Dear reader,
The new year is upon us, and here in Australia, a new school year as well. Summer always goes too quickly, but in my house we are, mercifully, feeling a sense of readiness to go back.
I’ve been thinking about my students for the coming year, some known to me and some unknown. The teenage years are unusual in the sense that the present is overwhelmingly important and inescapable (embarrassments and failures can never be lived down!) while at the same time, the future, their adult years ahead, exert an intense pull on hopes and dreams. Their lives are before them, and with that in mind I have been wondering about the ways in which, this year, they will hear the call to do great and noteworthy things.
This call may come from many different places: it may come from home, from parents with grand plans for the year’s activities, determined for them to excel in their studies or hobbies. It may come from their friends, as they feel pressure to stand out from the crowd and to be the ones who are popular and admired. It will almost certainly come from their school which, like almost every Christian school I’ve interacted with, presses on their students a need to ‘do great things for God,’ to ‘make an impact,’ to ‘change the world for Christ.’ These are well-intentioned calls, and yet they are heavy with expectation. They also sound strangely similar to the call of our celebrity-infatuated culture, with its insistence that individuals refuse to be ordinary.
Perhaps you know this pressure that I’m describing, even though you are likely not a teenager. Teens are not the only demographic facing pressure to be and do that which is great and fame-worthy. In the stories our culture tells–primarily through TV and film–our heroes and heroines express a deep dissatisfaction with the ordinary, with quiet lives that are limited in their scope and impact.
This dissatisfaction is on full display in the 1999 film version of Mansfield Park. After reading the book for the first time over Christmas, I hopefully watched the movie–only to be very disappointed.
More than Austen’s other slighted and socially snubbed heroines, the book version of Fanny Price felt particularly pitiful to me. She lacks Elizabeth Bennett’s spunk and Elinor Dashwood’s tenacity, and I was ready to mark her as an uninspiring heroine, one whom I would easily forget. She is timid, self-doubting, and reserved. She wanders through her Aunt Betram’s household like a spirit: ready to aid Lady Bertram with her various needs, but not substantial enough to be truly present.
It seems that the film directors shared my ambivalence towards Fanny, because in the movie she is unrecognisable as the heroine that Austen created. Instead, she is imaginative, confident, and passionate–a writer of stories, able to spin fanciful tales of romance and adventure.* This Fanny Price is decidedly more interesting. She is inspiring and evokes indignation at her ill-treatment. And yet, as I watched, I realised that she was not the best Fanny.
Austen’s Fanny leaves room for growth. She does not appear fully-formed, as in the film, but grows as a result of Edmund’s knowledge and wisdom gained through her own experiences. And her strength of character develops through the education in manners given to her by the Bertrams, as well as through her lack of entitlement: having no social status, she neither expects nor demands selfishly.
Like many of Austen’s heroines, the circle of her influence is small, the turmoil of her world at the family level. Her service only reaches her aunt, uncle, and cousins. Fanny shows us the quiet faithfulness that most of us are called to cultivate–a willingness to learn from those who care about us and an attention to others and to experience that fosters wisdom.
The new year has begun, and with it new opportunities for us to grow, become wise, and to faithfully serve those in our circles, however small. These are not the things that will see our names and photos splashed across headlines or filling newsfeeds. But they are the little things on account of which Jesus will commend, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matt. 25:21).
*These stories are based on Austen’s own Juvenilia, stories she wrote as a teenager. I think it says so much about Austen’s own growth to compare the subjects of her adolescent writings to the subjects of her adult writings!
Cressida Campbell’s “Mandarin with Chinese plate” (2004)
A few weeks ago I was introduced to Australian painter and printmaker Cressida Campbell through an exhibit at the National Gallery in Canberra. Perhaps it was my tiredness after several late nights of conversation, but her work made me teary-eyed. I loved the colours, the detail, and I loved the everyday subjects–not made grandiose through glorification, but celebrated through a realism that revealed the beauty of her indoor scenes, landscapes, and household objects which she etched and painted. Her artist’s eye, like all excellent artists’, is attentive to her world.
The summer holidays have provided ample time for reading! In addition to Mansfield Park, I read a very Austen-esque novel–crossed with JK Rowling! Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell shares Austen’s witty narration with its subtle barbs at her own characters, and her tale of magic in England is gripping.
Maryanne Wolf’s Reader Come Home both confirmed my fears and encouraged me to be hopeful about the reading brain in a digital world. She shares my worries about childhoods (and adulthoods!) increasingly devoid of the beauty and power of books, and yet I found her idea of a “bi-literate brain”--a brain that moves between digital reading and analog reading in seamless and yet differentiated ways–to be intriguing. I was hoping for more instruction, especially as I anticipate a year of teaching teens to read well, but her optimism and passion will have to sustain me for now!
I borrowed two of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels from the library, but only had time for one this summer: An Artist of the Floating World. With a similar style and themes as Remains of the Day, Ishiguro opened up a new moment in history for me: post-World War II Japan. Ishiguro skillfully used narration to ask questions about memory and perception–about how we perceive ourselves in the present and how we remember the past.
O Good Omnipotent, who so cares for every one of us, as if you cared for him alone; and so for all, as if all were but one! Blessed is the man who loves you, and his friend in you, and his enemy for you. For he only loses none dear to him, to whom all are dear in him who cannot be lost. And who is that but our God, the God that made heaven and earth, and fills them, even by filling them creating them. And your law is truth, and truth is yourself. I behold how some things pass away that others may replace them, but you never depart, O God, my Father supremely good, Beauty of all things beautiful. To you will I intrust whatsoever I have received from you, so shall I lose nothing. You made me for yourself, and my heart is restless until it finds its rest in you. Amen.
— Augustine
On the road with you,
Laura