The Long View: Essays, Poems, Stories
Review of book by Susan Ford Wiltshire
This delightful collection of autobiographical essays, short stories, and poems is packed with wisdom distilled over a career as a classics scholar at a time when universities were dominated by men. Along with glimpses of events that impacted her life and her family, we get Insights into The Aeneid, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Sophocles, and Plato, from decades of studying and enjoying them. The present illuminates the past, and the past the present.
Highlights from the essays —
“When Ashton-Warner set out to teach five-year-old Maori children in her native New Zealand, she was given standard British colonial textbooks for her classroom. Soon she discarded those texts and asked the children to tell stories they had heard at home. She wrote them down and taught the children to read from their own stories. That’s how I learned to begin with what students already know.” p. 3
“Children love good stories. Someone said that God created people because God loves a good story.” p. 9
“Modern hospitality is typically a transaction among friends. Ancient hospitality … is a transaction among strangers. Modern Hospitality reinforces our familiarities. Ancient hospitality alters us by exposing us to outsiders. When a stranger from the public realm enters one private space, change occurs in both the host and the guest.” p. 10
“Socrates denied that he ever taught anything. He maintained instead that what we need to know is already in us.” p. 33
“Humor is like ball bearings, reducing the friction between ourselves and our stress.” p. 37
“When we are seeking approval from other people, we know exactly what we think they want us to be. that is easy and familiar. When we move toward autonomy, however, we are less sure of ourselves as we seek to discern the unique thing that only we can do, the particular person that only we can be.” p. 61
“Sometimes the contradictions in our lives are so vast we don’t even know they exist.” p. 126
Highlights from the stories —
from The Violin
“It had taken years, however, for her to arrange a cease-fire between her talent and her life.” p. 176
from Kestrel
“The world will be saved by beauty.” p. 193
from Colonus
“But it was she who had broken off the relationship, pointing to their mutually incompatible goals: she wanted to have fun and all he wanted to do was contribute to humanity.” p. 195
“For the first time he realized that a camera creates a perfect triangle connecting eye, mind, and heart.” p. 195
“Making connections… is what education and life are all about.” p. 198
“If he called Anne’s name now, he would be walking straight into life with all its uncertainties, not into a script with a conclusion already written.”
Highlights from the poems —
No Free Verse —
“Each word bears the cost
of another one lost.
This is a price to a poem.” p. 151
from To Vergil, His Birthday
“I dreamed of you once —
a tall man, dark, countrified,
dressed in old black suit and fedora …”
from Penelope Returning (my favorite) —
“They parted with regret, braced only by guessing
how great the love at home that taught each how to love.”
“… Ithaca is not the journey
but the catalog of stories
to make the journey known.”
