More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 17 - November 21, 2024
It is not because boys do not like girls that they keep them out of their tree houses. It is because they like them all too well that they do so, because the presence of the girl, they know, will change everything.
The boy does not simply grow into manhood, for manhood is a cultural reality built upon a biological foundation, rather than womanhood, a biological reality with cultural expression.
The man affirms his manhood not in the mere pleasure of a sexual act but in the life-affirming risk of death, in the cause of something great, something that redounds to the benefit of all.
The woman’s body announces, “I am able to bear children.” The boy’s body, maturing, says, “I might be able to do a man’s work,” but without the manly virtues, that body means absolutely nothing.
Until people made a pointed effort at making girls more like boys, there is no instance that I can recall of girls or women spontaneously coming together in teams for competitive sports.
If I am right about this, then the masculine team may be a necessary feature for the education of boys.
Jesus does not say that all of the saints in heaven will be the same. There will be those who are greater in the kingdom of God and those who will be less. Why should we want it to be otherwise? Would the heavens be more beautiful if all the stars in the sky were of the same middle magnitude, each equidistant from the next, like holes in a grid?
furor and amor, rage and love.
It is men who civilize men: who build the city and establish its laws. That is just an anthropological and historical fact.
during that meal, he makes a point of calling these men not his servants or his disciples but his friends.
I believe that life indoors hurts all children, but, as I have said, it does the more harm to the sex that naturally thrives the more outdoors—it hurts the boys.
it remains true that boys do languish indoors, and so it is imperative that we get them outdoors, often and regularly.
The boy does not want a domestic Jesus. He wants the Lord of the universe. He does not want to hold hands at the altar with a priest and an altar-girl. He wants to swing the thurible as if it were a sword.
risk. If the school does not affirm the moral vision and the authority of the parents, think of it as you would think of a nest of venomous snakes. Nothing good will come of it.
The book is Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland.
The sentiments she expresses are heartfelt, and, if I may say, more womanly than manly. When I think of God, my first thoughts are not of his goodness and love, but of his power and glory. Those are not incompatible, just as the man’s feelings are not incompatible with the woman’s.
we must try to restore to boys a kind of work that will mark the passage from boyhood to manhood, and make them into men whom any man would trust: building courage, self-reliance, self-sacrifice, perseverance, and a willingness to put the needs of others before one’s pleasure or vanity.
The novel is called Swiftwater, and is about a teenage boy, Bucky, who lives with his parents and his sister outside of the town by that name, right on the border between the habitable and the uninhabited northlands of Maine.
Our young people know how to do very little, and we have banished from the curriculum the content and the ideals of the old classical learning.
William B. Stout’s The Boy’s Book of Mechanical Models (1917).
Audels Carpenters and Builders Guide #4 (1923; my reprint is from 1946). Theodore Audel and his company published guides on electricity and plumbing and other fields of skilled trade;
Plato understood the power of music, and that is why he said that all education was at base a musical one. For music is expressive of a harmony between body and soul.
Good music builds the chest. Bad music lets the chest cave in. Plato said that the first sign of decay in a commonwealth would be a radical change in the people’s music.
The moral knowledge, to be really effectual, must inform the whole being and not just the theoretical calculator.
Courage is often shown more movingly in defeat than in victory.
Show me what music the boy listens to, and you show me his soul, or what his soul is in danger of becoming.
Says King Lear in the final moments of his life, mourning over the body of his daughter Cordelia, “Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.”
“Lift up your hearts,” says the priest at Mass. And why should boys not do that every day of their lives?
courage is best shown when you remain loyal to what appears to be a lost cause, when you are outnumbered, when the enemy is confident, and your friends waver, or doubt you, or abandon you.
most boys want to do what is right, because they want to be praised.
The proud man wants to put himself on display, as an idol for others to gaze upon. He wants the praise or the flattery or the obeisance of those he seeks to keep beneath him.
Praise is the grateful gift of man to God in return for all the graces that God confers, including existence itself, and praise of man by God is his way of welcoming man into his life and his joy.
He knows our frailty, and therefore he tries us at times within our capacity to endure it, that we might not be frail always.
It is the warmth and the right ordering of love that God desires from his fighters. He is not nice, but holy; not tame, but good: the ultimate good.
The worthy enemy is also the land, the sea, and all the stubborn particularities of a world that resists man’s will.
Boys will not clear a bar set low. That is a paradox of their nature. They will not rise to the mediocre occasion. They fall below it. They do not need assistance and hand-holding. They need challenge and danger.
Let boys know that if they would be true men, they must keep their promises regardless of their feelings. Let them know that in the pursuit of truth, what you desire is of no consequence. The bad man to fear is not usually the one who can set his feelings to the side. The bad man to fear is more usually the one who sets his passions upon the throne or arms them with a gun.
I turn here to a scene from a fine novel by John Buchan, who wrote smart adventure stories that boys once read by the millions. The novel is Sick Heart River, set in the forbidding northlands of Canada,
To be, to be a person in the full sense of the word, is to give yourself away to another: we do not lose ourselves by the gift, but find ourselves, or come to be ourselves in the first place.
Boys need to be needed more than they need to be loved, or they need to be loved by being needed.
He was a boy of spirit, what Plato called thymos, that drive that C. S. Lewis, following Plato’s lead, associated with neither the brain nor the belly but the chest.
true happiness, oh young people, does not consist in the pleasures of this world, or in earthly things, but in peace of conscience, which we only have if we are pure of heart and mind.”
It is the custom at the Oratory for the boys,” the teacher went on to say, “to make the exercises for a good death every month. This consists chiefly in approaching the Sacraments of Confession and Holy Communion as though it were to be for the last time.
I propose that from now we each admonish the other in regard to anything that may be thought useful for our spiritual advancement. If you see anything wrong in my conduct tell me immediately, that I may correct it; or if you think of any good I ought to perform, point it out to me.”
