April 27: Become a Dilettante, John Keating, What We Stay Alive For

Merton being chastised for wanting to be a writer . . .

It was not the first time I had met Mrs. Pearce, the headmistress of Ripley Court.  She was a bulky and rather belligerent-looking woman with great pouches under her eyes.  She was standing in a room in which were hung several of my father's paintings.  She had probably been looking at them, and considering the error and instability of an artist's way of life when Aunt Maud mentioned the fact that we had been talking about my own future.

"Does he want to be a dilettante like his father?" said Mrs. Pearce roughly, surveying me with a rather outraged expression through the lenses of her spectacles.

"We were thinking that perhaps he might become a journalist," said Aunt Maud gently.

"Nonsense," said Mrs. Pearce, "let him go into business and make a decent living for himself.  There's no use in his wasting his time and deceiving himself.  He might as well get some sensible ideas into his head from the very start, and prepare himself for something solid and reliable and not go out into the world with his head full of dreams."  And then, turning to me, she cried out, "Boy!  Don't become a dilettante, do you hear?"

I was received at Ripley Court, although the summer term was almost over, more or less as if I were an orphan or some kind of a stray that required at once pity and a special, not unsuspicious kind of attention.  I was the son of an artist, and had just come from two years in a French school, and the combination of artist and France added up to practically everything that Mrs. Pearce and her friends suspected and disliked.  Besides, to crown it all, I did not know any Latin.  What was to be made of a boy who was already in the middle of his fourteenth year and could not decline mensa--had never even opened a Latin grammar?

So I had the humiliation of once again descending to the lowest place and sitting with the smallest boys in the school and beginning at the beginning.

But Ripley was a pleasant and happy place after the prison of the Lycee.  The huge, dark green sweep of the cricket field, and the deep shadows of the elm trees where one sat waiting for his innings, and the dining room where we crammed ourselves with bread and butter and jam at tea-time and listened to Mr. Onslow reading aloud from the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, all this was immense luxury and peace after Montauban.

People don't understand the artistic impulse.  Merton, being the son of an intinerant painter, is immediately suspect.  The arts--whether visual, written, spoken, musical--are not considered serious pursuits.  Instead, they should be saved by pastimes, those hobbies responsible people indulge after they have completed their "real work" in a business office, medical practice, retail store.  The arts are frivolous.  The arts are expendable.  (Certainly, the current administration in the White House has made this belief core to their budget proposals, slashing funding for anything to do with truth and beauty and education.)

Me?  I subscribe to John Keating's philosophy from Dead Poets Society:

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute.  We read and write poetry because we are the members of the human race.  And the human race is filled with passion.  And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.  But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

That's why I stay up until midnight reading novels and poetry.  Why I tap away at my keyboard for a couple hours every night.  Not because I need something to fill my "empty" hours.  No.  Because I need these things to sustain me for the next day, when all the business of scraping a living from the belly of the world absorbs me.  If I didn't write these blog posts and scribble in my journal, I would undoubtedly be ready to take long walk off a short rooftop.

If you're reading this blog post, you probably already agree with me.  There is something about writing and poetry that fills you up in some way.  Gives you something that Wheel of Fortune or 60 Minutes does not.  It may be a secret obsession that you hide from family and friends.  That's okay.  You can still be a part of this Dead Poets Society.  Just be sure to leave your tie and suit jacket at home.

We are dreamers here.  Hopers for a better tomorrow.  We reject practically everything about our present-day world.  The hatred and waste and greed.  Instead, we embrace love and beauty.  That is what I live for, why I punch time clocks, drag myself out of bed at 4:45 in the morning.  It's all about poetry.  The sonnets and lyrics of everyday existence.

Saint Marty is ready to haiku off to bed now.