Tha Is

I highly recommend the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, which is short and wonderful. I’m only half through, but what I’ve especially liked so far are:

–Mill’s home schooling–it’s absolutely laughably incredible, except that it’s true. And after describing the most extraordinarily extensive pre-adolescent education most of us have ever heard of, he says, in effect, “And I was just an ordinary kid–no great student or anything.”

–watching a brilliant mind formed by the reason-worshipping Enlightenment coming to grips with Romantic rehabilitation of feeling–and YOU ARE THERE!

–watching this brilliant mind infected by the great leveler depression;

–Mill as a link between Enlightenment reform movements and what seem the more modern reform movements of socialism/anarchism/communism. The French Revolution always seemed “back then” to me, whereas Marx and the nineteenth-century socialists always seemed on a tight continuum with our own time, no doubt because of Marxism’s huge role in the twentieth century, including my own half of it. (Mill thought socialism impractical, but it was an important branch of radical thought in his time.)

Bishop Grantly died as he had lived, peaceably, slowly, without pain and without excitement. The breath ebbed from him almost imperceptibly, and for a month before his death, it was a question whether he were alive or dead. In Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, from his series of novels about local British church politics, the first chapter is “Who Will Be the Next Bishop?”  I just began, and I was chortling in my joy at the old bishop’s lingering death before I’d read a page, and within five I was warmly ensconced in the diocese wondering who will be the next bishop?  There’s none of Dickens’s breathtaking, earthshaking insanity in Trollope.  He’s more of an Austenian close observer and fine craftsperson.  Who knows how much fun “3 or 4 families in a country village” can be until they read Pride and Prejudice?  Ditto for the British clergy and Trollope.

Home schooling best-case scenario, from the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, Chapter 1.  Start on page 5 and continue till sufficiently impressed. Mill was born in 1806, so he was six or seven in 1813, the year mentioned in the text.

Let there be blog.