The Melancholy Korean

aybe you’ve had this experience. There’s this girl, see. She’s cute, smart, bien élevée. She exercises a lot, always a good sign. She likes to read books, an even better sign. Naturally, you like her. There’s one thing. She’s a little chilly on the friendliness front. Not snotty, exactly, just a little, well, distant. It’s not serious enough to dissuade you, since you know reserve is often a consequence of a sheltered upbringing—inexperience about the world taking the form of insecurity in it—and you also know it’s better to lose one’s innocence slowly (if at all) than to gain experience too quickly: there’s no one more loathsome at a party than the world-weary sophisticate. Besides, you like the challenge. You think you can warm her up, get her to unbend, relax a little. And even if you don’t succeed, she’s worth the effort. Because you think she’s the bee’s knees. Cream of the cream. A pearl. (Or, since it sounds better in Italian, una perla.) And so, when she asks for help in moving, you immediately volunteer. Time to make a move.

oving boxes, you remember too late in the late afternoon sun, is not a particularly enjoyable task. The tripartite move, down and up several flights of stairs, to and from a truck, back and forth from a storage unit, is worse, and, were it not for the presence of your Lady in Need, you might even be bad-tempered about the situation. But she seems happy you’re there, especially since her other friends couldn’t be bothered to show up. Certainly, there aren’t other Knights to the Rescue on site pressing their claims. Five hours later, half-faint from heat stroke, with a dehydration headache pressing against your temples and dining room table splinters in your hands, on the subway going home you recall the day’s final scene, how she came up to you and held you close in a hug, the way her hair, even after the long day, still smelled like freshly cut lilacs—unsurprising, since someone had to sit and watch the truck, and it wasn’t you. “You’re so awesome,” she said. The next day, Your Awesomeness is having trouble with the morning routine, some kind of muscle failure that prevents you from lifting a toothbrush up to your teeth, but what are the trivialities of dental hygiene next to the exhilarating promise of a date in her apartment? The home cooked meal, a few days later, served on a familiar wooden table (your obstinate adversary tranformed by candles and flowers into romantic ally) follows a familiar pattern: wine, greenmarket salad, laughter, rustic baguette, witty repartee, and so on, until that moment, as the dessert plates dry on the dish rack, and it’s just the two of you, lingering over the coffee, meal safely out of the way, she feels comfortable enough, good friends that you are, to tell you about her secret crush on Marco, a name, you realize appromiately half an hour later (good manners and your pride having prevented an earlier departure) which you could have spelled, given one letter for each flight of stairs you carried her belongings, a name uncomfortably close to your own: Moron.

(Daily Drop Cap by Jessica Hische)

ducation tells. But not in the way depicted in the popular arts. Educated people in movies, in magazines, in commercial fiction, in sitcoms are instantly identifiable: they wear glasses and poorly tailored clothes, are sexually frustrated and verbally diarrhetic, and, generally, harmless. Exceptions to the last might include the bookish, hair-in-a-tight bun, pencil-skirted librarian, quiet and reserved, until you get her into bed, when she turns into Kuchuk Hanem (“a regal-looking creature, large-breasted, fleshy, with slit nostrils, enormous eyes, and magnificent knees; when she danced there were formidable folds of flesh on her stomach. She began by perfuming our hands with rosewater. Her bosom gave off a smell of sweetened turpentine… When Kuchuk undressed to dance… I spare you any description… I write too poorly… I sucked her furiously, her body was covered with sweat… she snored, her head against my arm…” — G Flaubert) but this figure, the Virgin Whore, exists more commonly in the male imagination than in real life. 

ortunately, these descriptions are nothing more than inaccurate satires conceived to soothe the egos of the ignorant. The truly educated know what Socrates knew: they know nothing. Consequently, they are humble, since they acknowledge the vastness and complexity, and ultimate unknowability, of the universe; they are generous, since they understand knowledge is not a form of private property to be fenced off and protected, but, like happiness, a blessing that flourishes through sharing; and they are gracious, since they are grateful, every moment of every second, for the poetry that graces and enriches the experience of life. In contrast, the ignorant are loud with their opinions, close-minded, set-in-their-ways, they are boorish and boring, blowhards—lots of noise, little significance. Sophomores, high school and college, often think they know more than they do (ask any teacher) and confirm the truth of Pope’s observation that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” They are fools. (A fool is someone who thinks she knows something.) The biggest fools, dogmatic atheists, we can find, ironically, among the most educated in society: university professors. (A dogmatist is someone who definitely knows something.) The famous atheists, like Betrand Russell or Richard Dawkins, have sharp, formidable intellects, impeccable academic credentials and an eviscerating eloquence.  They command authority. For their achievments, they demand, and receive, respect. They sit at High Table, and, among those other notables and most honored in our society, they have pride of place. Because these are men who know. 

(Daily Drop Cap by Jessica Hische)

ritic Edmund Wilson on Somerset Maugham:

Mr. Maugham, it seems to me, is not, in the sense of “having the métier,” really a writer at all.  There are real writers, like Balzac and Dreiser, who may be said to write badly.  Dreiser handles words abominably, but his prose has a compelling rhythm, which is his style and which induces the emotions that give his story its poetic meaning.  But Mr. Maugham, who use of words is banal, has no personal rhythm at all, nor can he create for us a poetic world. 

Somerset Maugham, one of the most successful, beloved and highly paid writers of his generation, did not disagree: 

I am in the very first row of the second-raters.

oubtless, we can read for aesthetic pleasure, so that we might apprehend beauty, a far different proposition from mere entertainment.  Stephen Dedalus: 

Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical.  It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic basis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty. 

But we also read with our hearts.  And, as with any endeavor that involves our emotions, as with relationships, say, we can learn as much from the bad ones as the good.  Even the worst relationships have their happy days, those indelible moments inscribed on our souls that are able to elicit from us a rueful smile.

One of the books that shaped my sensibility.  One of the first serious crushes that cut a wound on my soul.  Considered “terrifyingly banal” by E. Wilson and his set, impossible to read, boring.  They aren’t wrong.  Still, I don’t regret our time together.

(Daily Drop Cap by Jessica Hische)

f you are the kind of person who pinches the cheeks of young children, or speaks to them in an incomprehensible nonsense language “ooh, baby make-a stinky?” that rightly calls into question your intelligence, judgment and taste, or someone who treats the young like dolls and imposes on them all manner of nauseatingly “cute” outfits, stop. Step back. Unfit for society, you are an almost certain danger to its youngest, most impressionable members. Under no circumstances become a teacher.

The education of children is too important to be left to the sentimental, often childless, self-proclaimed “lover of children.”  The task requires iron, not syrup.  If, on the other hand, you eat nails for breakfast and can break bricks with your fists, if you have the endurance of an ultra-marathoner, the discipline of a Buddhist master, nerves stronger than tempered steel, and a hatred of ignorance so fierce you often find yourself awake at night, too enraged to sleep, because your business school friends insist on saying “irregardless,” then you may be equal to the demands of teaching children.

t is a tragedy of unmitigable proportions, on par with the invention of the atomic bomb and the ubiquity of television sets, that education has become a subject studied in graduate school.  Academics, more than most, are prone to fads, navel-gazing, obfuscation through grammatically tangled prose, and worship of big-time celebrity—values directly opposed to the humane, liberal spirit that has animated education in the West for five hundred years since the rebirth of its culture during the Renaissance.

Lytton Strachey quotes him ironically, but old Squire Brown succinctly defined the purpose of education:

I don’t care a straw for Greek particles, or the digamma; no more does his mother. What is he sent to school for? … If he’ll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a Christian, that’s all I want.  

Properly understood, the primary purpose of childhood education is the formation of good character.  Good character, in turn, consists of three things: modesty, integrity and fearlessness. For “educators” who disagree, whether on political or personal grounds, or because they wish to continue peddling their snake oil to unsuspecting parents, ruthless Guantanamo Bay interrogation is too good a fate.  

Time does not work backwards.  Lost time is forever lost.  So, what penalty could possibly be harsh enough for incompetent teachers?  The sour fruits of a student’s poor schooling are narrowed horizons, frustrated potential and colorless dreams.  No prison term, no matter its length or severity, could ever equal these unforgivable crimes.  

(Daily Drop Cap by Jessica Hische)