IT'S IMPORTANT TO HAVE A LIBRARY

IT’S IMPORTANT TO HAVE A LIBRARY

I am a techie. Being retired from teaching, my morning schedule almost always involves joyfully checking my email, logging on to Facebook, reading various online newspapers from around the world, as well as the all-important reading of poetry and book reviews. I deeply value our digitized world wide web…as it continues weaving the evermore interlocking strands of our consciousness.

However, I do not want to lose our libraries—those evermore important houses for our cultural memorabilia.

Before his death in 2004, Wink Franklin, as president of The Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, had asked my opinion on the development of a library there at the institute—whether he should go digital or paper...I answered, "OH BOTH!!!!" (I had been participating for several weeks in a New York Times forum discussion of Chris Hedges' book about war. (War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which had won an award from Amnesty International.) ..and because of Wink's question to me, I asked Mr. Hedges a specific question about the value of the library experience in regard to what I like to call benevolent evolution.

Hedges' response is below. He writes eloquently of the healing effect upon him of his time at the Smyth library...after the horrors of his experience as war correspondent.

Wink said back to me that he wanted to talk to me more about it...then things changed rapidly. Wink said the matter would have to wait. He did not tell me at that moment (the board gathering with consideration of James O'Dea as the new president) that he was in fact very ill. So I never really had the opportunity again to bring up the subject.

I am still thinking about libraries as I begin the task, once again, of unpacking and arranging books here in Loomis. War correspondent Chris Hedges wrote eloquently about the value of being surrounded by books and their particular 'aromas'.

From a New York Times forum, here are his words in response to a question from me about his experience within the actual walls of the Smyth Classical Library. I am struck by the role the sensual experience with actual books, and their environment, plays in his healing reintegration of self.

My question within the forum: “I wonder if Mr. Hedges could/would elaborate on his feelings for Smyth Classical Library, and its contribution to his ongoing development.”

Chris Hedges: I loved Smyth. It was my refuge from a world of violence and madness and grief. I was surrounded by volumes, many left to the university by professors long departed, which were by great thinkers and poets and historians who in another time, in another age, struggled with the issues I battled with intellectually and morally.

I loved the worn leather chairs and noisy radiators and the creaking floor boards and the smell of the books. I loved the oak tables, where I could spread out my books and think and read and write. I loved the windows where in the winter I could watch the snow fall gently on Harvard Yard. In Smyth I was freed from the cant of modernity.

In Smyth I reflected not so much on other times, but my own time. The study and understanding of classics, the long continuum of human civilization, is essential if we are going to grasp where we came from, who we are and where we are going. Without an understanding of the interconnectedness of our culture, our art, our history and our philosophy with the past we are doomed to a dangerous and frightening provincialism.
--Chris Hedges. New York Times Forum, May, 2003.

I am excited about the role our electronic media can play in preventing that “dangerous and frightening provincialism”…and for the in-depth communication opportunities afforded through such media, yet I plead that we take good care of our books too. A cherished memory is that of my grandchild, curled on the couch, under the lamp, book on pillow across the lap…reading. What can compare with the feel and aroma of an old book? Techie or not, I am a book lover too.
--Barbara Smith Stoff

LOOKING UP 'ROGUE' IN THE DICTIONARY

LOOKING UP 'ROGUE' IN THE DICTIONARY

Looking up “rogue” in The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, I find: ROGUE: a dishonest, knavish person; scoundrel; a playfully mischievous person; scamp; a tramp or vagabond; a rogue elephant or other animal of similar disposition; a usually inferior organism; a plant varying markedly from the normal; to cheat; to uproot or destroy; begging vagabond; villain; trickster; swindler; cheat; quack.

It might be interesting to google fairly recent political commentary on “rogue nations” …even John Bolton at the U.N….and it might be interesting to ask why is “rogue” suddenly so much in favor as a description (even a self-description) of Sarah Palin.

RESCUING THE CIPHERS

RESCUING THE CIPHERS

NOTE: Below is my emotional response in writing as I watched the news of the shooting, in 2001, at Santana High School in Santee, California...a school where I had taught Mandala Art classes. The article was published in The Christian Science Monitor. Now, in 2009, I continue to ponder the role the broadcast media plays in the proliferation of violence in human society. I know we very much need the broadcast media, and we very much need the internet. I am hoping that the ultimate balance in our collective consciousness tips in favor of benevolent evolution. I believe, even through all the current turmoil, that we are all slowly moving in that direction which I like to call benevolent evolution.
--Barbara Smith Stoff - November 12, 2009


Rescuing the ciphers.(Opinion) | Article from The Christian Science Monitor | HighBeam Research

RESCUING THE CIPHERS
BY BARBARA SMITH

Article from:The Christian Science Monitor Article date:March 9,
2001 More results for: "rescuing the ciphers"

Loneliness and alienation in our schools are not new. It's just that the symptoms are becoming more pronounced. President Bush called the shooting at Santana High School in California "a disgraceful act of cowardice." So much for compassion. I call the shooting a cry for help, a desperate attempt not to be a cipher--a faceless zero.

As I watched the morning news, I studied the face of Charles Andrew Williams as he was being led away into custody. His mouth was tightly pursed and turning down at the corners, his jaw was clenched. He looked so determined even in his hopelessness. It appears that young Williams was indeed isolated, targeted, "picked on because he is scrawny," called "freak," "dork," "nerd," bullied, humiliated. As of Wednesday, it had been reported that no family members have visited him in his cell. This child was lost long ago.

The ongoing discussion of the profile of a "school shooter" certainly accentuates the image of hopelessness. I remember studying the faces of thousands of students during my years of teaching high school English. Some of those faces, not all, reflected helplessness. I came to know in my bones their pain of blighted ideals, their passion to grow toward the light and out from under whatever heavy thing kept them down. And sometimes I was the one who felt helpless in the face of their need.

So after the news, I just sat there, remembering. And I remembered a short and true story written sometime in the early '60s by a teacher, Jean Mizer, about a boy who was so lonely he simply fell dead in the snow on the way to school one morning. The story, "Cipher in the Snow," describes the school personnel in their search to find out his identity, and the never-to-be-forgotten lesson his teacher learned during the course of the search--that to be a teacher means to really look at your students. Jean Mizer was given the Teacher of the Year Award for Idaho in 1964.

Surely by now we know that social alienation can at times produce violence toward oneself or toward others. I remembered another short story, this one by Joanne Greenberg about a young boy who wants so much to belong that he murders a man, just to present himself to his sinister coach as worthy of belonging. The story is called "Rite of Passage."

Joanne Greenberg knows whereof she writes. She endured teen years in a psychiatric facility. She recovered, and has now published 12 novels and four collections of short stories that show clearly her depth of understanding and compassion.

I feel helpless now in the face of all these school shootings, and I want to cry out too. And say what? Maybe that when keepers want to train bald eagles born in captivity to fly so they can be released into the wild, they put television sets in their cages. The baby eagles love to watch TV, and they see themselves flying and soaring just as the images on the screen are flying and soaring. And they learn to fly.

If we can use TV so creatively in the endangered-species programs, why can't we use television to encourage our children toward life Children are endangered, too. What kind of images do we put up for our young ones to emulate?

In 1914, George Bernard Shaw said: "The cinema tells its story to the illiterate as well as the literate; and it keeps its victim (if you like to call him so) not only awake, but fascinated as if by a serpent's eye. And that is why the cinema is going to produce effects that all the books in the world could never produce."

Harvard professor Robert Coles has studied children closely and has written with understanding and vision about his findings. We may be surprised at his words: "Children, if we can listen to them, will tell us of a life richer in moral values than most grown-ups can comprehend...If faced by the prospect of total annihilation, young people will try in some way to make sense of the mystery and madness of their lives."

So then what are we doing with our powerful imagemakers in the media? How do we reconcile Robert Coles' conclusions with the messages we are getting from some (not all) of our young people today? Where, and how, and why are we failing them? Failing them so much that they take such desperate means in their hands in order not to be just a cipher? I think one thing is certain. We do not listen to them enough--or soon enough.


Barbara Smith is a retired public school teacher, and at one time worked at Santana High School in Santee, Calif.

(c) Copyright 2001. The Christian Science Monitor

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