8/1001 Bradburian Nights

 Story: The Wooing of Dinah Shadd by Rudyard Kipling (from 50 Great Short Stories)

Essay: What is Knowledge? by Mary Hardcastle

Here is our question staring us in the face. What is Knowledge ? I want to appeal to your generosity. Will you for a few moments put aside all those answers to that question which are crowding into your minds and give your free attention to Charlotte Mason's attempted answer to that question? I say attempted because as she says herself Knowledge is undefined and probably indefinable, and! she can only give a negative answer to the question - she says that Knowledge is not instruction, it is not information, it is not scholarship, it is not a well stored memory. That clears the decks. Fortunately she did not leave the subject with a negation. Although she refused to give a definition, she gives us many affirmations which help us to see the vision of knowledge which she saw. She speaks of knowledge as mental food. She compares it to a flame which is passed like the light of a torch from mind to mind. She speaks of the knowledge gained through scientific observation.. She suggests that knowledge is the source of pleasure. Again and again she refers to the Science of Relations.

There is something vital and intriguing about all these affirmations, but they might become isolated cliches if it were not for these words: 'Knowledge is not a store but, rather, a state that a person remains within or drops out of.' At once we are brought down to earth and at the same time enter Eternity. We are not considering an abstract conception, a vague and remote something which we must dutifully consider for the sake of the children in our charge. It is a personal question for each one of us. Are we within that state of knowledge or have we dropped out of it? Certainly if we are not within it, the chances are that our children will never enter it.

And

Life is all living. The truly living person is in touch wherever he goes with some vital interest. 

Poem: 

Futility

by Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun—

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields half-sown.

Always it woke him, even in France,

Until this morning and this snow.

If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—

Woke once the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides

Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth's sleep at all?