“’Tis the custom of pedagogues to be eternally thundering in their pupil’s ears, as they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the business of the pupil is only to repeat what others have said; now I would have tutor to correct this error, and, that at the very first, he should, according to the capacity he has to deal with, put it to the test permitting his pupil himself to taste things, and of himself to discern and choose them, sometimes opening the way to him and sometimes leaving him to open it for himself; that is, I would not have him alone to invent and speak, but that he should also hear his pupil speak in turn.”

Montaigne believes that students ought to be exposed to great works, but only by teachers who can allow a student to understand them and make them his own. (Montaigne was a product of his times and writing about educating boys.) Montaigne doesn’t insist that a student agree with everything that he reads, but rather that he engage texts and their authors and make sure that he truly agrees or disagrees with what he reads rather than taking it on the authority of a tutor, an author, or the reputation or antiquity of a work.

“Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift everything he reads, and lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust. Aristotle’s principles will then be no more principles to him, than those of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of opinion be propounded to, and laid before him; he will himself choose, if he be able; if not, he will remain in doubt….if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato by his own reason, they will no more be theirs, but become his own.”

This is a valuable reminder to have as I work my way through the set of great books. The ability to quote ancient works and build an argument from references has a seductive power, as Montaigne himself would admit. But in the spirit of the set, this is a conversation, not a lecture by the books to us. Montaigne is engaging the authors who came before him and we engage him and them through our reading. This is an interesting point, because in this very same essay, Montaigne evokes a democratic notion shared by the creators of the set that the education for the best is the best education for all. He takes issues with the notion that Plato puts forth in The Republic that children should be channeled in their education based on early judgments of their relative intellectual merits.

“When it comes to pass, that for not having chosen the right course, we often take very great pains, and consume a good part of our time, in training up children to do things, for which, by their natural constitution, they are totally unfit. In this difficulty, nevertheless, I am clearly of opinion that they ought to be elemented in the best and most advantageous studies, without taking too much notice of, or being too superstitious in those light prognostics they give of themselves in their tender years, and to which Plato, in his Republic, gives, methinks, too much authority.”

It is likely a result of my upbringing in the United States, but I think that this idea that children can be tracked from an early age into specific types of education is a destructive one. I once had the occasion to speak with a British government official who said that tracking that was too rigorous threw kids on an intellectual scrap heap by the age of 16 and that this was a problem because it did not give kids a chance to develop and once they had, they were so far down a particular track that it became near impossible for them to make a change.

The other issue that Montaigne addresses is the subject of finding a suitable teacher. Again, for Montaigne, it is not the quantity of the knowledge but the quality of it.

“For a boy of quality then, who pretends to letters not upon the account of profit (for so mean an object as that is unworthy of the grace and favour of the Muses, and moreover, in a man directs his service to and depends upon others), nor so much for outward ornament, as for his own propoer and peculiar use, and to furnish and enrich himself within, having rather a desire to come out an accomplished cavalier than a mere scholar or learned man; for such a one, I say, I would, also, have his friends solicitous to find him out a tutor, who has rather a well-made than a well-filled head; seeking, indeed, both the one and the other, but rather of the two to prefer manners and judgment to mere learning, and that this man should exercise his charge after a new method.”

His goal is to have teachers that can instruct in virtue and the value of good thinking rather than in the value of tons of information. The students should not be forced and beaten into learning but coaxed, coached, and trained so that they digest their lessons and make them part of their body rather than store them in their gizzards to be regurgitated upon demand. Montaigne thinks that the measure of learning should be in the way that students live their lives as opposed to the way they quote what they have read.

“The lad will not so much get his lesson by heart as he will practise it: he will repeat it in his actions. We shall discover if there be prudence in his exercises, if there be sincerity and justice in his deportment, if there be grace and judgment in his speaking; if there be constancy in his sickness; if there be modesty in his mirth, temperance in his pleasures, order in his domestic economy, indifference in his palate, whether what he eats or drinks be flesh or fish, wine or water. “

If not, the Montaigne warns what we will get:

“To return to my subject, there is nothing like alluring the appetite and affections; otherwise you make nothing but so many asses laden with books; by dint of the lash, you give them their pocketful of learning to keep; whereas, to do well, you should not only lodge it with them, but make them espouse it.”
[There is more to Montaigne’s essay which I will cover in my next post.]

Cold Steel is a book that aims to introduce basic fencer into a wider world. Written in 1889, it explains how to develop competency in sabre fencing for a world where the possibility of a duel or the use of a sabre in military fighting still exists. Still, that is only half the fun, because the book goes beyond sabre fencing to cover fighting with sticks, daggers, and even unarmed defenses against a dagger.

In terms of useful technique, Cold Steel would be frowned upon by many modern sport fencing coaches. That shouldn’t stop modern sport fencers from reading the book for three reasons. One, the book may spark an idea for a drill or training that could be relevant. Two, it is fun to see how the sport evolved and connect your fencing to that of people who came before you. Three, sometimes it is fun to do something extra-curricular to pure sport fencing.

Some friends and I practiced the unarmed defenses against a dagger. While I am not sure how well we would fare “in an encounter of such unequal sort” to borrow Hutton’s words, we did have a good time spending a couple of minutes at the end of a few fencing sessions working on a skill that was once a part of a larger fencing curriculum.. It also gave us another way to think about and practice skills such as timing, distance, and angles.

This is what I mean by taking basic fencers into a larger world. Hutton takes the approach that his readers already have a basic knowledge of fencing and likely will take a sabre in hand primarily for sport fencing. Nevertheless, he believes that there are other things worth knowing beyond just fencing in a salle or gymnasium. He writes brief chapters on fencing with a sabre against a bayonet and a short sword and talks about how to fight with a large stick, a constable’s truncheon or billy club, and how to fight with daggers. It is a rather complete collection of fighting skills.

For that reason, this book would be of interest to martial artists as well as sport fencers. It goes without saying that those interest in historical fencing also will find this a good addition to their libraries if they do not already have it. (It is worth noting that Hutton taught classes at the Bartitsu Club in London for a time. Bartitsu was a martial art that combined jujistu, boxing, savate, and stick fighting and was mentioned in a Sherlock Holmes story.) The book also references a number of other works that could give people interested in historical manuals a starting point for further research.

A couple of notes of caution are in order. First is that practicing any kind of contact skill, whether it be sports, martial arts, or anything else requires the proper equipment, training, and mindset to be done safely. Hutton himself goes into the equipment necessary. Modern equipment has given us more options, and it should be used.

Second, Hutton’s terminology is antiquated and some is even terms he has self-defined. So, if you do try to practice any of this, read everything carefully and do not assume that modern terminology applies.

I would recommend this book to people with an interest in fencing, martial arts, and the history of those subjects.

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With the question of what should an education include, I included this passage from In My Own Way: An Autobiography, by Alan Watts. He was an interpreter of Oriental philosophy and wrote books on Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, and other similar topics in the 1960s and 1970s. In writing about his own education in England’s school system, he took time out to describe his own ideal education.

“I am inclined to believe that these schools are justified more by the eccentrics who resist the system than by the conformists who come out as the system intends.

“It is now becoming obvious that the same can be said of almost all school, and of universities as well. They are production lines turning out stereotyped personnel and consumers for the industrial machine – a machine which is more and more subservient, not to human needs, but to the abstract purposes of technological expansion for its own sake, of the money game, and of competition for the hollow reward of status. And the markets are flooded with things which I, and other who have come to their senses, do not want to buy. In my own school days stereotypes were a little different, but no one can resist a system designed to produce preconceived ‘character’ without suffering a few wounds. To compensate for lack of real success along the lines laid down for me I came out of the process with an ego large than I needed, and was as clumsy among ‘normals’ as one whose clothes are too big for him.

“It is perhaps idle to wonder what, from my present point of view, would have been an ideal education. If I could provide such a curriculum for my own children, they, in their turn, might find it all a bore. But the fantasy of what I would have liked to learn as a child may be revealing, since I feel unequipped by education for the problems that lie outside the cloistered, literary domain in which I am at home. Looking back, then, I would want to have arranged for myself to be taught survival techniques for both natural and urban wildernesses. I would want to have been instructed in self-hypnosis, in aikido (the esoteric and purely self-defensive style of judo), in elementary medicine, in sexual hygiene, in vegetable gardening, in astronomy, navigation, and sailing; in cookery, and clothes making, in metal work and carpentry, in drawing and painting, in botany and biology, in optics and acoustics, in semantics and psychology, in mysticism and yoga, in electronics and mathematical fantasy, in drama and dancing, in singing and playing a musical instrument by ear; in wandering, in advanced daydreaming, in prestidigitation, in techniques of escape from bondage, in disguise, in conversation with birds and beasts, in ventriloquism, in French and German conversation, in planetary history, in morphology, and in Classical Chinese.*

“Actually, the main thing left out of my education was a proper love for my own body, because one feared to cherish anything so obviously mortal and prone to sickness.”

*”This is a serious proposal, for Chinese is, for us, a far better language for ‘mind-training’ than Latin or Greek because it is the most evolved and highly sophisticated language least like our own. Thus, the patterns of thought upon which it is based bring out, by contrast the implicit and largely unrecognized patterns of thought which underlie our own tongue – as that ‘events,’ represented by verbs, must be set in motion by ‘things,’ represented by nouns. Furthermore, anything said in English may be said in half the time in Chinese, while German and Japanese take twice the time. Some form of written Chinese would also be a marvelous language for computers, because it can be read at a high speed and each character, or ideogram, is a nonlinear Gestalt, or configuration.”

Watts’s critique of his own education is awfully similar to what Montaigne said about the shortcomings of education in his day. For Watts, education is creating consumers and cogs for a grand societal machine who do not reflect on the larger meaning of life. Montaigne talks about how pedants produce people who do not think beyond the questions of status and repetition of the knowledge they learned in school. “We only labour to stuff the memory, ad leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void,” Montaigne writes.

I wonder if part of the problem is that educators are always designing the perfect education for the last generation as opposed to the one that they are education. The hard truth about experience is that there is no way to learn it other than to go through it.

I think the other part of the problem is that it is easier to regurgitate than understand. It is hard to get people to comprehend and reflect and study. It is also hard to teach someone when you do not have confidence in your own knowledge. If you don’t believe that you know what you are teaching, then you can’t teach it. So, it makes sense that pedants would want to avoid anything that would question their level of knowledge or expertise.

One place where Watts is exactly right for me is his very last paragraph (before the footnote) about the thing being left out was a proper love for his own body. When I was in school, I was one of the bookish, smart kids. I was not supposed to be an athlete. I fell into a stereotype imposed by the outside world. It was not a nefarious thing, it was just that this was the way that world seemed to operate. We all fell into the patterns presented to us when I was young. By high school, I was starting to break out of it, but it took a long time for me to appreciate my body and learn that it could be trained to do far more than I ever thought it could. (That is another blog, but it is interesting to see myself and others I know discover an athletic side they didn’t think they had.)

For my part, it is interesting that Watts writes as though the matter is settled and there is no future learning to be done. In thinking about this topic and my life, I am always thinking about new things that I can learn and how I might go about doing it. I think that is part of why I started reading this set and writing this blog. I think the end of my schooling was not the end of my learning or even the end of my time in classrooms. When I stop learning, I get bored and want to move on. I am still constructing my ideal education and add new topics daily.

My biggest problem is not having the resources to study everything I want right now. I have had to learned that I need to pick and choose what I study at any given moment. This is a lot more successful than trying to do everything at once. For a long time, I refused to pick things because I was afraid it would lead to me never being able to go back and try other things. While I realize order has its effects, I am learning that it is better to commit to things, like reading this set, and come back to other things later or as I need them. Building foundations goes a long way to future success.

I have rattled on here enough, but I will try to come up with an ideal curriculum for myself. As for my blog readers, what do you wish you had learned? What would you like to learn? Have you made plans or started learning these things?

I think this is probably a good caution to include in the set of “Great Books,” and it makes sense to have it on the first year reading list. As we move through all these books and hear the different parts of the great conversation, we should pause a minute to make sure that we are getting something out of it all.

“We take other men’s knowledge and opinions on trust; which is idle and superficial learning. We must make it our own. We are in this very like him who, having need of fire, went to a neighbor’s house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any with him home.”

Montaigne is calling for active learning rather than just finding ourselves a collection of books and quotes.

“What good does it do us to have the stomach full of meat if it do not digest, if it be not incorporated with us, if it does not nourish and support us.”

That is part of the reason that I started this blog. I wanted to be able to think and write about these readings and topics and maybe even talk about them with other folks. My goal was to make it more active and not just read and forget or pass over the books.

The goal of this blog is to avoid becoming the person who is “wonderfully well acquainted with Galen, but not at all the disease of the patient; they have already deafened you with a long ribble-row of laws, but understand nothing of the case in hand; they have all the theory of all things, let who will put it in practice.”

This phenomenon is alive and well today. The New York Times published an article about how law school graduates need to be taught how to do the things that lawyers do, despite a great legal education. They come out of law school without the ability to file documents or counsel clients. (You can read this story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/after-law-school-associates-learn-to-be-lawyers.html). And of course, we have seen a number of articles about how medical schools need to teach doctors how to interact with patients because their education has emphasized everything about the human being but not the person who is the patient.

Montaigne writes that he would think twice about sending a young person to a school of his era.

“If the mind be not better disposed, if the judgment no better settled, I had much rather my scholar had spent his time at tennis, for, at least, his body would by that means be in better exercise and breath. Do observe him when he comes back from school, after fifteen or sixteen years that he has been there, there is nothing so unfit for employment; all you shall find he has got, is, that his Latin and Greek have only made him a greater coxcomb than when he went from home. He should bring back his soul replete with good literature, and he brings it only swelled and puffed up with vain and empty shreds and patches of learning; and he has really nothing more in him than he had before.”

It is important to note here that Montaigne is not disparaging the liberal arts. Rather he is saying that the way they are studied makes them useless. I wonder what he would think of today’s schools. Still, let’s take a look at his literature example. Someone who studies literature well can use that knowledge to understand the world and judge it more prudently. Look at my earlier post about police brutality and Orwell’s essay on shooting an elephant. I think that Montaigne would approve of this kind of education.

What Montaigne thinks we need to do is not, like the rich gentleman he knows, have a book or quote for everything that may come down. What we need is to have a body of knowledge that helps us to understand the way the world works and be able to draw on that and share it with others. Building great libraries is of no use if we don’t do anything but constantly search for books, Montaigne would say.

Still, what is interesting is the Montaigne admits to, and I am also guilty of, some of the same sins as the pedants who have a lot of knowledge that does not improve them.

“And here I cannot but smile to think how I have paid myself in showing the foppery of this kind of learning, who myself am so manifest an example; for, do I not the same thing throughout this whole composition? I go here and there, culling out of several books the sentences that best please me, not to keep them (for I have no memory to retain them in), but to transplant them into this; where to say the truth, they are no more mine than in their first places.”

I think the difference is that Montaigne is working to add his own voice to the conversation. I think it is worthwhile for us to think about how we might do that ourselves. I excuse his quotes and foppery because I think what is happening here is not so much that he is abdicating his voice, but making it known that it is a part of a conversation and letting us know there are others worth hearing (reading).

It seems that sentiment might also apply to police training.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/what-george-orwell-can-teach-us-about-ows-and-police-brutality/248797/

I wonder what it would be like to try to teach literature to police recruits. I think it would be interesting and challenging, but I can’t imagine any department would find it a better use of time than interrogation, target practice, or chin-ups.

Below is a link to the essay. I think that the format is not so great, and I encourage everyone to buy real books, but if you haven’t read this essay, do have a look.

http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887/

Let me know what you think of this.

I got hung up on the word ‘should’ in my first reading of this essay. That hang up was a mistake, because I read a moral element into it that I ought not to have. Montaigne’s translator in this case is using the word ‘should’ in its subjunctive sense. In other words, even though we might try to change customs and laws, we will not find it easy to do so. In contemporary English, we write this variation of ‘should’ as ‘would’, though in terribly proper and somewhat outdated English, we ought to use ‘shall’ than ‘will’ when we speak in the first person, and ‘should’ rather than ‘would.’ The word ‘shall’ has also taken on a moral imperative sense. So the title might be better rendered “Of Custom, and That We Would Not Easily Change a Law Received.”

With the moral sense of should in mind, I initially thought that Montaigne was suggesting that even the worst customs ought to be left in place, but that is the opposite of what he is arguing. It is important to read carefully, and reading these books has forced me to stretch back into better reading habits. I have slipped recently, but I plan to pick back up where I left off. Having had a big slip at the start, I think I am better prepared to make my way through the readings to come.

Moving onto the heart of the matter, Montaigne talks about customs and human habits starting with the biological, describing how one’s own smell is unnoticed by that person, but noticeable to others, to how people get used to things like loud sounds in their environment to the things people learn as children from their culture.

“I find that our greatest vices derive from their first propensity from our most tender infancy, and that our principal education depends upon the nurse. Mothers are mightily pleased to see a child writhe off the neck of a chicken, or to please itself with hurting a dog or a cat; and such wise father there are in the world who look upon it as a notable mark of a martial spirit, when they hear a son miscall, or see him domineer over a poor peasant, or a lackey, that dares not reply, nor turn again; and a great sign of wit, when they see him cheat and overreach his playfellow by some malicious treachery and deceit. Yet these are the true seeds and roots of cruelty, tyranny, and treason; they bud and put out there, and afterwards shoot up vigorously, and grow to prodigious bulk, cultivated by custom. “

This is an interesting passage because it seems to presage the modern research that shows that serial killers usually abuse animals in their childhood. Of course we know that what children are taught by their parents greatly affects the kind of people that they grow up to be. Here, Montaigne is writing in a highly stratified society, but we also see this happen in all sorts of ways. For example people with specific kinds of training or who excel in one area of life often have this problem. Athletes, soldiers, and cops all over the world often have this sense of entitlement that is trained into them as part of what is seen as necessary for them to succeed in their particular arenas. Sometimes, though, it is a question of things simply being over-looked because someone does something well. Look at the chess champion Bobby Fischer. His behavior was overlooked by a number of people and his behavior has been characterized as cruel, tyrannical, and even treasonous.

Montaigne goes on to describe how customs vary among people and that things that seem quite strange, ridiculous, or even harmful are looked upon as normal in other groups. Montaigne cautions that even standards that we think are quite moral come from the influence of custom.

“The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom; every one, having an inward veneration for the opinions and manners approved and received amongst his own people, cannot, without very great reluctance, depart from them, nor apply himself to them without applause.”

I feel that we are in this state now in the United States. Our system has ended up captive to a destructive custom of infighting between various factions that have not balanced themselves out because they refuse to recognize the common good. In the world as a whole we are facing global problems that I think custom prevents us from facing. We continue to live in a manner that is destructive to our collective future, but because we have always done things in a particular way and we accept the new technology that makes life easier, we give no thought to changing our ways. But I am worried that we are going to end up in a situation where large numbers of people suffer and we put ourselves in a dark ages because we are unwilling to part with custom. Montaigne cautions us that as powerful as custom is, fortune is yet stronger and can force our hands.

“So it is, nevertheless, that Fortune, still reserving her authority in defiance of whatever we are able to do or say, sometimes presents us with a necessity so urgent, that ‘tis requisite the laws should a little yield and give way; and when one opposes the increase of an innovation that thus intrudes itself by violence, to keep a man’s self in so doing, in all place and in all things within bounds and rule against those who have power, and to whom all things are lawful that may an way serve to advance their design, who have no other law nor rule but what serves best to their own purpose, ‘tis a dangerous obligation and an intolerable inequality – Aditum nocendi perfido praestat fides [Putting faith in a treacherous person, opens the door to harm. – Seneca, Oedip., iii. 686] – foreasmuch as the ordinary discipline of a healthy state does not provide against these extraordinary accidents; it presupposes a body that supports itself in its principal members and offices, and a common consent to its obediance and observation.”

I think Montaigne is having similar thoughts as a lot of the Occupy Wall Street protesters, but the hard part is that the necessities that are so urgent are not always wars, plagues, and storms. Sometimes they are mortgage crises that don’t affect everyone in the state equally. And we end up with the ‘dangerous obligation and intolerable inequality.’

The other problem that Montaigne notes is that ability to break free of custom is hard to come by, especially for those who need it most.

“If, as we who study ourselves, have learned to do, every one who hears a good sentence would immediately consider how it does any way touch his own private concern, ever one would find that it was not so much a good saying, as a severe lash to the ordinary stupidity of his own judgment: but men receive the precepts and admonitions of truth, as directed to the common sort, and never to themselves; and instead of applying them to their own manners, do only very ignorantly and unprofitably commit them to memory.”

Ouch. That is a caution we should keep in mind (in the moral sense) as we move through the rest of the readings and our own search for truth.

Jess Goodell has written a book that left me thinking for long time. She was a Marine who served as part of a mortuary affairs unit in Iraq. She and her fellow Marines in the unit were the ones who cleaned up the messes made by the battles and booby traps and prepared the bodies of U.S. service people to come home and the bodies of Iraqis for burial. These are the bodies that fill the flag-draped coffins the Pentagon does not want the American public to see.

While it is unavoidable to think about the costs of war when reading a book like this, that was not the only way she caused me to look at my life and the world around me. Goodell compares life in the Marine Corps and life in a combat zone with life in the United States. I have often thought that sometimes things are just too easy here. Goodell’s passage about a woman in a McDonald’s who fails to discipline her children kind of encapsulates it.

“The mother decided she could do — or refrain from doing — whatever she wanted, believing that her behavior had no effect on anyone else. Typical. Consume everything in sight while your kids run amok, disrupting other people’s lives. Then go ballistic when someone complains, as if it’s you who should be angry. I thought it’d be cool to instantly transport her to Iraq. insert her into a platoon and, after five minutes or so, ask her what she thought then about her interconnectedness with others. Her self-centeredness would be such a huge life and death concern to everyone else that they’d knock it out of her immediately.”

While Goodell speaks well of the espirit de corps of the Marines and how military people look after each other, she doesn’t avoid the reality that Marines and others don’t always live up to the mythos. She describes how fellow Marines fail her when they get back from Iraq. She also describes how the Marine Corps is not kind to women and how women in the ranks threaten the culture of the Marines. It is not a pretty picture, and Goodell tries her best to take an even handed approach and draw the true lessons: good and bad.

All of this of course avoids the main topic of the book, which is her time dealing with death in Iraq. Her accounts of managing the bodies and trying to maintain humanity, both for the living and the dead are harrowing. She describes how they worked through the steps of dealing with the corpses of U.S. and foreign people, and how they tried to do their best by every one. There are some storiesthat are just heart breaking. Her writing makes it easy to understand how so many veterans are just shell-shocked.

After reading this book, and others like Michael Herr’s Dispatches, hearing someone like an athlete being described as a ‘warrior’ rings hollow and false. Also, books that put a bright sheen on wars and battle (books by Stephen Ambrose come to mind here) come across as gross and misrepresentations of what happens. When you read about Goodell and her comrades scooping remains out of the remains of a blown-up truck with their hands, you question everything you think you know about violence and the justification for war.

In a strange way, reading this book made me want to be more “squared away” in a civilian and humanistic way by paying more attention to my interactions with my friends and family, my co-workers, and the world at large. I realize this is a first book and a catharic book for a shell-shocked veteran, but it was a powerful book and I hope that Goodell continues to observe and think and read and write, because I think she more to say and it will be worth hearing.

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The Great Equations is a science and mathematics book for popular readers, which is its strength and its weakness. The strength is that the text is accessible to just about any reader with some smattering of science and mathematics in their schooling. The weakness is that sometimes I found it a little too basic and too quick to gloss over details and proofs for equations.

One of the interesting things is how the book demonstrates the way science progresses in fits and starts. It also shows how important collaboration and communication are to scientific discoveries.

The other thread of the book that I enjoyed is its commitment that science is something that everyone should know something about — the chapter on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of entropy, is entitled “The Scientific equivalent of Shakespeare.” He thinks we would all have better lives if we treated some basic scientific knowledge like we would knowing about Shakespear. Crease is not shy to deride things like astrology.

Crease also acknowldges his debt to the “Two Cultures” concept first proposed by C.P. Snow that says knowledge is divided into technical and cultural knowledge essentially. One of the most interesting chapters is the interlude that discusses the humanities and the science. “For only when the humanities couple their inquiries into human dimensions and possibilities with an awareness of what science has disclosed of the dimensions and possibilities of the world will the humanities most effectively be able to provide answers to the questions of what we know, should do, and can hope for.”

I enjoyed the chapters on quantum mechanics becaus ethey explained things in a way that helped me make sense of things friends of mine who are scientists and mathematicians have explained to me in other ways.

One of the things missing from this book, as another reviewer pointed out, is the quadratic equation. I also would have liked to see mote mathematical proofs in the book. I think Crease missed a chance to make popular readers more comfortable with equations beyondd just holding them up as something to be admired.

I also would have liked to see a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem associated with the diagram associated with the U.S. President James A. Garfield used to invent a proof. I don’t think enough information is given int he book to recreate the proof myself, though I may need to try again.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of science, humanities and social science people, and educators who might draw some ideas on how to bring science and math to a wider audience.

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The passage I am thinking of comes from Proverbs, 27:17.

From the NIV Study Bible:

“As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”

From the King James Version:

“Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.”

I was recently reminded of this passage by an episode of the television show Burn Notice. While that was not the first time I had heard this, it rang a little louder in my ears having recently read some Epictetus. It would be interesting to compare Proverbs, Epictetus, and even some of the modern advice and self-help books that are out there. I wonder how the words in the ancient texts would be taken today if they were passed off as modern.

That said, this idea of one man sharpening another came up one time in my life in the context of fencing. A more experienced fencer was helping me learn the sport and I thanked him for helping me become a better competitor to him and he said that he was helping me become better so he could better hone himself.

We can hone ourselves whether we win or lose, but it can help put losses in perspective. If we learn where our dull points are, we can hone ourselves by using our strengths to work on our weaknesses.

I am trying to carry this idea, and the stoic idea of learning from difficult people into my daily life. I am also trying to remember that it is sometimes good to be a difficult person so that you can help others learn.