Educated, not destroyed…

I hadn’t been to an estate sale in a while.

Using the estatesales.net site, you can get a look at what sales are offering ahead of time, so it’s easy to see if the style of what’s on offer is anything you’re interested in, or if there looks to be a good, cluttered basement – which is where you often find the good stuff.

And there hasn’t been much to interest me for some time. Colonial-style furniture, corelleware, santa figurines and Southern Living cookbooks, mostly.

Same with this past weekend, but as I was driving to the grocery store I noticed a sign up in the neighborhood, pointing to an estate sale down the street.

Okay. This shouldn’t take long. Just check it out.

Don’t get too excited. I didn’t find any Heywood Wakefield or atomic glassware. But I did find books. Lots and lots of books.

Now, anyone who’s been following me for a while knows that I have a fraught relationship with books. Specifically, the books that have been in my charge. Beginning with my marriage, when two book-heavy households were merged, then my husband’s death, then my father’s death, over the past two decades I have managed to overcome any reverence for the act of possessing any particular material book – one just doesn’t get rid of books, right?…..to reach the opposite position of Good God, please takes these books out of my house.

I can’t tell you how many – thousands – of books I’ve either sold, or, more likely, given away, not only to my adult kids, but to mostly church rummage sales.

So, let’s just say that when I go to estate sales, I glance at the books, but they’re not my focus, not only because of the reasons I just outline, but also because most of the book collections in these sales are not, shall we say, consistent with my interests. Aside from the Southern Living cookbooks (which are great! But…not what I’m interested in), you just see a lot of Tom Clancy and Joyce Meyer and high school yearbooks.

This was different, though. Much different. I should have paused right there and researched the deceased’s background, since his name was in many of the books, but I didn’t – my arms got full pretty quickly.

As it turns out, he was an academic – of film and drama studies and a writer himself. Also of a Palestinian/Catholic background, so there was a lot of Middle-Eastern related material, as well as a bit of Catholic stuff.

Here are some shots of some of the books I purchased – books that I wouldn’t be able to find at any library even if I were looking for them, and wouldn’t run across just by my ritual perusing of forgotten book sites or archive.org. But also a bunch of .25 paperbacks (collected stories of Peter Taylor, Jean Stafford, etc.) that will be useful both in the homeschool and for me during those late nights I’m looking for something to read, not long, just….something…and not on a damn screen….

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All very interesting – I’d never read the Mauriac. Priestley’s The Good Companions is one of my favorite novels, so I’m looking forward to perusing his magnum opus. Deep into early twentieth century American literature, the book about Paris is timely. And I did, indeed, read about half of Philosopher’s Holiday last night, and will write more about it when I’m finished, but for now, I want to highlight a couple of passages:

First, in a chapter about one particularly restless student, educated in a particularly open-minded way (this is the late 20’s-early 30’s) all over Europe, this student interrogates the writer, a philosophy professor, about a course:

“Students here speak well of it, but students speak well of courses for such accidental reasons. Everyone says it’s bright and entertaining. But, well, you know what I mean. Is it worth taking? Does it really give you new ideas, or do something to your old ones? Does it make you over, or give you a new world? “

Imagine wanting to pursue education, not because it confirms your worldview or affirms your identity, but because it’s only worth your time if it gives you….new ideas?

Well, but what do you expect? When you raise children to believe that they are fine and beautiful just as they are, and are accepted just as they are….of course any challenge to that is an affront and an offense.

Secondly, Edman recounts a discussion in which which some Bach was played on a phonograph in a group that included some Very Modern Musicians. Discussions ensued, of course. He concludes:

The arts are the languages of men, and a passionate conflict over a symbol may be as symptomatic as the quarrel over a religious and political creed. But in such matters quarrels become discussions, and the discussions are innocent. Our quarrel over taste divided but educated rather than destroyed us.

To want to learn. To be willing to have your worldview challenged and maybe even blown up. To disagree, as one does, but to seek to learn through that disagreement, rather than to wield power and claim victory?

What a world. What a world.