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0:00
[MUSIC PLAYING] JUSTIN A. JACKSON: I think we rush through things too quickly. I think now as readers, we are consumers, that the only reason we read is to consume information or to consume the Odyssey so that I've read it. But I don't think that's why we ought to be reading the Odyssey, that we read the Odyssey because we've been told by people we trust, maybe even just time itself, that there's something important that it gives back to us, that there's something to learn there.
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But in order to do it, we need time. We need patience. We need a time to meditate on these things. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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Hello, and welcome to our discussion today on the importance of literature. This is a discussion I think that's very important, especially when we consider K through 12 education and the role that literature will play in helping to shape the habit of mind for our children, perhaps even a disposition of their soul towards literature itself. So when we ask a question of what is the importance of literature for me, a literature professor, it almost seems axiomatic.
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One wouldn't question that there is an importance to literature. I can't imagine my life without literature. I cannot imagine my life-- in some ways, I can't imagine it without having ever been exposed to Homer, or Dostoevsky, or Franz Kafka, or biblical literature, not for even religious reasons but just for the beauty of the language and the poetry itself. So when we ask the question, why study literature? It's both an easy question, and it's a difficult question. Why study it?
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And I think another question goes along with this. Why study literature? And I think that becomes a question of how to study literature, that when we want to ask the questions of the importance of literature, sometimes we have to ask, well, what is our approach to this? And as teachers, we have to constantly keep in mind this question when we go in front of our students. We should ask them all the time, why are we doing this? Why are we reading Homer? Why are we reading Virgil?
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Why are we reading Chaucer? When we ask that question, the next question that should come to mind is we tackle the why, because the students will give us really big answers to this, usually these wonderfully humanistic answers, because there's something of the human in all of these ages and all of these times and all of these cultures which speaks to all of us. That's absolutely correct. It's a big answer to the big question. But the one thing we don't want to lose out
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on as teachers of literature, as students of literature is the question of how to read literature, how to teach literature. Because here when we start to think about the how alongside of the why, we'll see that each one of them informs the other. And that we'll start to understand literature is a gift, that when you open up that book you understand that in some way, shape, or form this is a conversation than an author has started with you and with others. And we take this as a gift.
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And the best thing to do with a gift and for a gift is to return thanks. And the one way in which you thank an author and a poet is to read his or her works seriously, deliberately. And so what we'll find when we start to approach the questions of why study literature and how to study literature is that we'll understand that we enter into a world of wonder. This, I would say, is the habit of mind, the disposition of the soul that we want to introduce our students to, is wonder.
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When they open a book, it should not be simply for utilitarian reasons-- to finish a book report or to learn something about ancient Greece. Rather, they will be struggling in encountering the ideas that really have shaped civilizations-- theological ideas, philosophical ideas. And maybe perhaps in this state of wonder, wondering what else is the author going to give to me, they may, in fact, learn something of themselves. That the gift of literature may not
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be just that piece of literature that is given to us, but that maybe literature gives something of ourselves to us as we approach literature. OK, so before we begin this question of the importance or why or even how to study literature, I want to lay out some other good reasons for studying literature, ones which are very, very common-- perhaps maybe even too common, these approaches to literature. And I want to make the argument that perhaps these approaches ought to be secondary.
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And these are going to be approaches to literature that everyone is familiar with, but I want to say that these ought to be put on the back burner. And then I will work through a positive explanation of what we do with literature. So first, the via negativa, a negative way. And again, I don't mean to disparage these approaches to literature. I use these approaches to literature, but I want us not to think of them as foundational, but as secondary. So the first one, why study literature?
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We do not study literature so that we can see this work as a historical or cultural artifact. That is to say that we don't study Homer to learn something about ancient Greece. We don't study Shakespeare simply to learn something about Renaissance England. We don't study Dostoevsky to learn something about 19th century Russia. One no doubt gains insights into these historical time periods and these cultures when one studies Dostoevsky, for example.
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And furthermore, I believe one can learn something about that piece of literature through studying 19th century Russia. So I don't mean to isolate literature in a vacuum and say there is nothing to learn from culture, there's nothing to learn from its historical setting. Nevertheless, what I want to say is this is not the primary reason we study literature, that literature is not simply an object of history, an object of culture. A real human person with a real human brain
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and a real human soul produced this, wrestled with him or herself in producing this. And it is there in that work that what we want to encounter, that kind of poetic vision of the author. So step one, not a historical/cultural artifact, though that approach is helpful.
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The second way in which we don't approach literature as a foundational way or fundamental approach is becoming more and more prevalent, I find, with the students who are coming in from high school as they come to Hillsdale College. Our primary reason for studying literature is not to reflect on our own culture or, even worse, to get students to reflect on themselves or their own lives. And you can see how delicious this is, because now literature becomes relevant if it's all about me.
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What can I learn about myself? What can I learn about my own contemporary culture in reading Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, for example?
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It's kind of nice for a teacher-- whenever these students are pressing us, why are we studying this piece of literature? Sometimes we want to go to the historical or the cultural route because it gives that literature immediate significance, that we study it because it teaches us something there. Ah, it's a wellspring of information about ancient Greece. It's easy for us, then, to justify teaching literature in this way. Even easier to justify is to say, well, dear students,
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we can learn something about ourselves. Remember all of those fights you had with your brother and sister? Oh, read King Lear. That'll teach you about sibling rivalry. That will teach you something about family hatred and how destructive it is. Oh, here, read something about Joseph and his brothers. If you really want to know about jealousy and hatred, here, read this, just so you can relate it to your own lives. Again, is this important? Absolutely.
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I've learned more about myself reading Dostoevsky than from reading any other author out there. He seems to peel away the layers for me of my own selfishness, my own rivalries that I have there. But again, I'm still asserting, this is not the primary reason we're reading literature. This is an effect of reading literature, not the cause for reading literature. And the third way via negativa-- I mentioned this today, and this one's going to be controversial.
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But since nobody's here to raise objections or to throw things at me, I'm happy to go forward. And the third reason I want to say that we do not read literature for a fundamental reason is we don't read literature for a moral lesson. We're not always trying to eke out that moral lesson from a piece of literature. We don't read Homer's Odyssey as if it were a fable, waiting for just that little nugget, that little kernel to say, it's really wrong to sack and pillage and plunder.
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We don't need that moral lesson to then say, home is a good place. That's not why we're reading it. It's not there to instruct us, not to instruct us in how to live that good life. It may, in fact, do this. I don't know of any greater moral teachers for me than various pieces of literature. Much of my life in the ethical decisions I have to make on a day-to-day basis are informed by pieces of literature. My love of home life has been informed
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by pieces of literature and the praise of the home front. And I'll give you two examples today at the end of the lecture. So all of this is to say these three components are all very important. They have something to do with the study of literature, but I want to argue that the importance of literature does not rest primarily in any one of these three things. So then the next question arises. So then why study literature? And quite honestly, if these are the three main ways in which
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the vast majority of you have studied literature, you may be wondering, well, what in the world is left? You've taken away the historical/cultural-- at least, not taken away. You've put it on the back burner. You've put on the back burner personal reflection or contemporary cultural reflection. And you've put on the back burner the moral lesson that literature teaches us. So what else is left? It's an earth-shattering theory that we read Homer, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky simply
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to enter into the world of Homer, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky. This is why we read literature. We read it to be able to engage in their own moral or maybe even immoral imagination. We try to encounter what it is they're wrestling with, with regards to the human soul, to the interaction between human person and human person, to relationships of the divine and the human. And we play by their rules in this universe. And by the way, we may not like their rules and the universe
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which they present to us. Nevertheless, we learn by them. We learn their poetic techniques, and this becomes so very important. We learn how they craft their stories.
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This brings us into such intimacy with these authors.
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When you learn how these poets, how these novelists, how these playwrights craft their stories, when you start to see Dostoevsky's poetics and Homer's poetics-- when you start to do that, then what you realize is that you're no longer just encountering a world in Homer and Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, in Julian of Norwich. You're not just encountering a world. You may, in fact, in a piece of literature, be encountering a human person. And I don't mean the author that's
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reflected in the piece of literature, but that the piece of literature starts to take on a face, that the piece of literature itself has almost a personality, the way in which it tries to express itself to you. And the beauty of all of this-- and all of you are familiar with this phenomenon-- is that a piece of literature is somewhat like a river. You go back to it, and you can go to the same place, but it's always changing. It's always moving.
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It is in some ways-- when I say it's like a human person, so I'm trying to expand the idea that it's just a world or a universe, but that it's like a human person, that you enter into a relationship with it, is that it changes along with you. The Odysseus I met when I was 20 is very, very different from the Odysseus I met when I was 40. The images that Julian of Norwich introduced to me when I was 23, those are so very different, even when I was 35.
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They change. Why? Well, we change. We notice things. We become close to this piece of literature. We notice all of its nooks and crannies. Again, I think it's important to think of it as a person, because as we get to grow and know a person, we start to learn their contours. We start to learn their nooks and crannies. We learn how to push their buttons, and even better, they learn how to push ours. This, then, becomes why we read a piece of literature.
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Too often we want to focus only on the big ideas. We want to wrestle. What are those big ideas that we've been working with for 3,000 years? Let's do it again. In some ways, it's easy to discuss a big idea, and the reason why is because you don't actually have to get into the nitty-gritty of epic poetry. You don't have to wrestle with epic simile. You don't really have to talk to the piece of literature when you deal with big ideas. Does that mean the big ideas are unimportant? Absolutely not.
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But I'll be honest. We can get those big ideas from SparkNotes. We can get the big ideas from Wikipedia. You can get the big ideas from just listening to a lecture like this. Well, those are the big ideas, and they're there for our taking. You can get the big ideas off just the back of this book. You can read the introduction and get the big ideas. And they're there for us all the time. We can get them from our teachers' summaries. You realize you could get the big idea of Homer
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by reading an abridged version of the Odyssey that has really not a whole heck of a lot to do with Homer's actual poem, but can incorporate the big ideas-- the importance of homecoming, the importance of cleverness, maybe the importance of moderation or restraint. You can do all of that in an abridged version that really has nothing to do with Homer's Odyssey. So we need to be careful of just focusing only on the big ideas. Does it make for fun classroom debate? Absolutely, no doubt about it.
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But that means we have to think long and hard and carefully about why we study literature. Is it simply to produce classroom debate to discuss big ideas? I would submit that it's not. We can do that without literature. That means we should be focusing on something in addition to the big ideas. Of course, we have to have the big ideas. It's impossible to read a piece of literature without stumbling upon the big ideas. We need to define those for the students, absolutely.
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But then we must turn our attention to ask about the way in which the literature presents and wrestles with the ideas. We have to ask questions about recurring images, about repetitions of lines. We have to be very careful as readers as we work through these things. We have to ask ourselves about the specific details in a poem, in a text, and ask, why is it arranged in this way? What's the effect that this has? What's the play here? We have to respect these works.
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We have to respect these authors and the gift that they've given to us by actually engaging in the particulars and in the specifics. And here I would like to say, in looking at the poet's craft-- that is, in looking at the specifics of this literature-- here is where we will find wonder. There isn't really wonder in the big ideas. Even wonder itself is a big idea.
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The wonder comes when we ask a very simple question, when you read the homecoming of Odysseus and the interaction with his wife Penelope when she finally discovers that it is, in fact, he, Odysseus, who's returned home, and they're both weeping tears. And it moves you-- if it moves you. And if it moves you, you have to ask one simple question to enter into the wonder of literature. Then you would enter into the importance of literature, and it's a simple question.
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How do these authors move us so? That's not the big ideas. They move us because of the use of the language which they use to express whatever it is those characters are going through, the arrangement of these details.
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If we can do this with our students, if we can force them to get past asking about the big ideas, if we can get them past asking about general questions and wanting to only relate it to a historical time period, or to relate it to themselves and their own experience-- if we can get past that, or maybe perhaps even work to that, then we will create a habit in our students of being actively silent. I like to think of good reading as being actively
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silent and pensive, to sit and read a passage and to reread it and to meditate upon it. We will create in our students a habit of always thinking, there's something more here. What is this author doing here? We will teach our students how to read, and I don't mean phonics. I mean how to really work through a text. We will teach them to do this at the feet of these masters.
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But this takes listening and contemplation. Oftentimes I like to remind my students-- when I'm in front of a class, they think of me, of course, as a teacher. Teach us about Homer. Sometimes the best thing I can do as a teacher is to just get out of the way of Homer and to force the students, with whatever assignments there are, with whatever exercises there are. We have to teach them to wrestle with Homer. I've done it my entire life. It's time for the students to have some fun.
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So not only do I not want to just give them the big ideas. I also don't want to go through all of the particulars for them. I want them to have to do it.
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And this takes patience on the part of students. There are no things to click on in epic poetry. There are no hyperlinks here. A student just has to go through and read a number of what appear to be digressions and epic similes, and that's hard work. It takes a whole lot of training students to be silent and to appreciate that silence when approaching this piece of literature.
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There's a story in the Talmud of a rabbi-- his name is Rabbah-- who, while studying Torah-- it has this picture of him studying Torah. And he's rubbing his ankle with his foot while he's just immersed in the study of Torah. And he rubs so much that his ankle starts to spurt blood, but he's just completely unaware. And I've always liked the idea of this rubbing on the ankle until it spurts blood. I like that idea of texts. I like to ask the students to rub on the texts
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until they bleed, to keep pushing on them. I ask them to wrestle with these texts, to push on the text, to see what it's trying to offer. And then I like to warn them, be careful. When you push on texts, they have a tendency to push back. You think you know Odysseus, and it turns out you don't know Odysseus. This has dawned on me in just the last two years, and I've been teaching the Odyssey for 20 years. And it just dawned on me two years ago, I really don't know this guy at all.
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He is so contradictory and he is so double-minded. I don't know what to do with him. I would like to be able to come to class and just say, here you go, students. Here's our black and white character. Either he's this or he's this, and it's that basic and that simple. But what I've discovered over the last couple of years is it's just not that easy. Homer has given us just a very complicated character. He has given us, perhaps, an actual, real human person in this epic poetry.
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And oftentimes what literary experts will tell you is, there aren't real people in epic poetry. They just conform to these basic poetic models of storytelling. I disagree with that. I see in Odysseus a real human person, flesh and blood. But I have only gotten to that because I keep pushing on it. But I let it push back on me. We cannot dictate to texts what they are going to give to us. We can. Don't get me wrong. We can, but we must not do this.
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We must let these texts be in their response to us. I must allow myself to be surprised by Odysseus. I must allow myself to be surprised when I think it turns out Penelope's smarter than he is. She outwits him by the end. I didn't really ever want to believe that. I've read some articles, maybe that's true, but, boy, in the last couple of years, I think that may be true. And it interests me. It interests me to an amazing length the way in which these details start to set up,
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that we may be set up for this. It's a long conversation that's going on here in the text and over a long time in my life. And this leads me to my last point, is that if we are going to emphasize the importance of literature, if we're both going to ask why study literature and then ask how to study literature, and if we're then going to try to point out for our students and model for our students why and how, then it's really up to the teacher to always be wrestling with the texts.
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You can't have what used to be called the yellow notes, notes that you took down that have become so old that they're just yellow now. You must dedicate yourself to rereading those texts along with your students. How can you really talk about the freshness of Odysseus if you're just recalling something you read a year ago? You must have wrestled with it immediately. You must be able to-- if these are real human persons, it turns out you have to talk to them,
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and you have to allow them to talk back to you, especially if you're going in front of a class. How can we try to explain to our students that there is a habit of thoughtfulness, a habit of meditation if we ourselves aren't doing that for the students? If we aren't showing them what a careful reading looks like, they aren't going to know how to read literature, which would then bring them to why study literature, and why it is so important, if you aren't modeling for them
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how to go about doing this.
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So it's a burden for the teacher to have to go through it. It's time-consuming. But I like to think that a teacher of literature would already have a great love affair with these already. Perhaps this is why you ought to be teaching that text, because you have a great love affair with that text. And now we want to teach the students that sort of love affair. So before I go, I want to leave you with just a couple of examples from literature-- two examples. The big idea, I guess we could say,
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would be something about the importance of home, of place, of belonging, of nostalgia. And perhaps the nostalgia is important because it's the Odyssey, where it's certainly the theme of nostos, of a homecoming of Odysseus. So I want to pair the Odyssey and the idea of home and place, of family, with a children's book, a glorious children's book, Wind in the Willows, and also the sense of homecoming and of place. And you're going to see how these two texts in some way, shape, or form
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allow us to enter into their world of wonder. They themselves, it seems, are struck by the world and by the very idea of home, of course, but working through it with each of these characters. So let me begin, then, with the Odyssey. And this is when Penelope finally recognizes and finally admits that it's Odysseus after she tricks him over the description of the bed. And they both are so excited to be reunited.
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"She spoke and still more roused in him the passion for weeping. He wept as he held his lovely wife, whose thoughts were virtuous." And I want you to pay attention to this. This is what's called an epic simile, and this is an epic simile that's being used for Penelope. So here they are, weeping with one another. "And as when the land appears welcome to men who are swimming, after Poseidon has smashed their strong-built ship on the open water, pounding it with the weight of wind
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and the heavy seas and only a few escape the gray water landward by swimming, with a thick scurf of salt coated upon them, and gladly they set foot on the shore escaping the evil, so welcome was her husband to her as she looked upon him. And she could not let him go from the embrace of her white arms." That's magnificent. When my students run into that, without my pointing it out to them, they just go nuts. Why? Because what they've done is they've used as an epic simile everything
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that Odysseus has gone through in his struggles in trying to get home, and they use it on Penelope. It is as if she's there with Homer and all of his sufferings the entire time, and indeed she is. We understand Penelope's suffering by using this epic simile that was used with Odysseus. It's a thing of beauty, and the students are just amazed at the reversal here, the way in which Homer actually unites these two characters by using an epic simile that would have been used for Odysseus
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in his actions for Penelope. Here at a poetic level, he reunites them. In perhaps my favorite detail in the entire poem, he says-- and this is immediately after this-- "Now, dawn of the rosy fingers would have dawned on their weeping, had not the gray-eyed goddess Athene planned it otherwise. She held the long night back at the outward edge. She detained dawn of the golden throne by the ocean and would not let her harness her fast-footed horses who bring the daylight to people."
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And this is perfect. So much of Odysseus's weeping, weeping hot tears throughout the entire poem, is because he has a sense of lost time. He's been away from his family for 20 years. He's been on his journey home for 10 years. Everything being wasted away. The time with his wife is slipping by. He has a clear sense of time. So at this moment of reunion, what does Athene do? She stops time for the two lovers. She holds it back. Here is a gift for the man who's been
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longing to come home, who's been weeping over his lost time. The goddess just holds it back just a little bit longer. It's absolutely perfect at this reunion. The students love both of those scenes. And the other one, the other vision of homecoming that I have to share with you-- it's really spectacular-- is from Wind in the Willows-- again, I suppose, a simple children's book with animals running about the countryside.
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And this is after Mole and Rat have been on their adventures, and they're returning home. And this is going to be a key phrase. And Mole stumbles upon his old stomping grounds, his old home.
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"Home. That was what they meant-- those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging all one way. Why, it must have been quite close by him at that moment, his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again, that day when he first found the river. And now it was sending out its scouts and its messengers to capture him and bring him in. Since his escape on that bright morning,
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he had hardly given it a thought, so absorbed had he been in his new life, in all its pleasures, its surprises, its fresh and captivating experiences. Now, with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him in the darkness, shabby indeed, and small, and poorly furnished, and yet his-- the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day's work. And the home had been happy with him, too,
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evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling it so through his nose, sorrowfully, reproachfully, but with no bitterness or anger, only with a plaintive reminder that it was there and wanted him. The call was clear. The summons was plain. He must obey it instantly and go. 'Ratty!' he called, full of joyful excitement, 'Hold on! Come back! I want you, quick!' 'Oh, come along, Mole. Do,' replied the Rat, cheerfully, still plodding along.
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Poor Mole stood alone in the road, his heart torn asunder, and a big sob gathering, gathering, somewhere low down inside him, to leap up to the surface presently, he knew, in passionate escape. But even under such a test as this, his loyalty to his friend stood firm. Never for a moment did he dream of abandoning him. Meanwhile, the wafts from his old home pleaded, whispered, conjured, and finally claimed him imperiously. He dared not tarry longer with their magic circle.
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With a wrench that tore his very heart strings, he set his face down the road and followed submissively in the track of Rat, while faint, thin little smells still dogging his retreating nose reproached him for his new friendship and his callous forgetfulness." It's a thing of beauty. It's absolutely stunning. So I've given you something from about ninth century Greece that has a certain vision of the homecoming, of suffering to get home to be with his wife.
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Odysseus, who took up residence for close to nine years with goddesses, still longs to get home. And Mole, who loves his home-- his home is the temptress, but the temptress against what or against whom? His friend. This is a book about friendship and loyalty. And if we had time, we could see the way in which Grahame actually takes the natural world of home itself and creates a character out of it. This is the siren for Mole, but it's unlike Odysseus's sirens.
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Odysseus's sirens want to take him away from home. Mole's sirens are, in fact, home that tempt him away from friendship. That's what this book-- if we are going to do with big ideas, in many ways it's what this book is about. It's about friendship. So we could keep going on about the importance of-- in fact, we could go on infinitely about the importance of literature. Just grab a book off of the bookshelf, and you'll understand the importance of literature.
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But the one thing I want us to think about, the one thing I hope that sticks with you, is that the question of why we read literature must be informed of the how we read literature. And we read it attentively, and we read it deliberately. And we read it from a spirit of love and wonder. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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