Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

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reward for the first person to sight the white whale, Moby Dick. Around
the rim of the circular coin are the letters, “El Quito, Ecuador.” Pictured on
the coin is a scene: in the sky the sun shines in the constellation of Libra.
Below are three mountain peaks. On top of one is a flame, on another is a
rooster, on the third is a tower.
Captain Ahab, beholding the coin, sees the flame as Ahab, sees the
rooster as Ahab, sees the tower as Ahab; he sees Ahab, Ahab, Ahab. First
mate Starbuck, with his melancholic foreboding, sees the three peaks embodying
the trinity, and focuses on the valleys between them, embodying
the mood of the 23rd Psalm’s “valley of the shadow of death.” Buoyant
second mate Stubb takes the sign of Libra as the start of a rambling, improvised,
yet cohesive meditation on the signs of the zodiac as a picture of the
stages of a human life. Pragmatic third mate Flask looks at the sixteendollar-coin
and sees nothing more than a means of purchasing 960 cigars.
The black cabin boy Pip, who has lost himself while floating adrift one long
day before being rescued, sees neither himself nor even the coin itself, but
rather everyone else’s “reading” activity. “I look, you look, he looks. We
look, you look, they look. Where’s Pip? Where’s Pip? Where’s Pip?…” Every
member of the Pequod’s crew reads the same golden doubloon differently.
So any book speaks to each of us somewhat differently, although we
may be, figuratively, on the same journey.
How does reading continually deepen, “vertically?” Harvard’s Professor
William Alfred, featured by Life magazine in the 1970’s as one of the
ten best college professors in the U.S., said that after he had read John
Milton’s Paradise Lost fifteen times, he had started to “get it.” What are the
implications of that statement? Not that he didn’t get anything during his
first reading of it. And certainly not that he had read it fifteen times in a
row to start to get something from it. But perhaps over the years the parts
had been leading him toward the whole, until during his fifteenth read, like
frit turning to glass, the whole started to illumine all the parts. William
Alfred the reader had been maturing continuously over the years, not only
through years of life experience, but also through the influence of Paradise
Lost itself. Mediocre books we read once and outgrow. Masterpieces we can
always grow into; they grow us, always further.
Acknowledging the “horizontal “ variety of reading experience, and
realizing the “vertical,” growing capacity of masterpieces, how can we, as
teachers, think about the most important question of all in relation to reading:
timing? Of course, one aspect of timing is as unpredictable as fate,
fortune, karma, falling in love, “accidents.” Books have a way of appearing
at just the right time in a person’s life. Or one is given a book, and three
years later, at just the right time, one is moved to read it finally. Such examples
of individual timing are impossible to write about generally. The
best we can do as teachers is to listen and to trust our intuitions in relation
to particular books for particular individuals at particular times.
However, the accuracy of our intuitions can be greatly helped by
deepening our understanding of child development. And our reasoned understanding
of the stages of adolescence can lead to many timely choices.