IGNORANCE AND WANT

I have read a lot of books during my lifetime.  The vast majority of books that I have read are non-fiction.  I think I prefer non-fiction because they tell of the times and events that have led the human race to the place where we see ourselves now.  We learn from the history of us and it is said that this knowledge keeps us from repeating mistakes of the past.  That isn't exactly the case as history has repeated itself a lot through the millennia, but for the most part we strive to remember mistakes and vow to not let them happen again.

I do read some fiction but I am rather particular about the writers of fiction that I read.  There are two writers in my library that stand out above the rest when it comes to fiction.  John Steinbeck and Charles Dickens.  I have read all of Steinbeck's novels and the major works of Dickens.  What makes these writers stand out in my mind is that they write a fictional story that is based on the period of time in which they are living and mold these stories to present to us a lesson in humanity much more personal than a history book could.  When I read Steinbeck or Dickens, a picture is painted by their words that take you into the time that the story is taking place.  They place your mind inside the minds of the characters so that you understand what they are thinking, what they are feeling and how the world is seen through their eyes.  Both of these writers are masters of presenting their works in such a manner.

In 1843, Charles Dickens published "A Christmas Carol".  It was a short story compared to the length of his novels but carried as strong of a message as the longer works did.  Most of us are familiar with the story of Ebenezer Scrooge.  The old miserly man who had a firm dislike for mankind, particularly the poor.  The story revolves around Scrooge being changed overnight into one of the most beloved men who lived in London by the lessons of three spirits who visit him on Christmas Eve and show him how he must change for his own benefit as well as mankind's.  It is truly a story for the ages and one that is celebrated every year through movies, plays and readings.  It is a story that will never fade away I hope.

Every Christmas season over the last few years,  myself and some cousins of mine have attended a production of "A Christmas Carol" at a local university.   The production is magnificent and very entertaining as well as thought provoking.  It brings to life the characters that Dickens created all those years ago.

This year, for some reason, made me stop and think about the message Dickens was bringing to us.  There was one scene in particular that filled my mind.  Towards the end of the visit by the Spirit of Christmas Present, two children are revealed from under the Spirit's robes.  The children are in rags, with sunken eyes and skeletal figures. The Spirit explains to Scrooge who the children are:

“They are Man's and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance and this girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

Ignorance and Want.   I thought about "Ignorance" and "Want" for a long time.  I did a little research to see what the experts thought of these children as presented by Dickens.  I came to one of two conclusions.  "Ignorance" is the one we are to beware most of all.  "Want" is what ignorance brings.  Anytime there is ignorance, there will be people wanting.  Not wanting out of greed, but rather wanting to just survive.  Ignorance blinds us to what the needs are to make society a more perfect place in which to live.

Keeping the poor ignorant will trap them in a cycle of poverty from generation to generation without a means to escape.  Education is a must, and was a must for Victorian London.  Schools were not very available then and most times the children could not go to school because they were forced to help the family by spending their time in the work houses.  Without at least a minimal education, these children would grow up in ignorance as their parents had and the poor, they extreme poor would always be with us.  In Dickens time, this was the case.  Very little education that would allow for children to have at least a chance at breaking that cycle of poverty.

"Ignorance" can also be applied to the well off.  Those that do not live in poverty tend to not see what they don't want to.  They are ignorant of the plight of the poor who live around them.  Indeed, if anything, the poor provide a much needed service to the well off.  The cheap labor that the poor provide make it possible for the well to do to continue living that life style.  But ignorance of the poor is not a solution.  Ignorance of the poor, and keeping the poor down, will eventually bring society down as well.  I think perhaps the spirit was pointing out to Scrooge his own ignorance of the poor and how he, as well as society, fair better with a more prominent working class.

The result of ignorance is always more want, more need.  We should make ourselves aware of those in need and to do what we can to help them out of the cycle they find themselves in.  It is a problem that has faced man for centuries and continues to do so.

I am not sure what Dickens personal philosophy was as to how to break the cycle of poverty, but he is correct I think that the first step is getting rid of ignorance by both the poor and the wealthy.  I feel that once we make a dent in ignorance, once we teach and give those in the poverty cycle the tools to begin to climb out of it, then every generation after that should become a little more self reliant.  I think that once we take away the ignorance of the wealthy and they learn what tools need to be given to help the poor out of poverty then their investment in this endeavor will bring society as whole up to a better level.  With the wiping out of ignorance, there will be less crime, less bigotry and racism.  There will be more of an understanding of our fellow man.  There will be less want.

I also think that it is important that while the poor are given the tools to climb out of that hole, it must not be blindly given, but earned.  For those things that are earned are vastly more appreciated by an individual than that which is given freely and blindly.

So let's take Dickens wisdom to beware ignorance and work on eliminating it, which will result in less want.

Society will be the better for it.

THE BROWN BOOKS

I absolutely love books.  While I will read an occasional fiction book, I prefer non-fiction by far.  The fiction that I did learn to read and enjoy, I mainly picked up from high school Literature courses.  One particular teacher, Ms. Belden was the main person to make me appreciate fiction writing.  She introduced me to authors such as Steinbeck, Sinclair, and Lewis.  These were authors that wrote fiction for a purpose and to get philosophies and messages across to the readers to make the readers think.  However I was reading fiction books many years before and enjoying the stories just for the stories.  It was a time before I was able to pull messages from what the author was writing about.

When I was young, in the sixties, there was not an internet to look things up instantaneously.  The best way to do research was by using something called an encyclopedia.  The encyclopedia  that was best known and considered to be the best out there was the Encyclopedia Britannica.  The set of books were not cheap and usually consisted of a minimum of twenty volumes covering every topic you could think of from letter A to Z.  The Encyclopedia Britannica also threw in as a bonus some extras like classic novels.

I am not sure how my parents pulled it off but somehow they managed to get our family a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica that included a set of classic novels written for kids.  We were not a wealthy family and my parents scraped by as much as they could, so the purchase of an encyclopedia set was a major coup that they pulled off somehow.  The books were abridged and had large print but they were edited so well, they were able to get the whole story and remain an enjoyable read.  I am not sure how many of these classic novels were initially included with the encyclopedia but there were quite a few.  I am thinking that ten classics for kids were included in the set.

I don't remember when the massive set of books arrived, but I always remember that they were kept in a small bookcase in the living room.  The books were all brown with a slight gold lettering on the binding of each of them.  I am told that as soon as the books arrived I began leafing through them and, when finding a topic of interest, would stop and read.  Usually after reading an article on one topic, it would arouse my curiosity about another topic, which I would dutifully look up and learn some more.

Soon I was finding solace on dark winter nights or muggy summer nights by taking one of the big books up to my room and read about places far away, about people who were famous and why they were famous among many other things.  I did not restrict myself to just reading the volumes of the encyclopedia, but read the kids novels as well.  There were some great titles in those books.  "Treasure Island", "Kidnapped", "Black Beauty". as well as one book that had stories about children written by Charles Dickens.  This was the book that captured my imagination more than any of the others.  This book marked the beginning of my first author that I felt I wanted to read everything he wrote.  My love for Dickens would last right up until today, even though he would eventually be replaced as my favorite author by John Steinbeck as I grew older.

Still, it was this set of brown books containing classics for kids that continued to grow my love of reading and of books.  Those books became an important part of my life.  Both the encyclopedia and the classic novels formed my early years as I headed toward my teenage years.  I would eventually stop reading them as my taste for books became more complicated and more into the non-fiction realm.  The brown books eventually were part of a distant memory.  They were indeed books for kids and I stopped picking them up to read.

At some point in time the whole set of encyclopedia and classic novels disappeared from my parents living room.  Pretty soon they were all forgotten as part of my childhood that I had out grown and had vanished somewhere else, never to be seen again.  However, even though the books were not to be seen or read, there was always a special place in my mind and memories for those books, particularly the Dicken's one.

As time went by and I got married and embarked on my career, I had little to do with what was going on in my parent's house.  I really had no idea all that was in that house but I did know that there were two large barrels in the garage that were sealed and I never questioned what was in them, that is until one Saturday morning when I went over to help dad clean out the garage a bit.

Mom and dad had decided it was time to get rid of some of the old stuff that they had collected over the years and I was going to go over and help them move stuff out.  When I got there, those two big barrels were sitting in the middle of the garage.  As I stood there my curiosity got the better of me and so I asked my mother what was in those mysterious barrels.

It turned out that in one of the barrels were old clothes.  clothes not only of my mothers, but clothes from generations past.  I had no interest in any thing in that barrel.  Then came one of the shocks of my life.  In the other barrel apparently were books that had been saved over the years.  The majority of the books were Reader's Digest condensed books that my dad use to read all the time.  I never really got into the condensed books because the majority of them were fiction.  By this time I was firmly engrossed in the non-fiction genre of books.  I decided to look through a few of the books just to see if there might be something that I may want before they got donated or thrown away.  As I began going through the books I felt an emotional shock that made me wonder what my parents were thinking.

The first books that I latched onto were a couple of my grandpa's old mechanical engineering books that explained how railroad steam engines worked and the math behind how steam engines worked.  They were complicated books and were not in very good shape.  The bindings were falling away from the pages and I realized that even though I wanted to keep them, they would take special care.  I took them and wrapped them in ziplock bags and put them in my basement where they still sit.

Then came the second shock.  There, sitting among all the condensed books, were the brown books of children's classics from the set of encyclopedias.  I immediately questioned my parents on how in the world could they possibly think about getting rid of these books.  All of the love I had for these books as a child came flooding back over me.  I still loved them.  They were part of our family life as I was growing up, they were part of my life as I was growing up.  These were the books that filled many lonely nights and days in my bedroom with me, firing my imagination as I read them.  I pulled them out one by one looking at the bindings to see the title of each book.  Finally, I read on one of the bindings "Dicken's Stories of Children".  I held that book longer than the others and leafed through it.  These books were not going to leave the family.  I found nine of the books and packed them up and took them home and put them in my own bookcase in my living room.  They were back in circulation.  In the next few weeks I read a few of them reliving my own childhood and my discovery of books.

A few years went by and before I knew it, my own son was reading books with the fervor that I had read books when I was a child.  He discovered the brown books on the bookshelf one day and began reading "Treasure Island".  He seemed to have a sense that these books were special and rather fragile.  He always turned the pages easily as he read the books one after another.  As he grew up he read the brown books several times over.  These books that had helped me fall in love with reading had found a new life by helping my son fall in love with reading.  I still read a lot.  My son still reads a lot.  Both of us can look to our love of books and give some credit to those old brown books that came with the encyclopedia set that had been bought so many years before.

The brown books will forever be a part of my life.  They still sit in the bookcase in my living room and will stay there as long as I have any say in it.  When I see them on that shelf, I look at them with fondness.  The brown books impacted my life and my son's life.  Perhaps they will eventually impact another generation's love of books, even though the internet makes that highly unlikely.  Never the less, they will always be a part of my family.

LITERATURE IDIOT - DAVID COPPERFIELD

Contrary to popular belief I do read some fiction.  My favorite fiction author is John Steinbeck.  I have also read and love the books of Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Charles Dickens.  Dickens books were all written in with very similar circumstances to them.  My favorite book of Dickens was DAVID COPPERFIELD.  The character of David seemed to parallel my thoughts and wishes quite a bit.  It is a good story of the life of a boy who grows into manhood and makes something of himself in spite of all odds stacked against him.

Recently I had the opportunity to view the 1935 film version of the novel.  While watching the movie it occurred to me what an idiot David Copperfield really was.  He surrounded himself with people who were con artists, totally mad, or immature beyond belief.  You realize that these people are this way when you read the book but when you see the movie it totally comes at you like a blinding light.

First you have Aunt Betsey.  She is delusional and the one thing that she can not stand are donkeys walking down the road in front of her house.  As far as I know it is a public road but each time a donkey comes by her house she grabs a broom and runs out to chase the animals, and their owner, away getting them away from her house as quickly as possible.  She does not seem to mind any other form of life walking down the road, just donkeys.  Where does this aversion to donkeys come from?  We do not know but it does show that she is a little off by her actions.

She lives with her boarder Mr. Dick.  Personally I think Mr. Dick may be a metaphor of some sort but none the less Mr. Dick is more than a few bricks shy of a full load.  He is a full load shy of a full load.  This is the person that Aunt Betsey goes to for advice on a constant basis throughout the book.  Mr. Dick has to stop and think about the simplest of questions and brings forth the most common easy answer that there could be.  Mr. Dick is a total loser.

These are the two people that begin to raise David as a child.  Soon he is discharged to the services of Mr. Murdstone who is in charge of Davids education.  He is a hard man who forces David to study every waking minute of the day.  If David does not prove that he has learned his lessons, he is whipped with a cane of sorts.  Perhaps this did help David learn but it had to effect him mentally a bit which can perhaps explain why he continues to hang around this cast of outcasts, as it were.  He meets Agnes Wickfield somewhere along in here and she falls in love with David at a very early age. She is the daughter of a man that David goes to work for.  A stockbroker in modern times I would assume.  Agnes will be the most sane and proper person of all of the characters in David's life.

David then meets Mr. McCawber.  In the film McCawber is rightfully played by W.C. Fields.  He is a procrastinator extraordinaire who has an strong aversion to work and is always hiding from his creditors.  At one point he does end up in debtors prison but David is there to get him out.  David spends all of his time during the whole of the book keeping McCawber out of trouble and McCawber never seems to change..

Then there is Uriah Heep.  He is a slimey dog of a character who is extremely manipulative and is the one person that David does not seem to stay friends with.  Not to say that David did not try to be friends with Heep because he did.  It isn't until late in the movie that David realizes what scum Heep is and turns on him to save Mr. Wickfields business.

There is Steerforth who David went to boarding school with, or college we would call it these days.  Steerforth is a very bright man with no morals at all.  He ends up running off with Alice Peggoty, stealing her away from her fiance only to dump her in the middle of Europe when he got tired of her.  Alice tries to kill herself and ends up committed for life in an asylum.  The Peggoty family were another of the few normal characters in the book.  Peggoty was Davids nurse when he was young and living with his Aunt Betsey..  She took good care of David and gave sound advice to him.  Problem was that there aren't many opportunities for her to give David advice so her worth is mostly discounted through out the novel.

Then there comes the lovely Dora.  David falls in love with her at first sight.  This presents probably the best argument for not falling in love at first sight.  Dora was one of the most immature people I have ever read about in a novel.  I am counting Mr. Dick in this novel as well as Lenny in OF MICE AND MEN and a host of other immature characters.  The woman, or girl, that David decides to marry is a total waste of space and she plays David like a fine violin.  When she dies towards the end of the book you almost want to applaud.  It is here where David makes his most intelligent move during his whole life.  After Dora dies, he marries the mature and down to earth, free yet right thinking Agnes Wickfield.  He should have been with her during the entirety of the book.

Now, there is a lot more to this novel than what I have written.  I have just hit upon some of the more obvious things that David went through that really made his life more difficult than it had to be.  He started out behind and down.  He had a long road to travel before becoming successful but he kept hanging around all of these people who dragged him back into the situation he had pulled himself out of.  I determined after watching that movie that David Copperfield was one of the most idiotic success stories ever written in literature.  If he had a half of a brain he would have left and never come back in order to live a sane life with mature people who didn't have half their wits gone.

I know what will be said, it was his strength to hold onto to the love of the people who formed his life and to help those people when they had difficult times.  Maybe so.  How many times is one man expected to continue to bail out those who refuse to do for themselves?  Mr. McCawber is a fine example of that.

What really hangs the crown of an idiot on David's head is marrying that immature baby named Dora when Agnes was right there ready to become his wife at the drop of a hat.  That one event shows the blindness of David Copperfield to reality and what he should have done to have a safe and happy life.

I like to think that after he discovered the immorality of Steerforth, after Dora had finally died, After Heep had finally been put in his place and the Wickfields saved, and after McCawber finally seemed to take a little responsibility, that David and Agnes Copperfield went to England and lived a quiet and productive life together, putting the entire past behind him.  Unless he could put the entire past behind him, he would be miserable on a daily basis worry about all those quirky people he had left behind in his child hood.  I would like to think he didn't even go back to visit Dora's grave.  If he did go back to visit her grave I would hope it would be to put a head stone down that said something to the effect of "Here lies Dora, a totally selfish and immature girl who sucked my soul almost dry before she finally died."

Maybe I am cynical.  Maybe I was just in a bad or strange mood when I watched the movie.  I know I had never seen David Copperfield this way before.  I had always admired him for getting out of his dire situation and making a success of himself.  That is part of the joy of reading a Dickens novel.  But the night I watched this movie from 1935, all I could think of was what an idiot he was and continued to be until the closing credits.

MOONSHADOW & THE KEEPER OF THE CANINES

This is a review of a book by author Kim Doll that gave me some things to think about.  I don't like non-thinking books and fiction thinking books seem to be far and few between as far as I have been able to see.  There are a few authors out there that keep you on your toes with fiction, like Mitch Albom or John Grisham for example, and while Doll does not quite reach Albom's or Grisham's writing ability, I can feel fairly good about putting her way up on the list of fiction writers these days. She certainly writes better than I could ever aspire to be able to do.   The book reads very smoothly and is a quick read.

It is the first of a trilogy of books and being that it has a heavy load to bear.  As the first of a trilogy it has the responsibility of laying the ground work for the two follow up books.  It does this extremely well.  You are introduced to all the main character's and are given a profile of each character's personality and place in the book.

I found it took me getting past the first two or three chapters before I settled down and felt comfortable with the book.  As in many fiction books, the reader is asked to displace reality and to step into the world that the book occupies.  The basis of the book takes a parallel line of the Bible and how God and Satan fit into that thought process and turns it on it's head.  Once I was able to start thinking as such while reading the book, I was able to get on with the message that I feel Doll is trying to get across through this series of books.

The message I came away with from this first volume of the Moonshadow Series is that being humane means much more than following the Golden Rule and treating other humans the way you would want to be treated.  It globally stretches the philosophy of humanity across the spectrum of species and life form and does it very well.  The book focuses mainly on the canine species but goes further to encompass all forms of life.

It also stretches the perception of good and evil as not only human traits, but also the traits of the rest of the animal kingdom.  It seems to take our core beliefs and make us aware that those beliefs could possibly be wrong thus tricking us into thinking we are acting humanely when in fact we are not.  These same beliefs are given to the animal characters as well, manipulating a couple of well meaning squirrels into doing evil deeds upon other members of the animal kingdom and costing them dearly.

While she does use animal characters in some evil roles, her main target is mankind and how we treat, not only each other, but the rest of the animal kingdom as well.  She does a superb job of getting your mind clicking over and start thinking about how man mistreats the world upon which we live. Doll spreads a wide enough net to make the reader's thinking process lead him into some very dark places of himself as he follows the quest of Moonshadow.

This first volume made me wonder where the tale will take us and, while I am ordinarily not a huge fan of fiction, finds me wanting to continue with the second volume when it comes out.  This is a good book and one that could improve people's thinking about ourselves, each other and the entire world we find ourselves living in.