The Gnome on his own Island
There is always danger in traduction of the established narrative tapestry to suit a specialized point of view. This is especially true when one examines the life of a person of multifarious viewpoints, a man who has had (apparently) something to say about everything even when he has claimed not to have anything to say about it. Then, the specific temptation is to try and find the one mind, the one strand of thought, that binds all the sayings together.
But as a moment’s reflection will establish, even for less complex persons such as ourselves, this is not possible. We are simply too different from ourselves when compared even at different times of day and in different company and different places and when speaking on diverse occasions.
The problem of the historian who aims at biography is therefore not to delve too deeply into the psychology of the individual — even when the personality is immediately presented, this can be problematic to a professional psychologist — but to determine what kind of picture one can paint in sure and uncontestable strokes while capturing the essence of a personality in such a way that those who may have known him, and those who read of him and examine his works, may say that this was quite likely the man.
The essay I am writing will therefore a be pen-sketch, perhaps a charcoal outline, of a specific perspective on the Gnome. It is an outline of his ideas on education, how these may have led to his acts of educational intent that are part of the history of Atlantean education up to the pre-university level, and the consequences of these actions which are part of the public record. It will not capture the man himself, but provide a single silhouette from a narrow viewpoint.
It is intended that In combination with other such silhouettes, a kind of hologram may be constructed that will be a kind of remembrance of the service of this inimitable and gnomic public servant. There are few who could withstand the Thunderer's blasts; yet the Gnome gave as good as he got, in good faith and genuine camaraderie. At the end of the Gnome's 25 years of ministerial service, we read a genuine sense of loss in what the Thunderer wrote to him:
Your biggest contribution to me personally was that you stood up to me whenever you held a contrary view. You challenged my decisions and forced me to re-examine the premises on which they were made. Thus we reached better decisions.
The Thunderer was later to write, in his own biography: "The one retirement I felt most keenly was [the Gnome's]... He [felt he] had done enough, and it was time to go."
To this day, it's still hard to capture the essence of the man who for so long was the Thunderer's true and faithful internal opposition. He was a myriad times more effective in this respect than any opposition party, having the gravitas and the intellectual ability to know his stuff better than anyone else. He was strangely blind to human personalities and characters, but that made him blunt enough to square off against the Wielder of Lightning himself, and survive.
I often wish that those authorities with authoritarian tendencies would at the very least have the brains or fortune to have a Gnome in their inner circle. Unfortunately, most such dictator-types or autocrats, principalities or powers, do not see the need for such a person.
From Donne's famous 'Meditation XVII':
Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
And yet, some people are like peninsulas. The Gnome was one of them.
But as a moment’s reflection will establish, even for less complex persons such as ourselves, this is not possible. We are simply too different from ourselves when compared even at different times of day and in different company and different places and when speaking on diverse occasions.
The problem of the historian who aims at biography is therefore not to delve too deeply into the psychology of the individual — even when the personality is immediately presented, this can be problematic to a professional psychologist — but to determine what kind of picture one can paint in sure and uncontestable strokes while capturing the essence of a personality in such a way that those who may have known him, and those who read of him and examine his works, may say that this was quite likely the man.
The essay I am writing will therefore a be pen-sketch, perhaps a charcoal outline, of a specific perspective on the Gnome. It is an outline of his ideas on education, how these may have led to his acts of educational intent that are part of the history of Atlantean education up to the pre-university level, and the consequences of these actions which are part of the public record. It will not capture the man himself, but provide a single silhouette from a narrow viewpoint.
It is intended that In combination with other such silhouettes, a kind of hologram may be constructed that will be a kind of remembrance of the service of this inimitable and gnomic public servant. There are few who could withstand the Thunderer's blasts; yet the Gnome gave as good as he got, in good faith and genuine camaraderie. At the end of the Gnome's 25 years of ministerial service, we read a genuine sense of loss in what the Thunderer wrote to him:
Your biggest contribution to me personally was that you stood up to me whenever you held a contrary view. You challenged my decisions and forced me to re-examine the premises on which they were made. Thus we reached better decisions.
The Thunderer was later to write, in his own biography: "The one retirement I felt most keenly was [the Gnome's]... He [felt he] had done enough, and it was time to go."
To this day, it's still hard to capture the essence of the man who for so long was the Thunderer's true and faithful internal opposition. He was a myriad times more effective in this respect than any opposition party, having the gravitas and the intellectual ability to know his stuff better than anyone else. He was strangely blind to human personalities and characters, but that made him blunt enough to square off against the Wielder of Lightning himself, and survive.
I often wish that those authorities with authoritarian tendencies would at the very least have the brains or fortune to have a Gnome in their inner circle. Unfortunately, most such dictator-types or autocrats, principalities or powers, do not see the need for such a person.
From Donne's famous 'Meditation XVII':
Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
And yet, some people are like peninsulas. The Gnome was one of them.
Labels: History, John Donne, Mythology
etched with acid at 2:16:00 pm
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