STA News
A Life Worth Living
We moved to Tampa, Florida when I was six. When Philip tells his brother Nathanial that the Messiah hails from Nazareth, Nathanial says, “What good can come from Nazareth?” My mother felt the same way about Florida. But she soldiered on.
Before she became our mother, she was an English teacher. So an early task in this flat, sunburned city was to cart her two sons, in our push-button Desoto, to the Public Library, where she would register us and we could begin borrowing books. Books, you recall, O Kindle Readers, like this one by Sarah Bakewell, are composed of printed paper, glue, some kind of binding, and what’s called a jacket cover. Mother’s command performance was a little bit of a chore for my beloved brother: he grew up to fly A7 Navy jets on and off of an aircraft carrier. I, Little Mr. Big Britches, was enraptured by The Odyssey, a six-year-old reader going Big Time.
The 1917 two-story red-brick building was ornate by Florida standards. (That’s the year the building was built, not when I was six years old). It boasted a roof of terracotta shingles, a carving in the stone that read FREE LIBRARY, and four Corinthian columns beside the main entrance twenty steps up from the street, where tram tracks and wires had given way to busses. What more glorious a place for a boy’s odyssey, his quest, than the reading room lined in bookshelves, a mural of Hillsborough River centering one wall, the high ceilings with swirling Florida fans, and in one corner those beautiful card catalogues topped with one of a million replicas of Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington. At that point, Mother would always say, “He never told a lie.”
“What can I check out?” I asked my mother. “How many can I check out?”
At this point, you might expect the gracious, loving mother, like so many gathered together in this room, worried about uprooting her poor sons from God’s country in the Carolinas to come to his swamp-infested outback, where the grass was full of sand spurs and the sand burned the bottoms of bare feet, would say, sweetly, “Any book you want, Dear. As many as they allow, Dear.”
You didn’t know my mother.
She said, “Any book the librarian approves. Then bring it to me.”/
In 1941 the great Argentine writer Jorge Borges wrote a story titled The Library of Babel. The narrator of Borges’ story, an aged librarian, quests all his life for an explanation—of what, I’m not quite certain: vindication, the answer to the universe, the end of despair. Ask Sherry Rusher for a better explanation. But there is a quest. The story grows in fame because it introduces the idea of a “total library,” as a stand-in for the universe, a series of hexagonal rooms, each lined with books in which every possible combination of letters and signs in all languages exist. Most of the books are of course gibberish, but every single possibility is nevertheless housed, because, you never know, what appears gibberish could be code. At the end of the story the librarian admits that Letizia Alvarez of Toledo might in fact have a better idea: she argues that there is no need for a library full of books but only the invention of one book with an infinite number of pages. Perhaps it could be just a small hand-held device.
It appears that a 1941 dream of the democratization of all knowledge is at least a quasi-reality in our sons’ lives. In my opinion, this makes our roles essential, our roles as guides, gurus, teachers, magi, librarians, and parents all the more important to our boys’ growth from processing information two thumbs at a time to gaining knowledge to learning wisdom. The long view, for me, for you, and for this school, is wisdom.
The librarian in the Borges story is on a quest. I find, even when talking about a library or an iPhone or weekend activities, that the metaphor of a quest is a powerful teaching tool for children. Borrow from Scripture, myth, literature in order to inspire them to think of their lives as a quest for significance—a pilgrim’s progress past the Grendels of the world and through sloughs of despair to find meaning and purpose, which in my opinion, regardless of the best sellers lists, are precursors to happiness and not vice versa. So even though this very small device gives them an infinite number of pages to read and options to choose, let us give them this organizing principle, the quest for a life worth living.
This choice means, in my opinion, that we start them off their journey with our clearly stated belief system, a set of values essential to the worthy life, and that most importantly we model those values and readily admit we too remain on our own quests.
That’s my simple message tonight. But I’d like to finish with a few particular comments about this Total Library held in my hand and some aspects of it that relate to beliefs. I’m not talking about an entire belief system or every aspect of this glorious machine, but just a few points to get us thinking as we talk with our sons and ourselves.
- The speed of this machine is extraordinary, and it speeds up every month. But on our quest for wisdom, let us remember and teach our children that a quick response is not necessarily the best response.
- I can chat back and forth with you until my thumbs break, but the frequency of a response in fact diminishes the force of the expression. Many people known for their wisdom answer slowly or concisely and keep long periods of silence. Being known as a “chatterer” is seldom a compliment.
- Let us not forget that there is a necessary lag time between innovation and assessing true value. Knowing real value simply takes time. And phrases like “old” and “obsolete” and “un-cool” need re-examination. Our children certainly use those phrases about us and we’re certainly not.
- What is ultimately essential to wisdom is context. Context means providing more than one source, and context introduces complexity, disquiet, and difficulty, those aspects of life that make quest truly real, make it worth pursuing.
Those are just a few thoughts to chew on as parents and teachers. We live in a phenomenal world with machines that can lead us remarkable places. As we go through our stops and starts, and love our children, let us re-state our values to them and with them seek wisdom always.
Thank you.
Headmaster Vance Wilson delivered this address at the annual Parent Dinner, on January 28, 2015.
Located in Washington D.C., St. Albans School is a private, all boys day and boarding school. For more than a century, St. Albans has offered a distinctive educational experience for young men in grades 4 through 12. While our students reach exceptional academic goals and exhibit first-rate athletic and artistic achievements, as an Episcopal school we place equal emphasis upon moral and spiritual education.