Why science is the purest poetry Frederico Garcia Lorca
. . . It was imagination that discovered the four cardinal directions and that has discovered the intermediate causes of things, but imagination has never been able to rest its hands in the burning embers, without logic or sense, where one finds free, unrestrained inspiration.
It is difficult for a so-called pure imaginative poet to produce intense emotion with his poetry.
He can, of course, produce poetic emotions, and he can produce with the technique of verse that
typical musical emotion of the Romantic, which falls short, almost always, of the deep meaning of
the pure poet. But the imaginative poet cannot produce virginal, unrestrained poetic emotion,
free of walls–rotund poetry with its own newly created laws. Imagination
is poor, and the poetic imagination more so.
Visible reality, the facts of the world and of the human body, are much more full of subtle
nuances, and much more poetic than what the imagination discovers. One notices this often in the
struggle between scientific reality and imaginative myth, in which –thank God– science wins.
For science is a thousand times more lyrical than any theogony.
The human imagination invented giants in order to attribute to them the construction of great
grottoes or enchanted cities. Later, reality taught us that those great caves are made by the drop of
water. In this case, as in many others, reality wins. After all, it is much more beautiful that a cave be
a mysterious caprice of water – chained and ordered by eternal laws – than the whim of giants who
have no other meaning than that of an explanation.
From “Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion”
Lesson from a teacher to a teacher
Excerpt from There Are No Shortcuts, © 2003 by Rafe Esquith.
"It hit me like a thunderbolt. You see, Atticus knows everything Huck
knows. He knows society is racist. He recognizes the violence,
hypocrisy, injustice, and ignorance of society. He knows he is going to lose.
But Atticus does not light out for the territory. He goes back into the courtroom to fight the fight as best as he can, because it is what he believes in. he doesn't do it because of the law, or the rules, or what people will think. He has his own code, and he lives by it as well as he can.
...My classroom is my courtroom. I am going to lose more than I win. There are many times when, despite my efforts, I will lose children to poverty, ignorance, and, most tragically, a society that embraces mediocrity.
But that doesn't paralyze me anymore. I have a code, as any good teacher or parent must have. It doesn't matter if the odds are against me. It doesn't matter if I lost a battle yesterday. It doesn't matter if the odds are against me. It doesn't matter if I'm just one fellow trying to fight television, corporations, and a society that hasn't yet achieved Dr. Martin Luther King's dream of judging someone by the content of his character.
I knew that I had to be the person I wanted the kids to be. I never wanted my kids to be depressed or despairing about any bad breaks or failures that they've had. Well, that had to apply to me as well. I now knew that if I wanted the kids to work hard, then I'd better be the hardest-working person they'd ever known. If I wanted them to be kind, I'd better be the kindest human being they'd ever met. Teaching must be by example, not by lecture.
I've made plenty of mistakes since rediscovering Atticus, but I've always been able to hold my head up to my students. Atticus showed me the way."
|
Copyright © TWPerry |
|
|
||