<a href="http://www.ttmd.com/rel/v2_viewupc.php?storenr=272&upc=0375701273"><strong>Building a Bridge to the 18th Century </strong></a>

There are ebbs and flows in one's reading life. Sometimes there are dry patches where you simply can't find a book that matches your mood or interests. You have adequate reads but nothing that really grips you.

And then there are times when you will have a series of home-runs. You keep coming across, as if by accident, books that answer questions you are asking or give you information you are seeking. Authors who are thinking along similar paths as you are, maybe approaching it differently or arriving at somewhat variant conclusions but whose thoughts help hone your own.

I have had a good past eighteen months with a sequence of books on different topics every month or two that do exactly that. Books that I can wrestle with, that I can tell even as I read them are going to influence my thinking; that will give me not only new information but force me to look at something from a perspective I had not considered before.

The most recent diamond was entirely serendipitous. I found Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century in a used bookstore and, thinking it was an essay about a philosophical/historical connection between our current circumstances and the intellectual ecosystem of the 18th century, I purchased it even though I was unfamiliar with Postman's work.

What a break. With that title I might have gone either way on the give-this-book-a-home decision. A brief biography of Neil Postman is at Wikipedia. Having just discovered him, I find that he actually passed away in 2003. That is one of the pitfalls of used bookstores - sometimes you fall behind. Postman appears to be one of those intellectual iconoclasts with which New York City has so often been blessed, carving out his own distinctive intellectual path. He appears to have travelled from the rollickingly innovative and even revolutionary to a more settled respect for continuity with the past.

A number of his books have been either best sellers and/or highly influential, including Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985 dealing with the influence of television on communication), Technopoly (1992), The End of Education (1995), and The Disappearance of Childhood (1982). Building a Bridge to the 18th Century was Postman's last book and is actually a distillation of over thirty years of thinking and writing. The chapters (Progress, Technology, Language, Information, Narratives, Children, Democracy, and Education) are really a series of Montaignesque interlinked meditations, building on and bringing up to date the core ideas of all his earlier works.

I highly recommend Building a Bridge to the 18th Century as a distinctly relevant, very thought provoking and always entertaining disquisition on topics near and dear to parents and any thinking citizen. I also would recommend this for YA readers in eleventh and twelfth grade who are taking technology courses, media studies, and most especially philosophy. There is a lot of grist for young mills in this book.

We must sail, and not drift

Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

...the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: to reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it--but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

I remember that I read the feudal play of Henry V for the first time in a loghouse.

Here are further comments from Alexis de Tocqueville and his Democracy in America published in 1835. Again, when read in context, you see that de Tocqueville is really focusing on America as a prototypical democracy which serves as comparison to practices in aristrocratic Europe. Of course today we tend to mine de Tocqueville more for his anthropological observations than for his political philosophy.

When a traveller goes into a bookseller's shop in the United States, and examines the American books upon the shelves, the number of works appears extremely great; whilst that of known authors appears, on the contrary, to be extremely small. He will first meet with a number of elementary treatises, destined to teach the rudiments of human knowledge. Most of these books are written in Europe; the Americans reprint them, adapting them to their own country. Next comes an enormous quantity of religious works, Bibles, sermons, edifying anecdotes, controversial divinity, and reports of charitable societies; lastly, appears the long catalogue of political pamphlets. In America, parties do not write books to combat each others' opinions, but pamphlets which are circulated for a day with incredible rapidity, and then expire. In the midst of all these obscure productions of the human brain are to be found the more remarkable works of that small number of authors, whose names are, or ought to be, known to Europeans.

Although America is perhaps in our days the civilized country in which literature is least attended to, a large number of persons are nevertheless to be found there who take an interest in the productions of the mind, and who make them, if not the study of their lives, at least the charm of their leisure hours. But England supplies these readers with the larger portion of the books which they require. Almost all important English books are republished in the United States. The literary genius of Great Britain still darts its rays into the recesses of the forests of the New World. There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I read the feudal play of Henry V for the first time in a loghouse.

Not only do the Americans constantly draw upon the treasures of English literature, but it may be said with truth that they find the literature of England growing on their own soil. The larger part of that small number of men in the United States who are engaged in the composition of
literary works are English in substance, and still more so in form. Thus they transport into the midst of democracy the ideas and literary fashions which are current amongst the aristocratic nation they have taken for their model. They paint with colors borrowed from foreign manners; and as they hardly ever represent the country they were born in as it really is, they are seldom popular there. The citizens of the United States are themselves so convinced that it is not for them that books are published, that before they can make up their minds upon the merit of one of their authors, they generally wait till his fame has been ratified in England, just as in pictures the author of an original is held to be entitled to judge of the merit of a copy. The inhabitants
of the United States have then at present, properly speaking, no literature. The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. Other
authors are aliens; they are to the Americans what the imitators of the Greeks and Romans were to us at the revival of learning--an object of curiosity, not of general sympathy. They amuse the mind, but they do not act upon the manners of the people.

de Tocqueville and reading in America

Alexis de Tocqueville is famous for his Democracy in America published in 1835. While primarily intended as a comparison of democracies versus aristocracies, it is also an anthropological study as well as a travelogue. I came across this snippet in which de Tocqueville describes a specific frontier cabin in which he stopped for the night but offers it as a representative example of the cabins in which he stayed as he travelled about. I was struck by his description of the reading conditions and supplies for a typical frontiersman.

We entered the log house: the inside is quite unlike that of the cottages of the peasantry of Europe: it contains more than is superfluous, less than is necessary. A single window with a muslin blind; on a hearth of trodden clay an immense fire, which lights the whole structure; above the hearth a good rifle, a deer's skin, and plumes of eagles' feathers; on the right hand of the chimney a map of the United States, raised and shaken by the wind through the crannies in the wall; near the map, upon a shelf formed of a roughly hewn plank, a few volumes of books--a Bible, the six first books of Milton, and two of Shakespeare's plays; along the wall, trunks instead of closets; in the centre of the room a rude table, with legs of green wood, and with the bark still upon them, looking as if they grew out of the ground on which they stood; but on this table a tea-pot of British ware, silver spoons, cracked tea-cups, and some newspapers.

The literary conditions of frontiersmen and women in the 1830's is something of a reproof to our current homes which are so often bereft of books at all much less Milton and Shakespeare.

Define: Eschaton

Eschaton from an article (The Real Barack Obama by Jay Cost in Real Clear Politics, January 12, 2010).

Other pols promise the sun, the moon, and the stars in the sky, but Barack Obama would do them one better: he'd promise the eschaton.

from Dicitionary.com:

Main Entry: eschaton
Part of Speech: n
Definition: end of the world, end of time, climax of history
Etymology: Greek for 'last'

Benefit of Clergy

I had forgotten about this interesting little twist in British legal history. For roughly 350 years one could avoid being charged with a crime or could (if a first time offender) receive a lesser sentence if you could prove you could read. This was pretty important in an era when stealing property of almost any sort might attract the penalty of death by hanging.

From Wikipedia:

At first, in order to plead the benefit of clergy, one had to appear before the court tonsured and otherwise wearing ecclesiastical dress. Over time, this proof of clergy-hood was replaced by a literacy test: defendants demonstrated their clerical status by reading from the Bible. This opened the door to literate lay defendants' also claiming the benefit of clergy. In 1351, under Edward III, this loophole was formalised in statute, and the benefit of clergy was officially extended to all who could read.

The literacy test was not abolished until 1706. I guess it would have given kids a pretty good incentive to pay attention in class.

What's that? Gone for a Burton

A phrase used in England. Came across it in Alistair MacLean's Night Without End.

"What?" The sudden switch caught him momentarily off-balance. "What happened - you mean, how did it go for a burton? I've no idea at all, sir."

From Michael Quinion's site (World Wide Words) there is a discussion of this enigmatic phrase that appears to have originated in World War II in the RAF to refer to a pilot killed in action but now referring more broadly to something gone missing or destroyed.