Gnome Man Is An Island

The Gnome has passed on. We will remember him in the prosperity and education system he left behind, in the defence arrangements, the zoo and the bird park, the many things which he touched and made but which we did not see.

We will remember him even though we complain so much about what he did. Because, in the end, he really did try his best. His wizardly brain went west a long time ago, but the thoughts he thought in his prime were wiser than the thoughts of most others.

If anyone should be named the father of modern Atlantis, it is he. Or at least, that is what my students thought after I told his story.

His chapter is ended now. I must quote Donne's famous lines from Meditation XVII, not the ones that most think of, but these:

...all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another...

Autumn has now come upon Atlantis.

Metempsychosis without Reincarnation

Inspired by unicorns and suchlike, I come again to Donne. My summer fades into autumn, but is still heated enough for summer. I am in myself entire and yet not whole. I feel that a lot is going on in me which I have little control over, and that all the dietary advice and chemical knowledge and suchlike is just a human way to pretend that one has control over the microcosm, while being subject to the vagaries of nature.

I think I should just exercise when I feel dull, eat when hungry, sleep when tired, work when enthused. To those who would complain that I have choices they don't, too bad then. Sometimes you make your own situation, sometimes you make of it whatever you can.

Here are two fragments which have occupied my thoughts of late; the first is of Donne, the second of Tennyson. Each has his own way of struggling with human frailty.

Extract from 'Meditation I'

  by John Donne

Is this the honour which Man hath by being a little world,
that he hath these earthquakes in himself, sudden shakings;
these lightnings, sudden flashes;
these thunders, sudden noises;
these eclipses, sudden obfuscations, and darkenings of his senses;
these blazing stars, sudden fiery exhalations;
these rivers of blood, sudden red waters?

Is he a world to himself only therefore, that he hath enough in himself,
not only to destroy, and execute himself,
but to presage that execution upon himself;
to assist the sickness,
to antedate the sickness,
to make the sickness the more irremediable, by sad apprehensions,
and as if he would make a fire the more vehement,
by sprinkling water upon the coals,
so to wrap a hot fever in cold melancholy,
lest the fever alone should not destroy fast enough,
without this contribution nor perfect the work (which is destruction)
except we joined an artificial sickness, of our own melancholy,
to our natural, our unnatural fever?

O perplex'd discomposition,
O riddling distemper,
O miserable condition of Man!

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Extract from 'Ulysses'

  by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life. Life pil’d on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is sav’d
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Old Thoughts

Donne's famous Meditation XVII tends to eclipse his other works in the mind of modern man, perhaps because the phrase 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' was etched by Hemingway on the modern literary consciousness. But Donne wrote profusely and entertainingly, and what he wrote is good basis material for people professing to know anything about 'Knowledge and Inquiry', as some in Atlantis do these days.

For example, in Meditation XX, he writes:

The arts and sciences are most properly referred to the head; that is their proper element and sphere; but yet the art of proving, Logic, and the art of persuading, Rhetoric, are deduced to the hand, and that expressed by a hand contracted into a fist, and this by a hand enlarged, and expanded; and evermore the power of man, and the power of God himself is expressed so, 'All things are in his hand'. Neither is God so often presented to us, by names that carry our consideration upon counsel, as upon execution of counsel; he is oftener called the Lord of Hosts, than by all other names, that may be referred to the other signification.

Such thoughts are interesting. They dig deep into the heart of language and the hidden assumptions we make in the use of metaphor and image. It would be valuable even for those who care nothing for Christianity and its range of cultures and cultural history, to undertake the equivalent exercise into their own ideas, models, tropes and schemata.

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.