TEACHER THINKING, TEACHER CHANGE,
AND THE “CAPRICIOUS SEAMSTRESS” — MEMORY

Margret Buchmann
Michigan State University

I. Introduction: Ibsen and Company

Having lately returned from Norway, I am full of memories. Landscapes, tapestries, Viking ships, the lilt of the language, the hospitality and kindness of friends, much talking and more thinking. I have also learned a bit about Ibsen and his times. In 1879, the playwright wrote to a friend, “There are at present not as many as 25 free and independent spirits in the whole of Norway. Nor could they possibly exist.”¹ Ibsen then executes a familiar and customary turn, which one might call the “pedagogical” turn in social and political arguments; without further ado, he posits an implicit explanation for how people’s lacks of freedom and autonomy are caused: “I have tried to see and ‘feel from the inside’ the daily life of schools — modes of instruction, curriculum policies, the content of subject areas, the plans that regulate every hour.”

Ibsen’s writer-friend, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, wrote in the same year: “In our times, in our country, it is utterly impossible to be an intellectual without seeing everything in relation to society; and it is impossible, in turn, to do that without assuming a political or religious standpoint.”² In modern countries today, these pedagogical turns in the critique of society and political turns among people devoted to the life of the mind are still taken for granted. Note that they assume quite a lot about the sources and causes of desirable change, as well as about human perfectibility. In general, these “turns” overestimate the role of schools and intellectuals, drawing a flattering (and onerous) picture of what these institutions and groups can do to change the world that we have made.

Research on teacher thinking can be seen against this background. As the Norwegian context adds its distinctive somber features, so this international body of research and researchers has its peculiarities: Cynicism, or detached irony, versus romantic tonalities and pastoral myths. There are those who recoil from most of what goes on in teachers’ minds, because teacher thinking seems rarely transformative, being instead conservative, idiosyncratic, and oriented toward the next things to be done.³ Mimesis appears to be the nemesis of teaching.⁴ Veering from vindication to defense, other researchers celebrate teacher’s thoughts, even terming them theories, just because those thoughts are personal and engrained in “their own” practice.⁵

Each camp is affected by a version of “holy terror.” The first ponders the contents and workings of teachers’ minds with exasperated fascination and an almost superstitious dread, the other tries to spell those contents out with piety and reverential awe. While the second camp pronounces its defiance, “And we saw what teachers thought and did, and it was good,” the other reverses valuations, riled by the deflating ordinariness and mundanity of teaching. The queer logic of their factious opposition incapacitates both sides. Some researchers do not wish to meddle with teacher thinking, which is sacred; others are transfixed by their metaphysical refusal to see truth and rightness as residing in the world, which is profane.

These fixations translate into politics. Those who feel baffled by the stolid immovability of schools (and society) are annoyed precisely because they cast teachers as agents of change, heralds of a new and better order envisioned by intellectuals. Where teacher thinking is valued just because it is what it is, issues of empowerment and self-determination for a (mostly female) profession, often not accorded much status or “voice,” are not far below the surface and sometimes pointedly up front.⁶

II. Looking at Mythical Pictures of Teacher Memories:Rainbow or Granite?

On either side of this divide in perceptions and politics, I see the presence of myth with its normative and meaning-generating content;⁷ the opposing views of teacher thinking come down to conflicting mythologies. In this paper, I will examine this divide and its implications by looking at issues of memory and meaning-making. While, to some, teacher memories seem but a heavy, repressive “dead hand of the past,” whose weight accounts for the persistence of unambitious teaching and oppressive evils, they appear to others as uplifting — a luminous thread of life and meaning. These mythical pictures involve the dichotomies of structure and development, individual and society, tradition and imagination, and memory and reason, or hope. Their opposition is rooted deeply in anxious thought and concern: fears of a deadly real world, hopes for a transforming — saving — vision, and conflicting — heartfelt — commitments to the source of that vision and of human progress. Thus, it is rooted in acts of faith. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson may be more up to date than it may at first have seemed.

In attempting to outflank these conflicting mythologies and contrary affiliations, I have chosen something similarly “deep down” and powerful, namely, the poetic truth of a prose passage in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Orlando thinks about human nature, thought, action, uncertainty, and continuity, with memory busy at the center of it all; what she, or he, says brings to mind Shakespeare’s prancing “motley fools” rather than theories of “rational-choice” or “reflective equilibrium”:

Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite,…nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that…our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the masthead ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon: Is there land or is there none? …nature…has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us…but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world…may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim…. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work…our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.⁸

Clay and diamonds; rainbow and granite: There is a great deal in this passage, which is poignant, evocative, justly observed, and effective in making one “stop and think.” Consider the last sentence alone, depicting ordinary actions as taking wing, but uncertainly, half in light, half in darkness: Are they winged, soaring messengers or birds hopelessly caught? Let us concentrate on the image of memory as a “capricious seamstress.”

By giving memory this paradoxical name, Woolf has unsettled our thinking, though with a light touch. She does the same in calling human nature a “perfect rag-bag”: odds and ends go into it, and who knows where they come from or go? A tendency to be capricious conflicts with one’s notions of a patient needlewoman sewing straight seams and neat hems, following a given pattern with regular suitable stitches, bent on having no frayed or unravelling pieces. A seamstress sticks to a task whose outcome and purpose are no mystery — except, of course, where she is capricious.

The homeliness and humor inherent in Woolf’s metaphors for human nature and memory provide some relief from the darker sides of their manifold associations. A rag-bag may attain perfection, but its state of completion and greatest excellence is still one of its own, rather dingy and disreputable kind: ill-assorted, tattered, and not all that glorious. Yet caprice recalls the remote and smiling unconcern of marvelous Greek gods. It is a state of self-reliant energy and bliss in which justice, good judgment, true need, or the facts of the matter do not count for much. It is a state of youth.

To be capricious is to be lighthearted rather than solemn. It can mean being willful, disorderly, imperious, wayward, and inconstant, yet, in any event, moving, changeable, doing and being the unexpected — thus escaping control. Being subject to sudden, irregular changes will affect others as being unreliable and intractable, hence, as a lack of characteristics valuable for interaction. However, one can also see remoteness and the play of fancy as forms of release, and capriciousness as a positive power. Elusiveness and animation are appealing. Caprice engenders the unique and surprising. There is a generous and jubilant quality in its freedom.

Let us see what these explorations of caprice suggest for the idea of memory. Remembrances are put together from many things, somehow, but they are no impassive records. In his “Ode to Psyche,” Keats speaks of “sweet enforcement and remembrance dear.” Memory, as the primordial stuff of being and meaning, feeling and knowing, is, to some extent, inventive and — though often deeply etched and rooted — no stranger to flux and fantasy. Whether one looks at a degree of indeterminacy as openness or unreliability depends on the context and, also, on one’s capacity to tolerate, or even welcome, the unexpected.⁹

This said, let me go back to research on teacher thinking and my contention that, in this field, people tend to be of two distinct minds about memory. Researchers do not seem to consider the motley aspects of memory, jointly, or in their unquiet, paradoxical union. Instead, they favor either a gloomy or rosy view of the nature and effects of teacher memories on teacher and pupil learning, as well as of society at large. I do not just question the starkness of these views — their tendency to be unmitigated — but their partiality in the descriptive and evaluative senses of the term. In both senses, partiality contributes to the tyranny of illusions.

III.Partiality in Vision and Politics

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “partiality” in its evaluative sense as the quality or character of prejudgment, or of being “inclined antecedently to favour one party in a cause, or one side of the question more than another; prejudiced, biased, interested, unfair”: its opposite, then, is being impartial. There is a weaker evaluative sense in which “partiality” indicates one’s being sympathetic or feeling kindly toward a cause, group of people, or side of a question. Descriptively, as in the case of an insurance policy covering only a part of one’s total loss of property or other damages, something’s being partial means simply that it is incomplete, that it constitutes a part only, rather than the total.

In research on teacher thinking, opposing perspectives on teacher memories are partial in taking sides and in representing only part of the picture. We should try to recognize and rectify these matters because partial pictures of memory — views that are fundamentally incomplete as well as a matter of bias and partisanship — lead to misleading beliefs and ill-founded practices in teacher preparation and professional development. Not much good can come out of being in a state of ideological hypnosis. Still, the attractions of partial views of teacher memory are potent: they rest on their comparative starkness and a feeling of being “on the right side.” Dwelling underground are myths with normative and meaning-generating content: products of the spiritual life and constitutive elements of culture. Add to this the fact that partial views lead to exciting programs of (educational) inquiry and action, programs that are inherently appealing and fire people with a sense that they have found a key to things and recipes for action. True in general, this applies to views of teacher memories as follows.

If those contents and workings of teachers’ minds are viewed, gloomily, as unhallowed obstructions to progress, as idiosyncratic, conservative, disorderly, and intractable, a central goal of teacher education — if it is not to be doomed — must be their revision, control, or extinction. On the rosy view of teacher memories, by contrast, we must stand back respectfully as teachers accomplish and recount their personal journeys of development and discovery, perhaps helping them to record what must be their progress, but not run any interference, not even as educators.¹⁰

We should note two connected conceptual issues here. First, the divided views of teacher memories are also distinct in their respective preference for an external versus an internal point of view, equating this analytic distinction with the evaluative one of good versus bad — although, on opposite sides, valuations continue to be inverted. Second, the concept of progress featured by the rosy, internal view confounds descriptive and evaluative senses: “progress” as the movement, in time, through one’s professional and life cycles, and “progress” as improvement; one can, however, turn quite gray without commensurate advance in wisdom and understanding.

Wittgenstein once said that it is very difficult to veer just a little bit from an established path. This is what I will try to do in what follows. Tempering partial views of teacher memories should lead to sensibilities that are more enlightening and just, dispelling some gloom and purple haze.

IV. Relieving Gloom and Doom With Learning

Personal memories combine impressive idiosyncratic elements with equally authoritative elements that are shared; Thelen calls these “archetypes” — typical views and experiences of teachers, subject matters, and schooling that are anchored in a culture.¹¹ What is personally meaningful, typically the case, and affirmative of given cultures shapes ineluctably what people think and do. Teachers are no exception to these rules of common sense, sociology, and psychology. Memories outside the scope of professional education are relentlessly present and unquestionably compelling. That there is rule-governed behavior does little to lighten up the bleak picture, for those patterns are viewed from an external vantage point that contrasts memory and reason, tradition and imagination, and so on, which makes personal patterns “idiosyncratic” and cultural patterns “conservative.”

Against this bad news, consider the fact that memories do also provide light and warmth, giving one heart and direction, while supplying a sense of community as well as lively images of rightness (“This is what I ought to do!”) and of mastery in action (“This is what doing it well looks like!”). What is illuminating, inspiring, and, at least, alive about memory is left out of its inert picture. The roots of childhood, for instance, may be “impacted, interwoven, scrubby, interlocked, fibrous, cankerous, tuberous, ancient, matted.”¹² Still they twist and turn, inside, and help provide for life, if not growth: Keats’s “branch`ed thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain.” In looking at memory, thus, in relation to learning, we are assuming a modified internal point of view: one where outcomes will have to be judged with some suitable detachment.

Some intimations of these matters came to me when I first read a remarkable novel by Rebecca West, The Birds Fall Down.¹³ In this story of espionage, revolution, conflict of cultures, and love, a mother’s joyfully giving a hat to another woman is a memory around which crystallizes a daughter’s getting of wisdom and understanding — in an extended process of revelation and formation that has elements of necessity and of a quirky randomness. The woman receiving the gift is the father’s mistress, and that fact is unknown, at the time, to the mother and observing child. When first drawn to revisit the event, the daughter does not see and remember much beyond her mother in her radiant generosity, loved and the image of safety and love. The other woman seems but her mother’s foil, not beautiful to the child, yet somewhat disturbing in her complacency and nameless fascination.

Over time, a gesture that commanded love and admiration, a gesture of overflowing, self-assured kindness, becomes an emblem of pain and betrayal. Its memory becomes more aching and detailed, while the passive actors on the scene — recipient, onlooker — take on more active, significant roles. Remembrance comes at irregular intervals; it unsettles the daughter’s sense of who her parents are, who she is, and where she, and they, stand. The event set in motion an unanticipated process of imagination and learning that corresponds with memories and knowledge and creates memories and knowledge, while preparing the ground for still further understandings.

The movement from experience to knowledge in serious reading may be a similar, iterative process, in which barely formed, unexamined feelings, by way of first response, are followed by another reading, in “perspective.” This is a term with rich conceptual implications. Perspective, first, denotes the act of viewing, as in its meaning of a visible scene or mental view; originally, it signified the science of sight. Perspective also implies a relative position that need not be fixed, hence, a particular point of view in relation to objects, including imaginary or abstract ones. With a change of perspective, one’s views follow suit. The relations of perspective to time are open, since a mental view or outlook can be applied to any extent of time, real or imagined, past or future: perspective can be a prospect.

As viewing in a literal and metaphorical sense, perspectives require a living, thinking being and some externalizing movement; only comparative remoteness makes close inspection possible, even in introspection. Although perspectives can be broad in mental grasp and sympathies, they cannot be neutral. A specified position, however, is not the same as a decided view, a settled or unquestionable perspective. As Dewey said, outlooks can themselves be looked at:

One can only see from a certain standpoint, but this fact does not make all standpoints of equal value. A standpoint which is nowhere in particular and from which things are not seen at a special angle is an absurdity. But one may have affection for a standpoint which gives a rich and ordered landscape rather than for one from which things are seen confusedly and meagerly.¹⁴

In responding to text, Frye argues that initial readings, which follow the narrative, are like “a gathering of data for understanding,” whereas secondary stages of response (not necessarily requiring an actual second reading) take the perspective of the whole structure and turn the “wandering through a maze of words into a directed quest.”¹⁵ This “staged” process, Frye concludes, “is the result of living in time, where experience comes first and the consciousness of having had the experience comes later, and sometimes does not come at all.”¹⁶ A difference between text and life is that one’s existence is animate: it does not stay put, nor, as it seems, do its memories.

Thomas Mann provides a brilliant summary of these reflections on memory and learning. Picture Goethe’s Lotte, the beloved of young Werther, returning to Weimar in her middle age. As she rests from her journey, shimmering images of youth and summer come crowding into her mind. The author comments:

Yet the strange thing was that all these images and memories had not obtained their extraordinary pointedness and luminosity, their precise fullness of detail, at first hand, so to say. To begin with, mind had by no means been so keen on keeping them in all their particulars; instead, it had been compelled to yield them up only later, piece by piece, word for word, out of its very depths. They had been investigated, restored, painstakingly brought to the surface again with all their appurtenances, varnished brightly and placed, as it were, between candles — for the sake of the meaning they had gained after the fact, against all expectations.¹⁷

We may, in sum, be under the spell of memories but their import is not spelled out for us.¹⁸ In an account that lightly moves across centuries, Orlando’s life and learning illustrate how there can be a “multitude of things which call for explanation and imprint their message without leaving any hint as to their meaning upon the mind.”¹⁹ For her, or him, however, “the image with all its associations,” ultimately, “[gives] way to the truth.”²⁰

V. Uneasy Acts of Evalkuation

Let me set the mood for this final section by quoting from the beginning paragraph of Primo Levi’s third memoir, The Periodic Table:

There are the so-called inert gases in the air we breathe. They bear curious Greek names of erudite derivation which mean “the New,” “the Hidden,” “the Inactive,” and “the Alien.” They are also called the noble gases — and here there’s room for discussion whether all noble gases are really inert and all inert gases are noble.²¹

If memories are to be retained and restored for successive viewings, their presence had better be importunate. Hence, there are virtues even to the vices of capricious memory. What does not follow from my revision of memory’s inert picture — Leibniz likened it to a pile of stones, I believe — is that all memories are illustrious icons or that all instances of looking back will impart a higher character or more refined perceptions. There may be unsuitable attachments to memory. So as to procure learning, memories must satisfy differentiating criteria of value concerning their inherent qualities as well as qualities of mind’s likely response. I will illustrate these points with Northrop Frye’s discussion of “magical lines” in poetry.²² The question is what makes particular memories compelling and productive of learning.

In reading a poem, a line or part may detach itself from the whole and stick in memory. Although this is a personal experience, great poetry is public in ways that other memories are not. Many people get caught in the magic of Marvell’s “To a green thought in a green shade,” or remember Keats’s lines in “Ode to a Nightingale” that tell us how the bird’s song has

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

We can look at these culminating lines for what they suggest about the power of the poet’s song, or of our words, to open up vistas. Although it brings a widening from within, the mental gaze is framed, as by a window or embrasure in a fortification. But it yields some of its sheltered containment to the enchantment of language, in which the lure of many hidden, perhaps unconscious implications of words contradict their apparent inertia.

Although there is the poem as a coherent whole, Frye observes that this couplet “seems to burst through that unity to suggest different orders of existence”; he goes on to propose a “principle of response” which applies to the issue of memory and learning: “The inference is that there may be something potentially unlimited or infinite in the response to poetry, something that turns on a light in the psyche, so that instead of the darkness of the unknown we see something of the shadows of other kinds of emerging being.”²³ One’s response to a specific passage of life or poetry may thus extend indefinitely beyond its context and given orderings of reality — perhaps approaching regions where perception is abandoned to indifferent elements.

A principle of response to memory can be analyzed in its own right, yet its coming into play is made more likely by characteristics such as those inherent in a “magical” passage, or by qualitative features of memory. Not all lines that one comes across will be like that. Recall, “One if by land and two if by sea, and I on the opposite shore will be,” or, “There is no joy in Mudville, the mighty Casey has struck out.” Life isn’t all magical, either. Nor will all personal responses burst through the boundaries of experience and knowledge in reminiscence. By care, pains, chance, and nameless fascination, memory may procure learning. But, if memory beats back transcendence, that need not always be fatal.

Experience and remembrance are, with poetry, on a continuum of meaning-making and conserving retention. Frye’s concept of “magical lines” dramatizes issues of memory and learning, while exemplifying evaluative considerations regarding inherent qualities of memory and qualities of response, both probably related. If such passages of text or experience are special, they are so in a positive, desirable sense. Coming across Orlando was magical for me. Of course, something can be an exception to the rule and located at the opposite, negative end of the evaluative spectrum; such placements, too, are acts affirming value.

In trying to sort out how poetic assent may be conditioned — do we have to agree with Shakespeare’s renderings of differences between men and women to appreciate Antony and Cleopatra? — Heller considers the absence of what is distinctively valuable. At issue are, again, both inherent qualities (weakness or greatness of poetry) and qualities of response (bluntness or sensitivity in appreciation, as understanding and enjoyment). The interplay of these qualitative features is mediated by the reader’s attention to epistemological criteria, or the degree to which beliefs asserted or implied by poetry strike one as reasonable or fruitful. In a lengthy, agonizing footnote, Heller furthermore concludes that epistemological value is required for poetic production: “There are ideas and beliefs so prosaic, outlandish or perverse at their core that no great or good poetry can come from them. It is this negative consideration that to me finally proves the intimate positive relation between belief, thought and poetry.”²⁴

There is still room for discussion, however; let us consider one of Wittgenstein’s notes from the collection, Culture and Value:

Nietzsche writes somewhere that the best poets and thinkers, too, have written things that are mediocre or bad, yet that they have sorted out what is good. But it’s not altogether like that. In his garden, a gardener does not only keep roses, of course, but manure, rubbish and straw; yet what makes here for difference is not just (inherent) goodness but, above all, their function in the garden.²⁵

Interminably complex and demanding, though not without grounding, acts of evaluation in making meaning ought not to come easy. On occasion, however, acts affirming value will entail outright dissent and the repudiation of beliefs.

In looking at teacher memories, therefore, we need questioning acts of appraisal as well as sensibilities that are more just. This requires paying attention to the internal point of view but not letting it go unexamined, thus heeding the external point of view, while not letting it swallow up everything.²⁶ Mutually necessary, these opposing perspectives do not furnish grounds for political faction; instead, each is, in itself, simply what it is — vindicating neither teachers’ rights nor scientific utopias. Looking at ourselves, we need to make our mythologies more clear and see them for what they are: neither more, nor less, than varieties of meaning-generating faith. Permit me to conclude with lines from Wordsworth’s ode, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The poet raises his “song of thanks and praise,” emphatically, not for “the simple creed of childhood:”

But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized.

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¹ Henrik Ibsen, quoted in “Nachwort” by Aldo Keel to Die Wildente (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1991), 122, my translation.

² Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, quoted in “Nachwort” by Aldo Keel to Henrik Ibsen, Die Wildente, 122-123, my translation.

³ See, e.g., Dan C. Lortie’s extremely influential book, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). Exemplifying this gloomier view are diverse lines of work inside and outside of the U.S. context. In its matter-of-factness and exploratory attitude, the work of Jere Brophy must be mentioned among the important exceptions. Likewise, Gaea Leinhardt criticizes two views of “situated knowledge” in teaching: one essentially dismissive and the other romanticizing about “the wisdom of practice” (see her “Situated Knowledge and Expertise in Teaching,” in Teachers’ Professional Learning, ed. James Calderhead [London: Falmer, 1988], 146-168).

⁴ See Philip Jackson, who distinguishes between “mimetic” and “transformative” traditions in The Practice of Teaching (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986).

⁵ See, for example, Freema Elbaz, Teacher Thinking: A Study of Practical Knowledge (London: Croon, Helm, 1983), F. M. Connelly and D. J. Clandinin, “Personal Practical Knowledge and the Modes of Knowing: Relevance for Teaching and Learning,” in Learning and Teaching the Ways of Knowing, NSSE Yearbook, ed. Eliot Eisner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and F. M. Connelly and D. J. Clandinin, “On Narrative Method, Biography and Narrative Unities in the Study of Teaching,” Journal of Educational Thought 21 (1987): 130-139. Rainer Bromme, however, argues against the use of the theory metaphor when studying teacher thinking (see his “On the Limitations of the Theory Metaphor for the Study of Teachers’ Expert Knowledge,” in Teacher Thinking: A New Perspective on Persisting Problems in Education, eds. R. Halkes and J. K. Olson [Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1984], 43-57).

⁶ See, for example, Freema Elbaz, “Knowledge and Discourse: The Evolution of Research on Teacher Thinking,” in Insight into Teachers’ Thinking and Practice, eds. Christopher Day, Maureen Pope, and Pam Denicolo (London: Falmer, 1990), 15-42; M. F. Belenky, B. M. Clinchy, N. R. Goldberger, and J. M. Tarule, Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986); and Lisa Delpit, “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children,” Harvard Educational Review 58 (1988): 280-298.

⁷ I owe the formulation of this point and the generalized use of the term “myth” to Leszek Kolakowski, The Presence of Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

⁸ Virginia Woolf, Orlando (New York: Signet, 1956), 50-51, emphasis added.

⁹ See Israel Scheffler, “In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions,” in In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions (New York: Routledge, 1991), 3-17.

¹⁰ See, as an impressive instance, the article by Hugh Busher, Stephen Clarke, and Laura Taggart, “Beginning Teachers’ Learning,” in Teachers’ Professional Learning, ed. James Calderhead (London: Falmer, 1988), 84-96, which documents the authors’ reluctance to help a floundering beginning teacher for fear of robbing him of control over his own improvement by imposing their own “expertise.”

¹¹ See H. A. Thelen, “Profession Anyone?” in New Perspectives on Teacher Education, ed. D. J. McCarty (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973), 194-213.

¹² Margaret Drabble, The Middle Ground (New York: Knopf, 1980), 132.

¹³ Rebecca West, The Birds Fall Down (London: Virago, 1966).

¹⁴ John Dewey, “Context and Thought,” in On Experience, Nature, and Freedom: Representative Selections, ed. R. J. Bernstein (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), 102.

¹⁵ Northrop Frye, Words with Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990), 74-75.

¹⁶ Ibid, 89.

¹⁷ Thomas Mann, Lotte in Weimar (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: S. Fischer, 1982), 34-35, my translation. (Original work published 1939.)

¹⁸ John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (edited, with commentary, by Anthony Raspa [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975]) are relevant here as exercises in using the visionary power of experience and memory, or of giving that power practical effect in spiritual improvement. In the words of the commentator, Anthony Raspa, “By forcing his readers to use his memories, Donne’s Devotions made him probe the eternal; by engaging his understanding, it inspired deep comprehension of spiritual things; such comprehension, in turn, invariably led the reader to the exercise of the will for love” (in Donne, Devotions, xl).

¹⁹ Woolf, Orlando, 115.

²⁰ Ibid., 107.

²¹ Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), 3.

²² See Frye, Words with Power, 64-66.

²³ Ibid., 66; see also Keats’s “Ode to Psyche.”

²⁴ Erich Heller, “Rilke and Nietzsche with a Discourse on Thought, Belief, and Poetry,” in The Importance of Nietzsche: Ten Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 112, emphasis added.

²⁵ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, edited by G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 59, my translation.

²⁶ Looking at classic problems of philosophy, Thomas Nagel urges a similar conclusion in “Subjective and Objective” (in Mortal Questions [Cambridge University Press, 1979], 196-213.).