The reason you can't trust tests
to reveal knowledge is that knowledge comes only when you know the meaning of
the words used. When I was nine
years old I could ace the test on the Ten Commandments because I had memorized
them, but I would have flunked if I had been asked what some of them referred
to. Adultery? I searched the other side of my
brain. Nothing there. When I asked an adult (naturally) what I
got was more words, and then more words.
I don't think you could say I had
acquired any "knowledge" of adultery until the adult got to a word
where I could say, "Oh yes, I've done that or felt that or seen that or
thought that." And then it
would be pretty low-grade knowledge, because I'd still have to get the analogy,
or analogies, before I "got" adultery.
Teachers help you do that, and I
saw a stunning example in my seventh-grade (12-year-old) Sunday School
class. There had been a big rumpus
in the papers about "adulterated foods" (this was the year of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic
Act), how manufacturers were putting acid and stuff into our wholesome jelly
made from the pure juices of fruits the farmers sent them. "Do you know what it means to
adulterate foods?" Did we
ever. You put something yucky into
something pure. "Well, adultery
is like that. It's putting an
impurity into something that's supposed to be pure — a marriage."
Well that, getting one important
word understood, was a terrific step in our education, and it took a
while. I don't know how you'll
ever know it's been taken on the kind of tests I hear they're using in schools
now, but I do know that it will pay off.
The students in that class are on their way to understanding Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, and to being able to write about them knowledgeably,
as students who have memorized the right words to say about them are not.
In college I was expert in the
right words. I'd observed them
closely in the textbook. This one
goes here and that one goes there and you've got the Renaissance. And I know all about it, as you can see
by my answer, where I have them all in the right place. I had been well taught.
No, I wouldn't be well taught
until more teachers did what my Sunday School teacher did: filled one word, and
then another, and another, with meaning.
"Sophomoric"?
That's Hotspur, "an all-state halfback stuck on himself." Like water into an empty can. No student of a human subject is ever
well taught until that is done, by herself or another.
But how about the untaught, or
lightly taught, or self-taught prodigies?
Doesn't their example let us skip this, or shorten it?
No. They, mostly in math and physics, are moving around empty
cans. Chess pieces. The cans of literature-readers have to be
filled, with life, and that takes time.
History-readers too. Consider
my experience with "sovereignty." When I come across it now I think of something very much
needed in countries plagued by warlords and bandits, like France in the tenth
century, or Italy in the sixteenth. I think of how that need can be exploited. I think of the risks of violating a
nation's sovereignty, and taking it over yourself, and being criticized by
Putin and Xi Jinping, who want us out.
But in the first history book I read "sovereign" meant King
George III, somebody all good Americans wanted thrown out. In the next book "autocrat,"
offered as its synonym, took me to a host of foreign sovereigns, all of whom
needed, by all good people, to be thrown out. That can
labeled "sovereign" needed a lot of filling. Now it's so heavy I can barely move it
around.
Then there's the word
"oblivion." I came to it
through "oblivious," a word I, a daydreamer, heard applied frequently
to my condition. Unaware, out of
it. Then "oblivion,"
naming the state the dead were in.
Of course. Irremediably
unaware, permanently out of it. Then
a worse state, being lost to other
people's memory, no matter how aware they were.
I, soon aided by poets, was moving
toward Ozymandias, the king who fought the loss so pathetically (leaving us
only a few stone legs and a head to go on) that he came to the attention of
Percy Shelley. I could
return to Ozymandias, and to "oblivion," every time I viewed a relic
or fingered an arrow head.
Oblivion was an awful place and you didn't just "fall" into
it; you could "drift" or "slide" or "fade" into
it (as, an NYR piece assured me, George Romney was going to do). Still you could, if you were lucky, be
"plucked from it," as by museum curators. Or learn (from Proust) how to "rescue" something
from it. Oh, my wide reading
taught me so much. After years of
it I thought my can labeled "oblivion" was about as full as it could
get.
Then, in planning a eulogy for my
80-year-old younger brother, I found myself wondering whether to include, among
the people who had played a part in his and my childhood, mention of Annie, a
spinster who, living with our grandmother, took care of us on visits. This was in the days when every family
harbored, somewhere in the house, a feeble parent or a damaged sibling. Annie's damage was in the brain, done
when she was five by an untreated fever.
She had played only a very small part, and for a very brief time, in my
brother's life.
Small? It was nothing. She made nothing happen. She couldn't.
Things only happened to her — like getting bit by the child she was
tending in the baby carriage.
Because she couldn't read she had to turn us over to somebody else when
we came running with the Sunday funnies.
OK, not worth a mention. But then it occurred to me that if I
didn't say something about Annie she would be totally forgotten. Don and I were the last people alive to
know her. When I died she would be
lost to all memory. Plunged into oblivion. And I had thought
my "oblivion" can was full.
What I knew of what the word meant
to others, poets, added to the seriousness of it. Annie had been "unbodied, unsoul’d, unheard, unseene"
for years. Soon she would be
unremembered.
The pang of it prompted a closer
review. Annie had lived a life
that, to my grown-up eyes, had only one memorable action in it. (Well, two if you count saying your
nightly prayers in Swedish with the window open, thereby amusing those of us bedded
on the porch.) When, at the age of
about eleven, I was in the worst pickle of my life, it was Annie who saved
me. My cousin, my brother, and I,
three years older than they, had been playing on the fire-escapes on the back
side of the buildings up on the next street, the big, commercial Michigan
Avenue. This, though we didn't
know it, took us into the neighborhood of one of the gangs Chicago boys were
always forming, even at that time.
They didn't like it that we were playing on their fire escapes, and they
were going to make us, through me the biggest one, pay. I had to fight one of their guys, right
there in the alley. Just when my
ability to hold them off with talk was about to reach its limit the boy I was
talking to, their leader, looking over my shoulder, said, "Jesus, here
comes his mom!" There was
Annie, waving a big broom, with my cousin right behind her. He had sneaked off and cried for
help. The young Southsiders ran in
all directions.
That great image of her care for
us brought back lesser ones. Annie
adding "sweetheart" — or "sweedart" — to everything she
addressed to us. Facing the
funnies it was "Ask Ida, sweetheart." With a jacket patiently held out it was, "Hand here,
sweetheart." An adult might
have seen how much frustrated love for children she was expressing but we
children were oblivious to it.
The pang of it all brought her
back into my eulogy. But no, a
eulogy, somebody else's eulogy, is no
place to satisfy such a pang.
John Updike has some great things
to say about goodness. When
Miriam, Rabbit's sister (in Rabbit Run),
extends her bangled arm toward the baby's cheek he says, "Goodness, like a
gas, filled the house," or something like that. (My memory is not so good. I have forgotten the place where he, after maybe over-detailing
a moment in Shillington, says apologetically that he's doing it "so that
this goodness not be lost.")
The deepening of my understanding
of "oblivion" made me
worry more about the loss of Annie's goodness. Lost, lost, eternally lost. I ended by including her in the eulogy. The alternative, putting her story in
an email to everybody was, I now think, probably better. Except that email gets lost. Digital storage can't be trusted. Will family members make a hard copy? I see that that might well depend on how fully they understand the word "oblivion." A test of knowledge after all!
