Learning
from Hamlet and Mark Twain
Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 3/15/20
With
so much of our attention on science and technology these days, it’s wise to
remember that there are also such things as human emotions. Social progress
generally and our public discourse specifically doesn’t suffer as much today
from lack of knowledge as from lack of emotional control. Emotions are as real as the soil we walk on.
Love, hate, joy, and sadness are everywhere. The question is which emotions
will we embrace and which ones will we reject.
Algebra,
geometry, biology, astronomy, sociology, computer science, agri-business,
simple arithmetic and all other such “sciences” do not and cannot help us
understand or control our emotions or human relations, nor are they meant to.
Psychology presumes to but is usually found lacking. An honorable field, psychology is
horrendously term-laden and also too ridden with psycho-quackery.
History
could help except for the fact that in education, history actually means
political history, with emphasis solely on dates, wars, power struggles, and
elections. Why not also intellectual
history, meaning the study of ideas
and of the individuals who first submitted and argued for them: the ideas of
Newton, Marx, Jefferson, Darwin, Einstein, Charlie Brown (seriously) and so
many others who have stirred our minds.
Ideas provoke thinking and debate.
Memorization of dates does not. Genuine
debate teaches civility, a commodity most lacking.
There
is one often disdained field of study that can teach us about our emotions, and
that is literature. Doubtless,
literature has often been mis-taught. Novels much too long have been
assigned. Poems so esoteric they would
cure anyone’s insomnia have been discussed too early and too long. Stories that
have the capacity to change hearts and challenge minds have been killed by the
teacher’s search for symbolism.
Biographies that could inspire have been crippled by professors who
politicize them, imposing their own biases on the subject rather than letting
students glean for themselves. Teachers
and professors of literature haven’t always measured well the amounts of
reading they dispense.
Even
so, literature is like a keg of penicillin standing in the midst of an epidemic
and few people over the centuries have chosen to even test the medicine. While the sciences address the mind,
literature addresses the mind and the heart.
Today humanity’s heart is in need of addressing. We’re not living together well. We’re
“connected” for sure, but we know what that means, cell phones and screens.
But
the human heart languishes. Math and
science can give us medicine and wealth, but not the joy of human
interaction. Human interaction thrives
only when we see each other eyeball to eyeball, touch to touch. Literature – good stories, time-honored poems
– fosters such interaction.
Literature,
that is the reading thereof, can help clarify one’s thinking and words. In
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Hamlet’s mother chides him for not casting off his
moodiness. “Why seems it so particular with thee?” she asks. “Seems, madam? I know not seems. ‘Tis!”
As
Hamlet was implying, there are beliefs and there are certainties. One certainty is that we are all closer neighbors
than ever before. We need and appreciate
the sciences. They serve us well except when politicized and used as a
bludgeon. If “global warming” was an unquestioned reality (‘Tis), why is the
term now abandoned for the broader/milder, “climate change” (Seems)? Living
closer together on the planet than ever, clear and honest un-politicized
language is needed. Literary studies,
not the sciences, help meet that need.
Mark Twain addressed this need when he said, “Use the right word and not
its second cousin.”
One
of literature’s most valuable offerings is “A soft answer turns away
wrath.” Vice-President Pence has
illustrated this certainty each time he and his coronavirus team have held
press conferences. Pence’s employ of soft (but substantive) answer recalls the
comment of P.T. Barnum – yes, that
Barnum: “Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions
of humanity.”
Since
history and literature are so intertwined, literature can afford us both a leap
into the past and a vision for the future.
Most writers, even fiction writers, are lovers of history if not amateur
historians. They see history as the skeletal bones on which the flesh of
literature is laid. They understand that
text without context is pretext.
More
practically, literature can enrich our imagination and hence our
imagining. Remember, Colonel Sanders was
62 when he imagined a little chicken restaurant franchise business.
So
if a virus or anything else keeps us inside, it’s a good time to read some good
literature, after finishing the morning paper of course.
Roger Hines
3/11/20
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