Methodical Madness = Prosaic Poetry?

    I like books.  I like to say that I like all kinds of books.  In a sense that is true.  To be honest, I mostly like fiction, more specifically adventure fiction.  I like Arthur Conan Doyle about as much as any author.  It’s fast paced, easy to read and it makes me feel like I’m learning.  The funny thing is, I never know whether I’m learning facts or not.  Historical fiction can be pretty confusing because you never really know which facts are made up and which are real.  Are there really giant white monster whales?  Were there really peg legged captains of whaling ships?  How many harpoons does it take to kill a real whale?  Anyway, I have a little more trouble with some different genres.  For example, I like poetry, when I understand it, but I rarely understand it… [complete syllogism here].  I also have difficulty with non-fiction in general.  There are definitely some exceptions, Paul Johnson and Malcolm Gladwell have an enthralling narrative writing style.  However, a lot of non-fiction seems to be intended for textbook style information downloads.  Although, some textbooks actually do a pretty good job of presenting information.  Anyway, as I was reading Paradise Lost this weekend and thinking primarily of the reading quiz, I had an epiphany.  I’ve been looking for the wrong things in the wrong places.  There are two things that we get out of reading: knowledge and enjoyment.  Pleasure in reading comes from two sources in my experience.  One is narrative that creates empathy or a connection with characters whether real or imaginary.  The second is simple appreciation of skill in wordsmithing.  We like Hamlet because we understand indecision and because his soliloquies and images are humorous and meaningful.

    The purpose of textbooks is almost entirely informational.  Of course it is nice when the information presented is interesting, or when we enjoy an authors style or wit, but there’s a reason why professors have to assign reading quizzes for textbooks.  Poetry is primarily intended for enjoyment.  After reading a thousand words under the title “The Raven,” you might expect to know something about the bird’s anatomy, migratory patterns, lifespan and nesting habits.  That is, unless you just finished Edgar Allen Poe’s famed poem, in which case, you would know that Raven’s are eerie black fowl.  You might even have the impression that they have the gift of speech.  The nice thing about fiction is that most authors are trying pretty hard to keep the interest of their readers and also throw in some tidbits about something that is interesting.  You can learn a lot from a Tom Clancy novel as you worry about Jack Ryan’s adventures.

    Everything I’ve said so far is pretty obvious I guess, but my epiphany was that I’m disappointed when I don’t enjoy textbooks and I miss the beauty of poetry when I try to catch a few facts for a reading quiz.  Maybe I read textbooks too slowly and poetry too quickly.  When I read a textbook, maybe I should try to take in the most important information, spend extra time looking at facts, tables and equations and skip over some of the text that may not contain critical information.  On the other hand when reading poetry, I need to overcome the urge to quickly skim over it in order to check it off the “I’ve read that one” list or pass a reading quiz.  Time to give Milton another shot.

Yes, it’s true.

    My first post started by explaining how this blog was a sort of alternative to facebook for me to keep up with all my friends whom I don’t see in person while I’m at college.  I thought it was only fitting to announce here that I now have a facebook account.  I know I’ve held out for a long time, but my reasons for changing my mind now are probably not what you expect.  There’s a rather long story behind it, but I think that I gave in for a good reason.  I have been wanting to tell you all this story for a while, but never felt like I had the time to do it properly.  Now, in order to justify my conversion to facebook presence, I will tell you the whole thing.

    It all started years ago when my dad would read stories to my brother and me before we went to bed at night.  He read a lot of different stories to us, but there were three that stand out in my memory and two that play a particular role in this story.  The first was The Chronicles of Narnia.  I think many of you know how much those stories inspired my enthusiasm and imagination.  There was a particular boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb whom I thoroughly disliked for a good portion of his first two books, but by his last battle, he felt like a good friend.  Shasta probably seized my affection more quickly, although I remember being disappointed to learn that his real name was as regal and simple as Cor. The other story was about something called a hobbit.  I remember specifically my dad’s particular affection for the round barefooted creatures with constant appetites.  Something about Bilbo made me feel like small, underestimated people could still do really cool stuff (I was not particularly tall until junior high). 

    I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy on my own several years later.  I’ll just say that it was one of the times in my life that I really understood how C.S. Lewis felt about the blue flower (Mere Christianity).  I remember a New Year’s Eve after a particularly tumultuous few months in 2007.  I had been reading the series gradually, and I was finally within fifty pages of finishing The Return of the King.  It was fairly close to midnight when I actually finished the book and Sam finished writing his narrative after so much had been lost, so much had been saved, and all was as it should be.

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    Fast forward one or two years.  I visited Andrew where he was in school at Wheaton College.  It was a long trip and I was tired from spending a night in the Atlanta airport.  One thing I was anxious to see was the Wade Center that I had heard about.  It was one of the first things Andrew told me about Wheaton after he had visited it.  And now I finally had the opportunity to see it.  For those of you who don’t know, C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe, which his grandfather built, that he played in with Warnie as a child in Belfast, and later moved to his home in the Kilns, is in the Wade Center.  The Wade Center also has C.S. Lewis’s desk, J.R.R. Tolkien’s desk, props from the Narnia movies, an original map of Narnia painted by Pauline Baynes and various items relating to other Wade Center authors.  And that’s just the museum.  There is also a reading room with various books, manuscripts, articles and letters written by and about the Wade authors.  If you’re curious about the survey/quiz from a few weeks ago, here are the answers.  The Wade Center authors are: Clive Staples Lewis, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Dorothy Leigh Sayers, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, George MacDonald, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams.  I could go into a lot more detail, but if you want details, you can ask me later and I’ll e-mail you or add another post.

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    Fast forward a few more years.  I was trying to choose a college.  I had applied to Wheaton, but I was leaning toward different schools.  I have to admit, one of my pregrets of choosing another school was that, if I went to Wheaton, I could go to the Wade Center all the time.  Long story short, I did end up choosing Wheaton.  After orientation there was a job fair on campus.  One of the booths was for the Wade Center.  I was thrilled at the thought of working there.  I think it was the next day that I received a call telling me to come in for training on Monday.  Now I can always tell people that my first real job position was archival assistant.

    Here’s a typical conversation when I tell someone on campus that I work at the Wade Center. 

Them: Really, I don’t usually see you there when I work out.”   

Me: Not the weight center, the Wade Center, where C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe is.

Them: Oh the Wade Center, I haven’t been there since connection.  I should come by sometime.  When do you work?

    (Connection is what Wheaton calls the weekend when prospective students visit)  Despite the fact that most Wheaton students have only been to the Wade Center once or twice, it is a Mecca of Lewis (and Tolkien, etc.) scholars.  Researchers from all over the world come to work on books and papers about the authors.  Again, I could talk for a long time about the Wade Center but technically this post is about why I got my facebook so I’ll fast forward again.

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    Laura, the archivist / reading room guru had been telling me about a Tolkien Society that might be starting at Wheaton.  She told me a bit about the constitution and some ideas for events and some of the technicalities of starting an official club on campus.  During a Tolkien Reading Day event at the Wade Center, there was a signup for info about starting a Tolkien Society.  Unfortunately, I missed that event because of my Glee Club concert, but Laura kept me posted anyway.  So I attended the first Tolkien Society meeting (last Friday I think).  During the meeting some great ideas were brought up.  But during the meeting, I realized that a large portion of group communication would be through facebook.  Those of you in HomeSTARs know that working around fb based communication has never been a problem for me, but then again, you also know that Miss Fitch is not particularly tech-savvy.  So to cut a long story short (or at least to cut out all the unnecessary details that I enjoy writing in blog posts like this) I was nominated and elected president/ringbearer of the brand new Wheaton College Tolkien Society.  It seemed that the time had finally come for me to get a facebook.

    I started writing this post before I actually got an account.  It has taken me over a week to actually finish it, but regardless, this is the story of how and why Daniel Flavin is now on facebook.  It is also the story of how I came to work at the Wade Center and why I enjoy it so much.  I still have a lot of excess thoughts on both topics, and maybe those will come later.  I would like to say that I haven’t changed any of my opinions on the benefits of face to face communication, or phone communication, or e-mail (I know, facebook messages are the same thing as e-mail).  There are good things about facebook, but I think that communication and forms of communication should be judged by the amount and quality of thought they include, the accuracy and clarity of the thoughts they convey and the extent to which they convey emotion along with thought.  I understand that most of these depend more on the person communicating than on the medium of communication.  However, I still think that facebook encourages laziness in communication.

    I also think that facebook encourages self-centricism, at least it does for me.  I’m not sure that my mini ego-boost every time I receive a friend request is healthy.  On the other hand, I don’t know if this blog is the best alternative in that sense.  I would be a bit embarrassed if you knew how often I check pageview data.  I also intended this to be more of a creative outlet than a series of life update essays.  I do plan to keep posting on this blog, but now that I can post pictures and status updates on facebook, maybe the nature of these posts will change a little in the future.

    So now to anyone who has read this far, thank you for your time and patience.  There should be a little comment button right below this.  It sounds cliché but I’d really love to hear what you think.