He knew this:
Another way to put it: if we can't be bothered to understand the words of others, whether they live now or lived in the past, then they are dead to us. In their words people try to name what they have seen of life. They try to pin down their fears and activate their hopes and make their lives move ahead. They offer their best insights. If we can't be bothered with the specificity of another's words, then down deep we can't be bothered with anything human besides ourselves.
[Thanks to Tom Vander Ven, who once published a piece on the shortsightedness of translating Shakespeare into contemporary language. That piece ended with Cicero's advice.]
These few lines from Seamus Heaney, the great poet whose death was just announced, deserve their own posting:
The way we are living,
timorous or bold,
will have been our life.
If you aren't a regular reader of poetry, but wonder if there is something in poetry for you, I recommend some of the text plus audio pages where you can hear the gravity and thunder of the words in his voice as you read along. "Clearances 3" is a favorite of mine because it attends so carefully to ordinary family memories, seeing closeness and coolness and longing interwoven in just a few lines of vivid storytelling.
An essay from the wonderful poet who died this week, Seamus Heaney, once sparked a blog entry of mine about what we can hope for from blogs that are essentially personal diaries. Heaney was talking about writing that has enough layers to engage readers deeply, and he pressed into service a quotation from another writer to make his point. Here's how the idea played out:
Diary blogs. Irish poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney quotes or paraphrases a comment by Patrick Kavanagh that may shed some light on diary blogging:
The diary writing we see on some blogs may engage us when we know the person, but when we don't know the writer we need some other context for engaging with the words. If they are lively, that can be enough. Similarly, if we identify with the life circumstances of the writer, that too can be enough.
But otherwise we need the writer to put her life into a context -- make herself into an example of something (the small town kid on the big university campus, for example). Or else we need to do that work ourselves. We might read as a specialist of some kind who asks, "What are young people going through these days?" or other question that creates a context. Even the act of identifying with the writer is a way of putting her words into a wider context -- making her an example of something (me!).
Without a literary, social, or intellectual context, whether supplied by the writer or by the reader, the diary blogs remain enclosed in the personal. They may serve the writer's purposes, but if Kavanagh is right, they don't do the work in the wider world of readers that they might do.
Knowing this, teachers who use blogs would be in a position to decide, then, if diary blogs serve their pedagogical purpose or not.
[Passage quoted from the Forward to Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, an oddly unnumbered page that appears to be page 12.]