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By Helen M. Whall, Director
 The
pleasures of teaching in the First-Year Program are many,
but one of the most immediate is sitting down with colleagues
from many different disciplines and deciding on which books
we all will
read-and teach. At one point, this year's crew of faculty had close to 75 books
under consideration. Conversations were heated, often to the boiling point of
laughter. But ultimately our deliberations led us to seven texts which we felt
best served our theme, "How then shall we live with the tension between permanence
and change?"
We will begin the semester with a short, classic work which we hope will emphasize
the core issue of our theme that centered on our need to choose how we live with
care. In Dostoyevsky's The Grand
Inquisitor, Jesus returns to Seville during the time of the Inquisition.
He is imprisoned and chastised for giving humanity too much freedom. This legend,
central to Dostoyevsky's novel, Crime and Punisment, makes clear that
the unexamined life is indeed not worth living.
Our attention will shift next to a work which should bring more into focus the
qualifying clause "with the tension between
permanence and change." Maura O' Halloran, an economics and sociology double-major
at Trinity College, Dublin, decided to seek her answer to how she should live
with the tension between permanence and change in a Buddhist monastery. Her mother,
Ruth, has published "Soshin," O'Halloran's journal and letters
under the title Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind. For three years, before
her untimely death in Thailand, Maura O'Halloran was the only foreigner, as well
as the only woman, studying at the Toshoji Temple and Kannonji Monastery in Japan.
The sincerity of her journals and the difficulty of her journey place in sharp
contrast contemporary notions of "Zen in ten
easy audio-tapes."
Richard Wilbur, on the other hand, finds ample
space within supposedly "fixed" Western poetic forms to celebrate what he calls,
in one poem, "The Beautiful Changes." This October, the distinguished poet will
speak at the College. We in the FYP will be reading selections
from his Collected Works in preparation for that visit. Wilbur's poetry
is simultaneously profound and accessible, a demonstration of what he calls in
another poem "keeping [a] difficult balance." We hope his work will touch our
student readers, as it has us, with its deep beauty and utter respect for the
natural world.
Dostoyevsky's doubts, O'Halloran's quest,
Wilbur's lyric observations-these all lead naturally to what may be the most
challenging work of the semester, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. This
Neo-Platonic dialogue was written in the sixth century while Boethius
was imprisoned and awaiting execution. Ultimately, Lady Philosophy "consoles" the prisoner
with a vision of how impermanent worldly fortunes are, how eternal is the highest
fortune found in God. As he attempts to reconcile the existence of evil and free
will, Boethius' alternating verse and prose passages seem to speak across the
centuries to the issues raised
in The Grand Inquisitor and by life in the First-Year Program.
If fall semester concentrates on the individual's need to study the tension between
permanence and change, the spring semester shifts to larger, societal issues.
We will begin with George Ritzer's disturbing sociological study of American
life, The McDonaldization of Society. Ritzer uses the fast food
chain both as fact and as metaphor for what can go wrong when all aspects
of life
are packaged for convenience and in service of Mammon. How, then, shall
we live,
with that kind of change in our social
values?
Reginald McKnight asks different questions of society in his compelling new collection
of short stories, White Boys, our next shared text. As in his earlier collections,
here McKnight sets forth the under-reported issues faced by middle-class African-Americans.
Whether a Marine recruit or a graduate student or a cafeteria worker, McKnight's
protagonists must fight societal stereotypes. So, too, must the reader.
As the New York Time's reviewer noted, McKnight and his characters
show the necessity for all of us to "make connections across racial divides." We are
pleased that this exciting young author will read at Holy Cross
in March.
We will conclude our collective inquiry into the relation of permanence and change
and of the ways that inquiry should
affect our lives with Ursula Le Guin's, The Left Hand of Darkness. Author
Le Guin herself changes a classic text, the Gilgamesh Epic, into
a science fiction novel. Our own year of experimental living can
therefore
close
on a world of
permanent change, a world on which, among other things, men become
pregnant. That supposition alone should provoke interesting debate
about how we
should live, but more than anything else, Le Guin's novel testifies to the lasting values
of true friendship. Her vision promises a worthy resting point for members of
the 1998-99 First-Year Program, but
first we must run the course. Won't you join us, if only while reading at the
end of a long day?
FYP Reading List,
1998-99
Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (Harvard
University Press)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Grand Inquisitor (Ungar)
Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (Ace Books)
Maura O'Halloran, Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind (Riverhead
Books)
Reginald McKnight, White Boys (Henry Holt & Company)
George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Pine
Forge Press)
Richard Wilbur, New and Collected Poems (Harcourt
Brace)
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