For Increasing Mandatory School Age by Monica Brady-Myerov, WBUR.
• Law urged to make teens stay in school by James Vaznis, The Boston Globe
• Study Finds High Rate of Imprisonment Among Dropouts by Sam Dillon, The New York Times
• Project Dropout

Tuesday night and Wednesday morning I was thinking about my blog and expanding it to be more useful. I am thinking of adding of Resources Page that will include links to interesting sites and I thought immediately of Project Dropout a joint production of WGBH, Boston’s PBS station, and WBUR, Boston’s NPR station.

Project Dropout was an interesting investigation of the dropout problem in Massachusetts. They spoke not only with administrators and policy wonks, but found actual dropouts and discussed the choices they had made.

Anyone considering dropping out should listen to and read through Project Dropout. Give weight to the reports.

On my drive into work on Wednesday, I heard a segment on WBUR by Monica Brady-Myerov, one of the principal reporters from Project Dropout. She was reporting on a new proposed law that would raise the dropout age in Massachusetts from 16 to 18.

I am not sure how effective this law will be unless a structure is built around it. And I am glad that I am not the only one who is thinking along these lines.

My gut instinct tells me keeping students in school until age 18 is the right way to go if we can address underlying reasons that cause them to drop out and create programs that address their need. – State Representative Martha M. Walz (D-Boston), quoted in “Law urged to make teens stay in school” by James Vaznis, The Boston Globe

I would like to thank Representative Walz. Without addressing the underlying reasons that causing students to dropout, the problem will persist even if the dropout age is raised. If kids do continue to be physically present in the classroom, they could already have dropped out mentally and intellectually, the education equivalent to the living suicides Herman Hesse talks about in Steppenwolf.

The full proposal, which I would like to read if I can a link to it somewhere, recommends that caseworkers be brought into the school to discuss options with children considering dropping out and re-engagement centers to address the concerns of people who have already dropped out.

What I don’t hear is people clamoring for more teachers and smaller class sizes. If a teacher has to address 40 students per class and has five classes per day, that is 200 students each day that filter through the door. If we are going to have to hire people at all for this proposal, no offense to the caseworkers, but I would rather see that money go to hire more teachers.

Snow on Rilke

• Reintroducing Rilke by Moira G. Weigel, The Wall Street Journal
• The Poetry of Rilke: Bilingual Edition by Rainer Maria Rilke (Edward Snow, trans. and ed.)

Although the review was published on my birthday, I did not see this review until this past week.

If I have not said this before, I am amazed at the arts and lifestyle coverage I have discovered in The Wall Street Journal. If I have written it before, my incredulity has only grown.

I am a passionate devotee of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.

While I can tell you, for example, that I discovered Elena Ferrante by walking past a row of her books in Barnes&Noble one day and found the cover of The Days of Abandonment intriguing or that I discovered Andre Gide because I was assigned to read The Immoralist in my Modern and Postmodern Philosophy course, I cannot tell you how I came to first discover Rainer Maria Rilke.

If I dig back in my memory, I have faint memories of reading that August Rodin had a poet for a secretary, that August Rodin’s emphasis on Things came to poetry through Rilke. Perhaps I have more to thank my art history professor for than I first realized. Though it is equally possible that I remember those references because I was already reading Rilke when I read those biographical details.

Most of the Rilke I have read has been translated by Stephen Mitchell, but I have read translations from Edward Snow. I have never sat down and compared the two translators.

This book is going to be another survey of his work, poems chosen from his different works but not a translation of his complete works. Which disappoints me: I want to read every poem that Rilke published. “Farrar, Straus and Giroux is publishing what it hopes will become the definitive English-language edition of Rilke’s poetry,” writes Weigel in her review. Her statement here is too broad in light of the limited scope of the collection. How can any survey hope to be the definitive edition?

Certainly I could accept that Snow is aiming for the definitive introduction.

The day after reading this review, I wandered, accidentally, through the poetry section of my local Barnes&Noble. And sitting on the shelf there were four books that called out to me. One I have forgotten already; one was Snow’s new Rilke; one was a collection of lectures that Robert Frost gave; and the last was The Shadow of Sirius a new collection from another favorite poet W.S. Merwin.

More things for me to spend my hard earned money on, gentle readers. There never seems to be an end to new books I wish to read. I cannot even speak to the physicality of the book because I know if I had picked it up I would have been unable to have put it down.

The Speed of Thought: Forming Words

• In Milliseconds, Brain Zips From Thought To Speech by Jon Hamilton, NPR
• Smart People Really Do Think Faster by Jon Hamilton, NPR

Of the two links, I heard the first segment, “In Milliseconds, Brain Zips from Thought to Speech” on the radio on the 18th. But the second link, which I almost find more interesting, I found as a related link at the bottom of the first article on NPR.org.

One area of neuroscience I find particularly interesting is the study of neuroplasticity. The brain continues throughout our lives to change and evolve, to grow new neurons and rewire itself. That is what enables us to continue learning throughout our lifetimes.

This is an exciting time for neuroscience. We are still figuring out what areas of the brain due what. Even as recently as ten or fifteen years ago the idea of neuroplasticity was dismissed, saying that we were born with a finite set of neurons and that was all we ever had.

Beyond just building connections and deepening connections, we can also increase our raw ability to think. We can speed up our brains processing power and we can do it throughout our lives. One researcher, Dr. Richard Haier “says thinking is like running or weightlifting. It helps to have certain genes. But anyone can get stronger or faster by working out.”

Maybe there is something to playing Brain Age after all.

Et Tu, Brute?

• 10 Latin Phrases You Pretend To Understand by Kevin Fleming, Mental_Floss

Caveat lector! Another fun article I found through Digg. Ten common Latin phrases. How many do you know, or think you know, before reading the little blurb under each?