Education via Strands of Great Books

Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons is very informative and educational precisely because it weaves together, in a “braid of insightfulness,” the various truths and phenomena of a life which have to be “taken together” to form a “cluster of understanding,” which is a pillar of what we are attempting to teach.

Life as a Social Status Olympics. The Death Scene of Major Amberson

“And now Major Amberson was engaged in the profoundest thinking of his life.

And he realized that everything which had worried him or delighted him during this lifetime, all his buying and building and trading and banking, that it was all trifling and waste beside what concerned him now.

For the Major knew now that he had to plan how to enter an unknown country where he was not even sure of being recognized as an Amberson.”

(The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington, Orson Welles’s 1942 film narration)

Time and Place. The World of 1873, the Financial Crisis and the Vicissitudes and the Tempo of Life

“The magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873. Their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city. In that town in those days, all the women who wore silk or velvet knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet and everybody knew everybody else’s family horse and carriage. The only public conveyance was the streetcar. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once, and wait for her, while she shut the window, put on her hat and coat, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the ‘girl’ what to have for dinner and came forth from the house. Too slow for us nowadays, because the faster we’re carried, the less time we have to spare.”

(The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington, Orson Welles’s 1942 film narration)

Fickleness of Life and Its Ephemeral Nature

[Uncle Jack to George:] “Life and money both behave like loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks. When they’re gone, you can’t tell where—or what the devil we did with ’em.”

(The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington, Doubleday, Page, 1918, page 435)

Entrepreneurial Psychology

[Uncle Jack:] “Twenty years have passed–but have they? … My Lord! Old times starting all over again! My Lord!”

[Eugene:] “Old times? Not a bit! There aren’t any old times. When times are gone, they’re not old, they’re dead! There aren’t any times but new times!”

(The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington, Doubleday, Page, 1918, page 97-98)

The task is to “amalgamate” the points in great books into a sort of unified “braid.” That’s deep education. Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel, The Magnificent Ambersons, is very informative and educational precisely because it weaves together, in a “braid of insightfulness,” the various truths and phenomena of a life which have to be “taken together” to form a “cluster of understanding,” a pillar of what we are attempting to teach.