You will never write anything that is of even remotely the same caliber as what Shakespeare or Austen or Dickens wrote. You just are not that good.
Is that an insult?
I also will never write even a single paragraph which could bear comparison to anything in Shakespeare. Is your instinct to tell me I shouldn’t think that about myself?
One of the strange byproducts of all of us being raised and told we can be whatever we want to be is that we get a warped idea of greatness. Pick a random kid you know and ask yourself, is it really true that if for this kid to be greater than Shakespeare, all that is necessary is the desire to be so? It is true that the kid could be a writer; but is it also then true that the kid could become a great writer, a writer of prose so divine that it makes you weep with joy to read it?
Enter Plato’s Ion. The dialogue (rather short) is between Socrates (surprise!) and Ion, a professional rhapsode. Now that is a career which has died out. A rhapsode was a person in ancient Greece who recited the Greats, particularly Homer. (By the way, when we tell kids they can be whatever they want, does that mean they can become professional rhapsodes? Can you make a career doing dramatic recitations of Homer?)
Ion is, at least in his own telling, the greatest interpreter of Homer alive, delivering prize-winning recitations of The Odyssey and The Iliad. People laugh at the funny parts and weep at the sad parts and Ion merrily collects his payment. The question which puzzles Ion is why he is so amazing when it comes to Homer, but bored to death whenever anyone is discussing, say, Hesiod. Why doesn’t the ability to deliver the best possible interpretation of Homer translate into the ability to do the same thing with Hesiod?
Socrates explains:
The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration. For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. (Jowett translation)
The image there is perfect. Homer composed his immortal works not through the art of crafting great tales but because he was inspired from on high by the Muses. You can’t teach someone to write something as great as The Odyssey; such a work comes to the poet from the outside, from the gods or God. Then along comes Ion. Ion also cannot be taught to do what he does so very well. Instead, like a link in a chain, he attaches himself to Homer and the magnetic power emanating from the Muses, flows through Homer into Ion and Ion exhibits the magnificence of the Divine Inspiration. Homer is merely an interpreter of the divine muse. Ion is an interpreter of the interpreter. And, we, lower links on the chain are attracted to the divine message through the magnetic force flowing through Homer to Ion to Socrates to Plato to us.
You will never be as great as Homer. But you could be as great as Ion. Is that an insult?
Imagine for a moment an educational system which worked like that. Instead of a rhetoric of trying to turn every kid into a miniature Homer or Shakespeare or Newton, we instead say “None of you are that good. But you can be an excellent link in a chain passing along the excitement of a Homer or Shakespeare or Newton.”
The first objection is surely that we may be crushing the next Shakespeare. But, can the next Shakespeare be crushed that way? If Genius comes from a communication with the Divine Muses, then the idea that the educational system can either create or destroy Genius is pure hubris. No matter how well I teach, I cannot create the next Eliot, nor would my failures stop Eliot from becoming Eliot.
Instead of telling every student they can be great and that the options in life are greatness or failure, why not say this: “You should aspire to be great and you should know you will fail. But, you can become a link in the chain of greatness; by considering what makes Shakespeare a greater writer than you, you can learn to pass along the Divine Joy of Shakespeare to others.” Ion is a great rhapsode not because he composed verses equivalent to those of Homer, but because he did not do that. Instead, he discovered the inspiration flowing through Homer and passed that along to others. To do this, he had to immerse himself in Homer and because he did that, others were able to see through him the Beauty from on high which an inspired Homer passed along in verse.
We have lost this idea that being a part of a chain is a High Calling. We tell students to be great and when the fail, they become the equivalent of middle management, soulless drones moving paper around. Ask yourself this: who is the divinely inspired artist that everyone who meets you learns to see the amazing insights that artist provided? Jane Austen needs her own Ions, and truth be told, Austen’s Ions are everywhere and you cannot meet one without thinking you really should go reread Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. But where are the Ions for Plato? Dickens? Newton? Euclid? Locke? Augustine? Dante?
Imagine a world in which everyone you knew was taught in school to find a link in a chain attached to a Divine Muse, to find one of the many Greatest of the Greats, and then to attach to that chain and pass along the magnetic force flowing through that artist. Imagine if we celebrated the idea of those who become the links in the chain, those who inspired us to learn just a bit more about plants or Virgil.
The world is an amazing place, full of beauty and insight. We settle all too often for an education which lacks all trace of that divine inspiration. Which is the better high school Physics class: The one in which a bored teacher marches through a boring textbook, but at least covers all the parts, or the one in which the teacher inspired by Galileo’s The Divine Messenger spends the whole year passing along the excitement of planetary movements, drawing students in by the sheer magnetism passing through Galileo to their teacher to them? The latter class covers far less material, but conveys the beauty of physics. The former class is the one taught in just about every school out there.
A year ago, I received an e-mail from a reader who is a teacher in high school who was having a difficult time getting his class of high school seniors to share his enthusiasm for The Brothers Karamazov. I had no solution at that time for the problem, but I think Ion points out why my imagination failed. I struggled with trying to figure out how to get high schoolers excited by Dostoevsky by imagining what would have happened if I had been assigned that book by my high school teachers. I would have hated it; they would have sucked the life out of the book.
But, now I realize the problem is not the book, but the whole way my high school classes were conducted. Now I imagine having this teacher who wrote me and who loves the book spending a semester doing nothing but sharing his love of the book. Every day is a fresh excitement as he reads out passages and captures the tension of the book. I imagine being asked to imagine what it would be like to have Alyosha or Ivan or Dmitri as a brother or to live in that monastery or to actually meet Father Ferapont. Imagine if every day in class was just swimming in that world with a teacher who was excited to show us the marvels. I think I would have loved this book in that high school class.
So is it possible that our attempts to cover everything in high school have crushed the ability to see the magnetism flowing from on high? What if the goal of school was to have every student find some link to the Muses and simply attach themselves to that link and let the magnetism flow through. What if instead of telling everyone that they can be the next Shakespeare or Newton, we just told them to find a Shakespeare or Newton and enjoy?
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