View from the Back Porch
I've been writing View from the Back Porch for a number of years. I hope through it to describe aspects of Stevenson that might not be "visible" in other communications.
If you would like my view on something about Stevenson, please let me know. I'd be glad to hear from you.
Frank Stephenson
fstephenson@stevensonschool.org
-
Back Porch 2008.22
Posted December 31, 2008
Love
Much has been written about love. What is love, where is love, how deep is love, my love, your love, our love, love. It makes us, Dostoevsky says, “better than we are;” it is the driving force behind everything that is good about each of us and by extension the families, institutions, and nations of which we are a part.
Its opposite is fear, a force that to Saroyan represents “the misery and sorrow of the world.” There’s always a choice.
We are entering a new year and I am thinking about what is ahead for my world, my country, the School, me. And I am reading Hamlet’s Dresser, by Bob Smith; “the true story of a boy whose life was saved by literature,” and of a man who shared (his love for) Shakespeare with people all over New York City. “A good heart, Kate,” said Henry V to the girl he would marry, “is the sun and the moon, or rather the sun and not the moon, for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps his course truly.”
If a good heart is the sun, lighting our way, then Sonnet 116 is an organizing principle: “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken.” It is an attitude that can permeate our lives, inform a nation, or change a world.
I’m also reading Fareed Zakaria’s new book, The Post-American World. A section entitled “God and Foreign Policy” talks about the Chinese Qi (energy), described by professor Robert Weller as “part of a broad way of understanding the structure of the world as a set of interacting forces, completely interrelated (harmonious) rather than working through a simple linear cause and effect.”
Which sounds a lot more like love and hope to me than fear, and returns me to Robert Louis Stevenson and our School prayer: “and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.”
Happy New Year!