Regarding Children

Do you recall the accompanist job at an elementary school I mentioned a few months ago? This week I concluded my duties there. I must say it has been a surprisingly good experience.

Chief among its benefits is that I no longer view children as an annoyance. They can be annoying, to be sure, but I now realize that this is not their default state. C.S.L. observes that it is the stupidest children who are most childish, just as it is the stupidest grown-ups who are the most grown-up. I am inclined to agree. Childish children can at least be improved; there is little hope for the incorrigibly adult. The best thing about working with the young is that it keeps one honest. (Or, at least it should.) Children are like animals in that they are acutely sensitive to — though not, usually, consciously aware of — a person's mood. They recognize mendacity, unlike so many adults, because they have not yet become inured to it. They almost always respond to kindness and enthusiasm.

For any of my readers who dislike children, I'll say this: you probably don't dislike them as much as you think. They're not all so irritating as those you see in public. (Young children are worst-behaved when with their parents, and adolescents are worst-behaved when with their peers. These are exactly the people one generally sees them with in public.)

I can say without exaggeration that this job has been a blessing. Of course, it's easy for me to say that: I experienced all the best things about teaching (seeing progress, nurturing what will become life-long interests, receiving the guileless admiration of children) without any of the bad things (disciplining children, dealing with ignorant or unreasonable parents). But in any case, I can now understand why people get such satisfaction from teaching young children.

Knoxville: Summer of 1915

In this time of leaving, becoming aware of all the places and things and people at Notre Dame I will see no more, I have spent some time thinking about those other times that are now lost to me: my undergraduate years, high school (however unpleasant), even my childhood. In a short while my years at Notre Dame will join those others, to add to the pain of recollection (which, happy or not, is painful; that is the nature of nostalgia).

Ah, but now it is nearly summer, the part of the year I remember best from my childhood. (For all my love of Rilke and autumn and that sort of Sehnsucht, there is something more personal about the memories of summer.) I suspect it was the same for James Agee, who wrote about his own childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee:

It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by.
...
On the rough wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine... with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth, and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.

May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble, and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

That is from Agee's essay, "Knoxville: Summer of 1915", which was later selected to serve as the introduction to his semi-autobiographical (posthumous) novel, A Death in the Family.

Samuel Barber set much of Agee's essay to music in his Knoxville: Summer of 1915. I am not sure which is my favorite recording of this admirable work (it is probably either that of Eleanor Steber or Leontyne Price). But in any case I will refer you here, where you can listen to it. (That particular recording is not special, but is the most convenient and legal to come by.)

I have been listening to the piece many times in the last few weeks. It resonates with the sense of loss I already have begun to feel about this particular place, these particular people. Oh, the terrible sweetness of nostalgia! — nostalgia, even, as in this prose poem and this composition, for a time I myself have never known and will never know. Discussing the piece in a 1949 radio interview, Barber noted its expression of "a child's feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep." Do you recall these feelings? I do. Sometimes I wonder whether there's much difference at all between the insecurities of childhood and the insecurities of the present.

Graduate Transience

As for the graduate student, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

In these last few weeks at Notre Dame, now that my recital is over and I have only seven more pages to write about Sarum chant and its influence on English polyphony, things have turned bittersweet. ("Bittersweet": another overused word. Oh well.) One becomes aware of how brief two years actually is. Yesterday I had my last class; today I had my last lesson and cantored for the last time at the Basilica. Wandering around before Mass, I saw some saints in the windows I hadn't noticed before: Margaret (with snake), Mechtilde, Jerome. At lunch I happened to run into some fellow sacred music students, and afterwards we basked in the sun and shot the breeze, enjoying some Gemütlichkeit. (An aside: the first recorded use of "shoot the breeze" is from 1941, but beyond that nobody is quite sure where the expression comes from. How many other etymologies have we lost?) This is exactly the sort of thing one can do in a community, and it is exactly the sort of thing that is cut short when graduate study concludes and we scatter to the ends of the earth. How can we hope to have real community without some semblance of rootedness? The Benedictine vows of stability, conversion of manners, and obedience are much better things than we give them credit for.

G.M. Hopkins, "Spring"

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring —
         When weeds in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
         Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
         The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
         The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
         A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. — Have, get, before it cloy,
         Before it cloud, Christ, lord and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
         Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.