An Old Garden

"Not one of the family had ever cared for it on the ground of its old-fashionedness; its preservation was owing merely to the fact that their gardener was blessed with a wholesome stupidity rendering him incapable of unlearning what his father, who had been gardener there before him, had had marvelous difficulty in teaching him. We do not half appreciate the benefits to the race that spring from honest dullness. The clever people are the ruin of everything."
George MacDonald in An Anthology, edited by C. S. Lewis. p125

This week with George MacDonald: How to Become a Dunce

"A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast the less he knows it."
George MacDonald: An Anthology, edited by C. S. Lewis. p 141

Do your work in a hit-or-miss fashion

This is the advice Henri de Tourville gave friends when they complained of being unable to accomplish enough (especially when sick or worn out):
"Do your work in a hit-or-miss fashion. Take time off to recoup your energy; be sluggish; send your mind off on vacation, as it were. Meanwhile, collect the ideas and insights that will still come to you now and then; do this, and you will have done something that will stand you in good stead later on. See to it that you have a few unstrenuous, beguiling projects that you can pick up and set aside at will. Take from them what appeals to you and leave the rest; presently you will discover that you have actually moved ahead and have gleaned a not too poor harvest. . . What I am recommending is some agreeable work or study that you can readily take up or put down, which occupies your mind without overstraining it-indeed, quite the contrary, it will tend to keep the mind fit by feeding it something of interest when it is thouroughly tired. To find such an activity, all you need to do is not look too hard for it, which would spoil all the charm. For that matter, you should have more than one such interest--three or four would not be too many, but one would be too few. The diversity is immensely helpful; we must not feel nailed down to a single chore. . .
Do not fret that circumstances allow you to do only so much, that at this rate it will take you ten years, and so on and so on. Love your new chore for itself. Let it be potent and restoring and satisfying for you in and of itself. Let yourself enjoy it without feeling too vexed that you cannot make everyone else enjoy it as much as you would like. One step leads to another. Who can help but feel the stimulus a man exudes who in his inner life is so very much alive that he seems to carry within him a whole world in which he expands and flourishes?"
From: A Student's Guide to Intellectual Work, by Jean Guitton

Guitton's Quotes of Merit

Quoted in: A Student's Guide to Intellectual Work:

Regarding the student's workplace--"Some need an atmosphere....with books, papers, and a disorder in the midst of which, as Victor Hugo put it, their inspiration "squats."

"Tolerate nothing near you, Ruskin said, that you do not find either useful or beautiful."

"Let us dispense with all automatic solutions," Foch used to tell his classes at the War College. "Let us first have general principles, then let us apply these principles to the case at hand, which is always new and fresh, and let us keep asking ourselves the question that the mind tends to neglect: What is the objective?"

"You must keep telling yourselves that in your work every [delay]--assuming that the work is soundly launched--represents one more "chance to reap ripe fruit." One bitter day Sainte-Beuve wrote in his diary: 'To ripen, O, to ripen! One grows tough here, rotten there, but one does not ripen.'"

"I do not know of any finished work," Valery said once, "I know only of abandoned work."

"Subdue your thirst for books," Marcus Aurelius said, "so that you may die not babbling but at peace."

Why can't these people learn to speak English?

I offer the following quote from William Barclay's A Spiritual Autobiography, without comment, seeing as how I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about:
"I remember on one of the occasions we were in London together [my father] took me to the Oval, and we saw Jack Hobbs out for 96 to Joe Hulme in the last over of the day, as he tried to hit a four to get his hundred before stumps were drawn."

The Importance of Learning Without Understanding

ThisWeekWith.....Jean Guitton:
"Form and content must arise out of chaos and indolence via the same effort. Often it happens that content proceeds from form, or so the poets seem to be saying when they speak of their work. And since you have less power over ideas than over words (because ideas are few, abstract, and desembodied), you often make the idea sound forth by pressing on the keyboard of language.
This suggests that when a child is still so small that he does not yet have enough ideas, the greatest help you can give him is to people his memory with beautiful forms; for the moment the forms will be void but later they will summon up for him both meaning and criteria of usage. The prerequisite for being original is to know your own language well; that is, to have mastered its established structures. This is why all classical, formal instruction may often require the student to learn without understanding, why it is addressed not to comprehension but to the cadences of memory. Certainly, you must also awaken sensation, develop and guide initiative, help the student to get the feel of things, but he would have to be a young genius to sense that his most profitable exercise is the "learning by heart" he so dreads. Yet if the son of man does not have one or two languages at his command, he will not rejoice in his world. He will be like a blind man, for he will possess things but he will not possess the Word, which is the light of all things."
A Student's Guide to Intellectual Work, p.124

One-liners from Jean Guitton

Highlights from: A Student's Guide to Intellectual Work by Jean Guitton:

The heaviest burden for the spirit is not to know what should be done.

The golden rule of intellectual work can be put thus: tolerate neither half-work nor half-rest. Give yourself totally or withhold yourself absolutely. Never allow the two to overlap.

You find the aides you deserve.

There is no such thing as preliminaries in work or in love.

Actually, the thing that should arrest your attention is a fact illuminated by an idea or an idea incarnated in a fact.

The great boon of sleep is to avoid disproportion.

Any and all precision represents a victory.

Genuine originality develops in response to cultivation and not in response to a void;

Waiting for inspiration is a futile exercise.

There is a great difference between the book that is loaned to you and the book that belongs to you.

You must read novels to learn the meaning of your own life and the lives of those around you, for the dullness of daily routine masks it.

To create is to renounce infinite possibilities in order to retain only one.

Thought is a confession.

Immediate success is a bad sign.

Accept your limitations on every side. Limits give form, and form is a condition of plenitude.

Cherish all that is genuine, and because of this love be on your guard not to associate exclusively with intelligent people.

This week with Jean Guitton

"Has it ever occurred to you how much a person could learn from one single experience that would be repeated again and again but in different ways throughout a lifetime? Very likely this idea lies behind the familiar expression "by thinking about it all the time." Look at those painters who have constantly dealt with the same theme, painted the same face or the same tree, and who in that one thing, offered so abundantly, never despaired of reaching the universal.

The flair of genius consists in detecting and keeping an eye on particular things that contain a potential universal and which through accumulated analogies can greatly enlarge our knowledge."

Jean Guitton, A Student's Guide to Intellectual Work. p.43.

It occurred to me, upon reading this little book for the first time, how much I learned from the single experience of reading it; and how I should probably read it again and again throughout my lifetime. I don't think Guitton had the reading of his book in mind when he made the point, and I don't know how to do it "in different ways" (read it in the original French?). Perhaps the passing of time and accumulated life experience and other reflections would make each reading "a different way".

Probably more to his point would be Monet's cathedrals and gardens or, more substantively, the clowns, prostitutes and Passion of the Christ paintings of Guitton's Catholic countryman, George Rouault.