It’s hard to ignore while in Japan that my Japanese is like my piano is like my French: completely unstructured, little fragments of coherence and understanding try to paper over a whole world of non-understanding and it leads to this feeling of … promise, potential, always indefinitely deferred.
It makes me feel constantly embarrassed by all that I don’t know, more than proud I know anything at all. I can say very basic things in conversation in clumsy and indirect ways, process 1/4 of what I hear and defer to technology for the rest. That my French is not much better is an even bigger indictment.
Of course anyone is free to bang out notes haphazardly on the piano, as the fancy strikes him. But this is a rudimentary, savage sort of freedom. It cloaks an incapacity to play even the simplest pieces accurately and well. On the other hand, the person who really possesses the art of playing the piano has acquired a new freedom. He can play whatever he chooses, and also compose new pieces. His musical freedom could be described as the gradually acquired ability to execute works of his choice with perfection. It is based on natural dispositions and a talent developed and stabilized by means of regular, progressive exercises, or properly speaking, a habitus. 1
In a sense I didn’t care about learning languages until the age of, like, 30, but piano? I’ve played it for fun in the gaps of my life and it isn’t any better. It’s all chords, vague ideas about what keys they belong to, constantly stepping out of keys as I fiddle between the chords I know. There’s an aptitude, but no underlying theory.
I’ve found that my relationship to theology is quite different: as I have gone to services, come back week after week, read more and more, I’ve gotten my own set of influences, my own personal system, the development of my faith in action.
From a recurring structure came an internal order. I’ve not been able to bring this to a pedogogical context.
In a child, however, courage is more imaginary than real. The child spontaneously identifies with persons who appeal to his imagination—great men, fictional heroes; they must never be cowards, even in the direst situations. He himself however is easily frightened by a trifle, shrinks before a shadow, and is afraid to go to bed in the dark.
The development of courage is progressive. It is acquired far more through small victories of self-conquest, repeated day after day, than through dreams of great actions. It grows with the dogged effort to study, to finish a task, render a service, or overcome laziness or some other fault. There will also be battles to fight, trials to encounter, small and great sufferings to endure, reaching their pitch in the illness and death of loved ones. …
Courage, which the Romans considered as the highest of virtues, is a characteristic of the morally mature person. It is indispensable for complete moral freedom. Gradually formed in us through life’s discipline, first given, then personally appropriated, courage enables us to undertake worthwhile projects of high value to ourselves and others, regardless of all interior and exterior resistance, obstacles, and opposition. We act when and how we wish, to the point of exploiting the very setbacks that might have weakened our resolve and checked our plans. The person of little courage can indeed boast that he is free to do what he wants, and can affirm himself along with the crowd in rebelling against rules and laws. In reality, despite all his talk, his freedom is very weak and he is near to being a slave, for he does not know how to form a firm, lasting determination strong enough to rescue him from the pressure of circumstances or feelings so as to master them as he ought. 2
I have been able to identify when I am made to be so distracted that I can’t develop anything, and I’ve been able to create structure when I have no obligations at all. But this is really rudimentary. To constantly learn — to learn entirely new things, you have to learn how you yourself learn.3
I’ve found more success in constructing syllabi — lists and achievements to complete with a sense of knowing the larger story beats of learning — and moreover, to make myself write. I opened a bit of discussion about this on the paralogue as I try to sculpt an entire field’s basics out for myself.
Footnotes
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Sources of Christian Ethics. Pinckaers, Servais-Théodore. Trans. M. T. Noble. Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Print. 355. ↩
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Ibid, 356-7. ↩
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And speaking of: Hamming’s own “Learning to Learn,” The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, opens with the imposition that one should hypothesise the likely future’s fundamentals, keeping oneself open to then pick up what comes next without being left behind entirely — but he wants his students to pursue excellence as engineers. I believe in good engineering, but leisure learning and general excellence is my emphasis here. ↩