Burn the Libraries

I generally don’t care much for poetry, but I do have a favorite, The Tables Turned, by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Andy, my boyfriend at the time, sent it to me on a series of postcards when I was first getting into rewilding. The first poem below provides the background for the second. According to Wordsworth, they both “arose out of conversation with a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy.”

Expostulation and Reply

“WHY, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?

“Where are your books?–that light bequeathed
To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.

“You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you!”

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet, I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply:

“The eye–it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against or with our will.

“Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.

“Think you, ‘mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

“–Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away,”

1798.

The Tables Turned
An Evening Scene on the Same Subject

UP! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you’ll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun, above the mountain’s head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless–
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

While browsing for more information I found a critique of this poem:

“Yes, another one of these. There is a discernible attitude, among some poets, that book learning (and science in particular) is somehow ‘unnatural’ and ‘unpoetic’, and that by its pursuit the human race is abandoning its collective spirituality, so to speak, and moving away from nature. This has spawned a whole brood of fallacies and misrepresentations, from Rousseau’s unfoundedly praised ‘noble savage’ to Whitman’s unjustly reviled ‘learned astronomer’.[1]“

Follow the links to…

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

-Walt Whitman

…and you find a very similar critique by a different person:

“The thing that gets my goat about today’s poem is the basic conceit -that Science, by measuring and analysing the natural world, somehow detracts from its innate beauty. I guess it comes down to a personal point of view (though I for one am against this entire ‘two cultures’ divide – I don’t see why the two world-views should collide at all); nevertheless, I take issue with all those poets (and yes, scientists) who propagate it. I fail to see how understanding Nature gets in the way of appreciating it; indeed, to me, there is something wonderfully poetic about the notion that there are millions of stars in millions of galaxies, further than the eye can see, each with their own solar systems and cometary halos and asteroid belts and ringed planets and red spots and blue planets…

Any poet who thinks that science is an impersonal, mechanical monster, committed to destroying beauty and truth and the joy of individuality, reducing the Universe to facts and figures, charts and numbers, doesn’t know the first thing about science.”

I disagree. I think that is exactly the nature of Science. There’s nothing wrong with a little observation, and experimentation, but capital “S” Science capital “S” Sucks and is synonymous with civilization. For exactly what is wrong with Science watch this video satire by the Onion: Study; Multiple Stab Wounds May Be Harmful to Monkeys.

Along these same lines, even other primitivists freak out when you talk about torching libraries. While there does exist a handful of inspirational anticivilizational authors, and I occasionally use books such as field guides and anthropological texts to help me rewild, I wouldn’t be all that sad if I never got to read one again. I think I’d figure things out. I hope that my grandchildren never learn how to read. I hope that they don’t have any reason to.

“…there is no record, in the entire history of the Library, that any of its illustrious scientists and scholars ever seriously challenged the political, economic and religious assumptions of their society. The permanence of the stars was questioned; the justice of slavery was not. Science and learning in general were the preserve of a privileged few. The vast population of the city had not the vaguest notion of the great discoveries taking place within the Library. New findings were not explained or popularized. The research benefited them little. Discoveries in mechanics and steam technology were applied mainly to the perfection of weapons, the encouragement of superstition, the amusement of kings. The scientists never grasped the potential of machines to free people. The great intellectual achievements of antiquity had few immediate practical applications. Science never captured the imagination of the multitude. There was no counterbalance to stagnation, to pessimism, to the most abject surrenders to mysticism. When, at long last, the mob came to burn the Library down, there was nobody to stop them.”

-Carl Sagan on the burning of the great library at Alexandria

You could say in the last 2000 years, the multitude, including our dear friend Carl with his freedom machines, have become caught up in the spectacle of Science, led to believe that it is on their side, but other than that have things really changed?

Note: If you liked this entry check out Urban Scout’s blog: Tracking Trumps Science.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Keep track of things you borrow and lend with Mooch!
• God vs. Science
• Q&A with Barbara Bradley: Can Science Help Find God?