“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
                -Sir Isaac Newton (though it had been said before, so I suppose he borrowed it from one of his giants)

“This is not an American seminar. I don’t give a damn what any of you ‘think.’”
                -A Cambridge professor to her graduate class, as related to me by Professor Kim Townsend

                Earlier today, after a class spent thirty minutes trying to discuss The Little Prince, one of my students said,
                “Are you asking us what we think “growing up” means?”
                “No,” I said, after considering that for a moment. “I’m asking you to help me understand what Saint-Exupéry thinks ‘growing up’ means.”
                It felt strange saying that, but it also felt right. My job is to help young people discover, build, and share their ideas. I’m honestly interested in what they write and think. I want to hear their voice. But we can also get too caught up in raising our own voice. Maybe there’s a reason so many speakers always have a glass of water near to hand: we need to stop, and drink. We need to listen, and have a sip from the river that flows outside. I can’t listen to the river run when I’m still talking. I can’t listen to you, or Saint-Exupéry.
                The Cambridge professor takes all this a big leap further: from her perspective, students’ ‘thoughts’ on Proust are a dilution of the original wisdom. The goal isn’t to see your mind: the goal is to use your mind to see through the dimness in which you started to the light ahead. The goal is to learn from the text in front of you. I like that, but I’m uncomfortable with any learning that asks you to ignore your own mind. I like that, but I think old learning becomes useful when it grows in someone new. For that to happen, we need to learn. For that to happen, we need to let what we learn grow in our own soil. That means it will change. That means, in the end, it’s part of the text and part of us, and part of a new landscape.
                I should have told my student: “I’m not asking for what you see. I’m asking you to climb up on a giant’s back, take a good look–and then tell me what you see.”

                “There was a tendency to treat the short story as though it was as definable a form as the sonnet, instead of being just exactly what anyone of courage and imagination can get told in twenty minutes’ reading or so.”
                -H. G. Wells in the 1911 introduction to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories

                I started making my own collaborative storytelling game after a student showed me Dungeons & Dragons, and I thought, one, what an interesting way to build a story together, and, two, why is the rulebook so thick? I wanted a simpler system in which people could sit down at a table, make up characters, and set off into another world. I made one, and now I’ve played stories that never go where I expect them to. There’s the luck of the dice, and more importantly, there’re the choices of other players.
                Put a pin in that. We’ll be back, but first we have to visit a professor at Amherst. If you gave him a few garbled sentences, he’d give you back a keen look, a minute of silence, and then, “There are three really interesting things you might be saying.” He’d lay them out for you: three points of view you might have been moving towards. He’d give you their strengths, their weaknesses. He was probably one of the most learned people I’ve ever met. At the same time, he didn’t write much anymore. I asked one of his thesis advisees about that. She said, “Sometimes I think his critical ability washed over his creativity.”
                In reading–in writing–it’s become easier and easier for me to let the task of building get washed over by the concerns of my building-code inspectors. I don’t want my inspectors to put my builders out of work.
                Back to the table. Back to a group of people, their characters, decisions, and dice. If I look at the story my current group has built together, there are narrative choices I don’t really like. There are characters and scenes I would have done differently. That doesn’t really matter. We come together, we wonder and listen and argue, and I’m having a wonderful time mucking about. I’m learning a lot. I’m sharing.
                Maybe the code-inspectors should come back tomorrow. If the story we’ve told is empty or blind or egocentric, they should point that out, and we’ll try to do better. But until then, I don’t want to let the goodness or badness of a story make me lose the is-ness. I want to trust a story long enough to taste it. After that there are decisions. Before that–well, before that H. G. Wells has a mug of something. He offers it to us. He smiles.
                ‘This is a leap of courage and imagination,’ he says. ‘Have a sip.’

“I’ve got so much inside  /  If only you would listen–”
                -a child singing in The School of Rock; and yeah, last weekend, that musical made me cry.

“Mammals, [Cory Doctorow] said, and I paraphrase here and do not put it as well as Cory did, invest a great deal of time and energy in their young, in the pregnancy, in raising them. Dandelions just let their seeds go to the wind, and do not mourn the seeds that do not make it. Until recently, creating intellectual content for payment has been a mammalian idea. Now it’s time for creators to accept that we are becoming dandelions.”
                -Neil Gaiman, in considering how the internet will affect writers and writing

                I read about the dandelions, and started worrying about Ragnarok and the End of Art. If we follow Doctorow, won’t we fall faster and faster into a world defined by the easy, accessible, gravitational cuteness of cat videos? Won’t we doom ourselves to shallow art reaffirming simple assumptions, to echo chambers where others repeat what we already wanted to believe? To the kind of poem that looks great in front of a picture of a sunset, and fits nicely on my phone’s screen? Doesn’t that mean THE END?
                No. No, it doesn’t. For Gaiman looked, and beheld a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Relax, and folks doing art followed after. I think we’ll be okay.
                (Quick tangent: touching, but not central. Doctorow’s mammal/dandelion idea is pulled from something my Amherst prof called r/K selection theory. Some species–dandelions, flies–have big, short-lived population booms when there’s a feast, and some species–whales, elephants, us–have smaller, more stable populations of bodies developed to live through famine. It’s a question of priority: should I spend my energy making a body that can walk across the deserts and survive, or should I hurry up, have a thousand kids already, and let this dandelion body, as it were, go to seed. All of which is super cool, and a great foundation for metaphors. So thanks, Doctorow).
                Tomorrow, in class, we’re reading a few pages that a student wrote. I doubt the pages would get her into Harvard. I doubt they’ll ever be published, and I know she could have spent more time polishing her phrases. All the same, what she wrote is going to help. She took an issue close to her heart, she struggled, she thought, she laughed, she learned, and she gave us something I think we can learn from. Because she’s one of them, her words will have an impact that ‘professional’ writing might struggle to match. I love the texts that have been passed down, the treasures handed through generations. But I also love what this sixteen year old can do with a young life’s experience, a heart’s hurt, a heart’s hope, and a few hours’ work.
                And it’s not just her. Lots of my students–all of them, I think–could write something that, while it might not last forever, could help their community think, heal, laugh, and grow. What else is writing for?
                So hurrah for the elephants, elegant and old, and hurrah for all the dandelions’ seeds.

                “Without Cora, he finds his thoughts lack direction. What, after all, is the point of observing this, of encountering that, if he cannot tell her, and watch her laugh or frown in response?” -Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent
                “Surprised by joy–impatient as the Wind  /  I turned to share the transport–” -William Wordsworth

                In college, my friend Tauhid introduced me to a game: pick a word and make up an etymology for it. The only one I still remember is “ex-ist:” “ex,” he said, “like exoskeleton, meaning ‘outside;’ ‘-ist,’ like activist or accompanist, meaning ‘one who does.’ So to exist is to be someone who shares their thoughts, who goes outside. Maybe a thought doesn’t really exist until you share it with someone else. Maybe I don’t really exist until I talk to you.”
                (It turns out a lot of what he ‘made up’ is actually true. I wonder if he knew that, or if he was just imagining along the same lines as the Romans who said existere).
                I think we help make things true for one another. That can frighten me, because in that there’s a kind (perhaps?) of dependence, and I grew up with Wild West stories and the West Side Story guy who “never asked nothing from nobody.” But we do ask something from somebody. I would rather live that way than not, I think. There might be a kind of dependence, but we always were a web with many strings, vibrating to each other’s movements. And there’s a kind of joy there, too. We say, “You can depend on me;” why not admit that I depend on you?
                Recently I saw a mother talking to her young boy. He didn’t want anyone else to touch his new game. “But it’s a game for more than one person, isn’t it?” she said. “You can’t really play alone.” Sometimes I want to line up my ambitious friends, my students with their thoughts of “success,” my Wild-West-watching self, and tell that mother, “Remind us all again.”

                “When I start one of these [writing] projects, I am pain-fully aware of my inadequacy. But the arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.”
                -James Michener, who in his “arrogance” tried to tell pieces of history as a story; “The Michener Phenomenon,” The New York Times, September 8th, 1985

                My mother was driving. We were on our way home, and I was twelve or thirteen. Some kind of protest had closed a street. That meant traffic. Our trip probably took an extra five minutes. As we sat there I thought, frustrated, about all the people slowed down by whatever was causing the commotion. I thought about the few people who were gathered in the closed street. How many minutes, all together, was the city losing to this traffic?
                “It’s not fair for a few people to take time from everyone’s day,” I said.
                My mother gave me a sharp smile.
                “What are you doing that’s so important that you can’t spend five minutes?” she asked. “Do you know what the protest is about?”

                A few weeks ago, students, faculty, and families sat down to hear ten different students talk about their ISPs–year-long independent studies projects, which, with the support of  a faculty mentor, take an idea and explore it. This year, one of those students wanted to talk about religions: what’s shared between them, and how people with different beliefs can come together to make a better world. Depending on who you ask, students were supposed to present for somewhere between 10 and 25 minutes. This young man talked for 43.
                A lot of people were angry. A lot of people saw arrogance in the way he held them all there, sitting, while really they wanted to finish things up, congratulate the speaker, and go home. I wasn’t there, but I get that. My friend, a teacher, was there: he gives the students around here most of his life, but he also has a family. I get angry when I think about someone demanding even more time from him.
                I also know the student. I admire him. I respect him. For him, those 43 minutes were about making peace with his parents, about seeing a way for American society to heal. They were 43 minutes to acknowledge the horrors we lead ourselves into, and look for a way out.  They were a transcendent experience. My friend, the student, felt only the opportunity to teach and learn. My friend, the teacher, wanted to go home.
                Eventually I talked to the student about all this. I thought he should know the word I kept hearing: “arrogance.” And it was arrogant. My student understood that. It would have been different (he said) if people had specifically come to hear him, but they hadn’t; it was a school event. When I talked to him about arrogance, he was also, as I expected, hurt: he looked back on that night as a source of inspiration, of possibility, and I handed it back in a different light. We got mad at each other. When he insisted he would do the same thing again, I got really mad at him–how could he demand even more time from the people who gave him so much? He got mad back–we spend so much time on this award or that award, on this self-aggrandizement or that empty tradition; don’t we need time to look at an issue that’s tearing us (his family, his country) apart?
                And I’m stuck. I don’t know how to balance those. Those who presume to understand, who trust themselves to touch the world, and change it–they are arrogant, aren’t they? They risk hurting things. They should remember that. And we need them. They hope to heal.

“He who defends everything defends nothing.”
                -Frederick II of Prussia

“The wise stay behind, and are thus ahead.
They are detached, and thus at one with all.”
                -Lao Tsu in The Tao Te Ching, translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English

                I remember sitting near abandoned American airfields in Vietnam, talking to a Buddhist monk about peace, world history and his beliefs. I remember the coffeeshop he showed me a few hours later, where my cup had almost as much condensed milk as coffee. I remember a story he told me about Buddha, a river, and a thief. I remember that I didn’t understand what he meant by non-attachment. There was something there, beyond his words, inside his kind eyes, but I couldn’t make out what it was.
                I thought I was supposed to care: about my family, the environment, the world we’re creating. I thought non-attachment meant not caring about anything. Maybe I had that backwards. To be detached, Lao Tsu says, is to be connected with everything. Defending this village or that ideal chooses it, highlights it as more important than other villages and ideals. That’s one kind of value. That’s one kind of caring. It gives me something to grasp. Lao Tsu, I think, doesn’t want to give me something to grasp: he wants me to open my hand, and breath. He wants my work to be a part of all things, and to care, in a small, attentive way, for all things. There’s more to breath than I could ever hold.
                The wise “are detached, and thus at one with all.” Fortresses and troops must defend this city, or that one; this idea, or that one. Maybe hearts and minds have another way of being.
                I’d like to sit with that. And I like that this thought about a Vietnamese man’s teaching comes to me, an American, through Chinese writings. There is a lot of hurt and anger in the history of those three countries. There are plenty of moments in which we’ve gone off, to fight, to win, to defend whatever we’ve decided is worth defending. But there is also a look of calm compassion, left in my mind by a far off monk, and this quiet passage from a man long dead. A look left behind, and so ahead of me, ready for me as I walk by looking for a way forward.

                “I only know what I am taught,” I whispered.
                “That’s not true,” he said.
                                -Nnedi Okorafor, Binti: Home

                In the first book, Binti, a young woman from earth, traveled the stars and became the point of contact between two sentient species. In the second book she goes back home. She visits the “Desert People,” an ethnic group who live in villages not far from where she grew up. Her own people don’t like the Desert People: they all have a strange degenerative illness, or so it’s said. They’re uneducated, superstitious, dirty. In talking to a young man from this group, Binti slips into these learned prejudices. When he notices, she defends herself with the line: “I only know what I am taught.”
                “That’s not true,” he says.
                So what else is it that she has? Some innate understanding of compassion and prejudice? Her own experiences? A long time ago, Binti met an old woman. That woman was one of the desert tribe. When Binti talked to her, she found a person, not a savage. Is that what else she has? Or is the “something else” simply the chance to think for herself, to build something with the bits she’s been given, to hold “lessons” against each other and try to balance them? We’ve all been taught–but we’re all still learning. That means, like Binti, we have the chance to learn something new.
                Whatever else Binti has, she has the young man she’s talking to. Half a page later, he shares a chuckle with her. Perhaps that’s a kind of knowing, too.

“I’ve freed myself from the obligation to try and be beautiful.”
                -Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent

                At first, I didn’t understand why my high schoolers were so excited about doing Night of the Living Dead. That’s probably because I wasn’t excited. I didn’t like zombies; I didn’t like the play. As we read the script, I wondered why I hadn’t insisted we do something else. I could have. The zombies surged through the windows, stumbling in their rotty-fleshy way. I should have, I thought to myself.
                The thing is, my students loved it. The young women loved it most of all. One of them, a sophomore who’d never been on stage, asked to play one of the zombies in the big finale. Another, who’d played leads with us before, had a slow death scene as she succumbed to the virus–and then came back as a zombie to bite her mother’s throat. As I told this thoughtful, compassionate young woman what she was supposed to do, her smile got wider and wider.
                “Can I really?” she asked.
                Looking back, I think I’m starting to understand. My students spend most of their time in a world that demands they be beautiful: that measures them for it, ranks them, sets them aside or admires them for their width and complexion. It’s a world that tells them they should listen, and follow, and be good. The play asked them to be something else. It asked them to be terrifying. It asked them to be strange, to stumble, to rot and fall apart and come back twisted. Whether I liked the play or not wasn’t at all important. It set them free.
                The Essex Serpent is about a widow who, as a near child, was married off to a well respected politician. In the silence of her polite Victorian society, she felt the cruelty he hid from others. She thought that was how love worked. She didn’t realize that she could try to leave until he was already on his deathbed. Then he died, and she looked at herself. She looked at the obligations she’d been handed, the ones she carried, thinking they were hers. She put down some of them, deciding she was free.
                Fulfilling our duties can show who we are. So can the obligations we push towards others, and so can the “obligations” we consciously put down.

                “I didn’t get my dad. I could never guess how he would react to things. Not ever.” –Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

                My niece, not quite two, was leading us on an adventure to the beach. It was a gentle day, with little swells licking along the shore. She wandered into the surf zone and plopped down. She looked out to sea. She looked at the sand, and stuck her fingers in it. Then a wave knocked her onto her back. She immediately twisted around to look at us–okay, not us, but at my brother standing beside me. My brother, her father, smiled.
                “Yay sweetie!” he said.
                Sometimes I think that young children live as much in our reactions to the world than in the world itself. Reading Sáenz, I don’t think that’s quite right: they live in the world, they’re hit by the wave, but they look to us to see what to make of those things. Their look asks, is this a scary thing? Is this a happy thing?
                As we get older–Sáenz’s Aristotle is in high school–we have more choices. The machinery of our own mind, our own evaluation, sits on top of what our parents see. But we still look at them. We still wonder what they see. I can’t shake the feeling that, in looking at his father’s reactions, Aristotle is wondering about one reaction in particular. What do you think of what I’m doing, dad? What do you think of me?

                Henry II: “You know, I hope we never die!”
                Eleanor of Aquitaine: “So do I.”
                Henry II: “Do you think there’s any chance of it?” -James Goldman, The Lion in Winter

                When I was younger, and my parents were recently divorced, I would travel back and forth between their cars, their houses, their lives. A hike with one would turn into lunch with the other. When I was with my mom, I often missed my dad. When I was with my dad, I often missed my mom. “Maybe you should focus on being with the one you’re with,” someone wise once told me. (I can’t remember who). Somehow my heart didn’t usually manage that kind of alchemy. I missed them. I missed the one I wasn’t with.
                I started to draw a strange conclusion. I wanted a perfect home that I pretended to remember and really, I think, imagined. I wanted my parents to be always-available and focused on me. I wanted things to be this certain, other way. They weren’t. Because they weren’t, I started thinking that finding what my heart desired was impossible. I started thinking that having desires of my own was pointless.
                In some part, of course, that’s true. The ‘ideal’ family I imagined doesn’t exist. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be healthy–just like so many of my immature fantasies (eating as much cake as I want, fighting dragons, finding universal adoration) wouldn’t be healthy. I think a big part of growing up is recognizing where desires have turned damaging, inconsiderate, or self-defeating, and growing in another way. (The desire to have power over everyone else can become the desire to have control over yourself; the desire to be the best can become the desire to share what you have; the desire to be the most loved can become the desire to love). Still, I think there’s another side.
                In The Lion in Winter, Henry and Eleanor’s lives are far from ideal. She led a civil war against him; he’s locked her in the Tower of London. They hurt each other, sometimes with what looks like relish, out of confusion and pain and habit. They use their children as pawns between them. They still, in their own bewildering way, love each other. They love their kids. They love the world and its possibilities. As a child that confused me. Their world isn’t like what they wanted, what they expected to get. They still want more time in it. Recently, that makes more sense. In that scene, in the middle of their loss and their pain, Henry and Eleanor feel something that makes them call out to each other, makes them smile, makes them laugh. The way they go about loving might be broken. Their love is not. Sharing all this–wanting and stumbling, wanting differently, and falling short–is a delight. Whatever else our world is home to, it’s home to the kind of vibrant love that hopes, together, to live forever. Feeling that isn’t pointless.
                Some desires are childish fantasies, impossible creations that would break under their own ugliness if I started fashioning them in the real world. Henry and Eleanor’s laughter tells me that some desires shine. Some desires find that this world is a fitting home, and live in it harmoniously. They’re worth feeling. They’re worth shouting about. They’re worth sharing.
                You know, I hope we never die. Do you think there’s any chance of it?