We are the hollow men[i]
we are the
stuffed men
leaning together
headpiece filled
with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices,
when
we whisper
together
are quiet and
meaningless
as wind in dry
grass
or rats' feet
over broken glass
in our dry
cellar.
Written by T.S. Eliot while memories of WWI’s horrors were still fresh, The
Hollow Men is a poem in the Modernist style, or so an English prof
informed me at the U of A long ago. Analyses of what Eliot was “trying to say”
are abundant and easy to find online. To me, it’s a literary masterpiece that
employs vivid imagery (“rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar”) to
portray the despair and meaninglessness in war’s aftermath, when we’ve together
put our spiritual[ii]
side to bed in the interest of material survival, leaving us as hollow men.
Reading at a material level literature written at a spiritual
level presents a real hurdle to many students. Used to searching out facts
about the economy, about world affairs, about local happenings, about the
mundane trivia that’s part of daily living can leave us unprepared for
interpreting parable, allegory, and imagist writing. And before anyone concludes,
“So what, who needs it?” he’d be well advised to give the condition of our
world some objective thought. Are we not on a trend toward increasing materialism,
and an equivalent decline in spiritual health?
It’s an unmitigated tragedy for Christianity that so many
who call themselves Christians idolize a Bible which they misread
because they are materially bent, spiritually illiterate. If the
current debacle in the USA—where an administration of absolute materialism has
co-opted the symbols of Christianity while ignoring its content—isn’t evidence
enough of that illiteracy, then the slide toward material emphasis (STEM) in education
should warn us that we’re on a slippery slide.
The definition of Renaissance Education raises questions,
obviously, like what is classical these days, or what is the end
product of an education supposed to be, today? A Renaissance-educated
person grasps the threads that lead from history to the present, and learns
much wisdom therefrom. A Renaissance-educated person can distinguish between
logical and illogical argument. A Renaissance-educated person has strong
language skills, sufficient, for instance, for reading The Hollow Men
with comprehension and engaging in conversation about it. A Renaissance-educated
person grasps that his life only has real meaning in community with others. Finally,
a Renaissance educated person is an insatiably curious autodidact.[iii]
Above all, a Renissance-educated person not only knows who
Socrates was, but understands what he meant when he said, “I am the wisest man
alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
Do click on the link to Poetry Verse in endnote i and
feel free to let me know what you think.
NAICA
[i]
From The Hollow Men: Kurtz, he dead by T.S. Eliot. The Hollow Men
- poem by T.S. Eliot | PoetryVerse
[ii] I
wasn’t sure what word to use here. Spirit and spiritual are often
associated with religious worship, but I prefer a broader meaning, like “Spirit
is that which enables us to love others, to feel emotion, to bear pain, to be
moved by nature, to love life and fear death, to make and interpret art, to
“feel.” Through material eyes,
the parable of the prodigal son, for instance, makes little practical sense.
Read through spiritual eyes, it is the entire gospel in a nutshell.
[iii]
Self-taught