Category: Literature

Every story, long or short, has five dimensions. They are usually called its 1) plot, 2) characters, 3) setting, 4) style, and 5) theme. We could call them respectively, the story’s 1) work, 2) workers, 3) world, 4) words, and 5) wisdom. “Philosophy” means “the love of wisdom.” So a story’s philosophy is one of …

“The time is out of joint,” utters Prince Hamlet to his close friend Horatio after encountering the Ghost of his recently deceased father, King Hamlet, on the battlements of Elsinore. Hailing from a purgatorial realm, the Majesty of Buried Denmark has come to inform Hamlet of the true nature of his death—that he was murdered …

By any stretch of the imagination, and by any criteria, the Chronicles of Narnia are among the most popular books ever written. Several major surveys of the bestselling books of all time place The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the Top Ten, a few places below The Lord of the Rings by C. …

In the Winter 2018 issue of The Classical Teacher, I wrote about the notion of the journey, suggesting that how we get to any worthy destination may in fact be the most important part of the experience. The journey is not always about the future destination; sometimes it is about the inner growth that takes …

Heading Out Beyond here there’s no map. How you get there is where you’ll arrive; how, dawn by dawn, you can see your way to feel. You’ve no need now clear: in ponds, sky, just as woods you walk through give to fields. And rivers: beyond all burning, you’ll cross on bridges you’ve long lugged …

I guess it’s because I’m starting to get old (some would say I’m already there), but with each succeeding Christmas I think more about what has become of the holiday. There is, of course, the problem of the secularization of Christmas. The “War on Christmas” that we have heard so much about in recent years …

Discovering and internalizing the Central One Idea in a great work is vital for proper reading and for cultivating wisdom and virtue.1 There are four stages of acquisition and expression that can be used to lead the student (and teacher) to this Central One Idea. The four-stage sequence is rooted in the trivium—grammar, logic, and …

Why study literature? This question is often asked by indignant parents, who want to know why their children, destined for business, learn fancy subjects instead of things serviceable to them in life. An open and alert mind—which understands human nature and its possibilities, which can judge and sympathise, which, because of its wide survey and …

In his famous essay on fairy stories, J. R. R. Tolkien asserted that one of the most important facets of fairytales is that they hold up a “Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man.” The fairy story, Tolkien wrote, “may be used as a Mirour de l’Omme” (mirror of man), as something that shows us …

The art of teaching and studying literature is in one sense very simple, and yet, in another sense, complex. We might ask, is “God in the detail” or is the “Devil in the detail”? To answer such a question, it helps to remember that the idiom “God is in the detail” appeared first and holds …