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The Teacher’s Work Should Be Largely Negative

In any case, I believe the teacher’s work should be largely negative. He can’t put the gift into you, but if he finds it there, he can try to keep it from going in an obviously wrong direction. We can learn how not to write, but this is a discipline that does not simply concern writing itself but concerns the whole intellectual life. A mind cleared of false emotion and false sentiment and egocentricity is going to have at least those roadblocks removed from its path. If you don’t think cheaply, then there at least won’t be the quality of cheapness in your writing, even though you may not be able to write well. The teacher can try to weed out what is positively bad, and this should be the aim of the whole college.

-Flannery O’Connor, The Nature and Aim of Fiction, from Mystery and Manners, pp. 83-84

Helpful as usual.

Neil Postman made the argument that the job of the teacher is to weed out stupidity: like a doctor, whose business is more the cure of illness than the positive advancement of help, the teacher’s job has to do with fighting against stupidity as much or more than actually cultivating pure intelligence. What is intelligence anyway?

You can’t make someone into a genius, but you can generally discourage them from being an idiot (especially if you catch stupidity early enough). Much of my own education has followed this pattern. Many lessons have slowly done away with a lot of my stupidity. I’m hoping to get rid of a lot more before my time is done.

But the main point is that learning what not to do if often as important as learning what to do.

They Don’t Stifle Enough of Them

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

-Flannery O’Connor, The Nature and Aim of Fiction, from Mystery and Manners, pp. 84-95

This could perhaps apply to more than just writers (as is the case with pretty much everything Ms. O’Connor says about writers).

Aiming for Truth with the Imagination

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and mode. The person who aims after art in his work aims after truth, in an imaginative sense, no more and no less. St. Thomas said that the artist is concerned with the good of that which is made…

-Flannery O’Connor, The Nature and Aim of Fiction, from Mystery and Manners, p.65

This is pretty much in line with C.S. Lewis’ famous line that the imagination is the ‘organ of meaning.’ The imagination seeks to grasp for, and embody, truth through metaphors and story. The good stories still deal with the age-old issues relating to the truth of reality. This is a good quote to keep right next to Lewis.’

Are you cultivating an imagination bent on grappling with truth? Are you a metaphor-maker? Are you content to live with abstractions? The word, says Dorothy Sayers, always needs to become flesh.

Your Name at the Top of the Page

I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a ‘killing.’ They are interested in being a writer, not in writing. They are interested in seeing their names at the top of something printed, it matters not what. And they seem to feel that this can be accomplished by learning certain things about working habits and about markets and about what subjects are currently acceptable.

-Flannery O’Connor, The Nature and Aim of Fiction, from Mystery and Manners, p.64

I found a lot of Ms. O’Connor’s points to be applicable to preaching and preachers as well. This is only the first example. Everybody wants a paycheck; not everybody wants to work. Everybody wants notoriety; not everybody wants to take notes. Everybody wants a gimmick. Everybody wants to figure out the market and opt for the easy thing that evokes some sort of reaction.

I’m reading nothing these days on the internet other than tirades – from both sides – about a trans on a magazine cover. That’s way too easy. Write something that will change people’s lives. Write something that will make people think. But, wait, that would actually take some hard work.

I say this as a note to self, really.