'Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste - Spring from the Children of the University'

On Words | Personal Reflections - II

Before we begin on today's blogpost, let me profusely thank and acknowledge a wonderful feedback that i chanced upon today, on our blog's feedback form, from a passionate Professor of Literature! She had quoted from Atwood's lines, 'A Word after a word after a word is power', and had also added to say, 'Thank you for reminding us of the power of words and our responsibility as litterateurs to use words that refresh, replenish and restore!'

And this, dear ladies and gentlemen, would really be our blessed lifelines and lovely helplines in our tryst with literature, in this lovely literary life that we all have been so graciously endowed with! Ain't it?

We could also cherish them as the '3-R's for life and living, alley? (Words that Refresh, Replenish & Restore)!

If only we, practitioners of literature, would do our kutty-little-might, all through our literary lives, to use words that would refresh, words that would replenish, and words that would restore, how much better humankind could possibly be?

That said, let's now continue with added momentum on our series on the ‘powers’ vested within words, and on the virtuous qualities of words in ‘making’ others, not ‘breaking’ them!

Well, literatures from across the world, offer us on a platter, a plethora of such wonderful characters who encourage and motivate others with their positive calls to action! A sample of such characters and role models for us all, to get to know about the power of words and their wonderful way and sway in encouraging others to give their best!

Right from the days of the good ol’ philosophers and literary minds of yore, the power of motivation and encouragement have long been cardinal qualities that have shaped the advancement and the progress of great minds and hearts over the ages! Their calls to action, with their encouraging words, have always proved significant gamechangers in bettering and in transforming the quality of life in individuals from all walks of life! 

So much for the power and the vigour of positive words that go a long way in the ‘making’ (not the ‘breaking’) and the growth of an individual!

Seneca, the renowned dramatist of yore, was, as we all know, firstly tutor, and then advisor to Emperor Nero, during the first five years of his competent reign. His words that were, again, significant 'calls to action', have always had a very positive effect on the emperor. In his treatise titled, On Clemency that was prompted by Nero's murder of Britannicus, Seneca, gently persuades Nero to leave the path of bloodshed, and advocates the path of clemency or mercy as the path to virtue for a just ruler. (Remember Portia’s famed lines, ‘The quality of mercy is not strained?’]

To Seneca, then, extremes of punishment or torture were indeed the exact opposites of clemency, or mercy, and hence, he feels, leaders should try, as much as possible, to avoid it. [Leaders here could possibly connote to mean, any leader, be it in academia, government, sports, etc] It’s no wonder then that Seneca considered philosophy as a balm for the wounds of life!

On today’s post, we shall look into a contemporary of Booker T Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and his wonderful work titled, The Souls of Black Folk, which is, till date, considered a cornerstone of African American literature!

After slavery was finally abolished in January 1865, African Americans started coming out of their repressive shells, and they subsequently began flourishing in the world of education, politics, business and commerce! Du Bois’s work The Souls of Black Folk is basically a ‘charter of encouragement’ for Black folks, replete with words of advice and wisdom!

Like Booker T Washington, who had made it mandatory that, when his students graduated from Tuskegee, they were to return to their hometowns, as transformed individuals, who are able to share with their kith and kin their newly learnt knowledge and best practices in agriculture, farming, breeding livestock, and taking care of themselves, DuBois too, in like manner, fervently encourages educated blacks to teach uneducated folks amongst their own community, as a means to empowering them.

In this connect, he's also coined a lovely term titled, “Talented Tenth!” (You may want to look up on our past post on Booker T Washington, HERE. And yes! like a Plato and Aristotle, or a Derrida and Ricoeur, or a Gandhi and Tagore, there were core aspects in which Booker and DuBois had huge differences of opinion! But that I guess, albeit noteworthy, should be meet for a different post, rather!)

The term ‘Talented Tenth’, then, to DuBois refers to educated black folks who would encourage their uneducated fellow folks to come up the ladder of success, through guidance, mentoring, care, and leadership.

This Talented Tenth,’ would lead blacks out of their ignorance and strive to give them their respect, their self-worth and their much-needed recognition in society! This post-slavery emancipation, DuBois believed, would sure help reduce much on social ills plaguing the blacks thus far, and also help in transforming the lives of the black folk for the better!

In Chapter V of the book, titled, ‘Of the Wings of Atlanta’, he talks about the vision, the mission, the scope and the hope ahead for Atlanta University, which, I guess, should be a real inspiration and an ideal for all of us, students and teachers at Schools, Colleges and Universities across the world, today!

Some of his words (reproduced herein below, straight from the text!) are so memorable, that, they could be carved out in the finest of teaks and laid out on the Principal’s chambers, the HoD’s chambers and on all staff rooms too! ;-)

DuBois speaks –

The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, an and is to-day laid before the freedmen’s sons by Atlanta University. And this course of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will ever have one goal,—not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.

The vision of life that rises before these dark eyes has in it nothing mean or selfish. Not at Oxford or at Leipsic, not at Yale or Columbia, is there an air of higher resolve or more unfettered striving; the determination to realize for men, both black and white, the broadest possibilities of life, to seek the better and the best, to spread with their own hands the Gospel of Sacrifice,—all this is the burden of their talk and dream!

The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.

Such an institution the South of to-day sorely needs. She has religion, earnest, bigoted:—religion that on both sides of the Veil often omits the sixth, seventh, and eighth commandments, but substitutes a dozen supplementary ones. She has, as Atlanta shows, growing thrift and love of toil; but she lacks that broad knowledge of what the world knows and knew of human living and doing, which she may apply to the thousand problems of real life to-day confronting her.

The need of the South is knowledge and culture, - not in dainty limited quantity, as before the war, but in broad busy abundance in the world of work; and until she has this, not all the Apples of Hesperides, be they golden and bejewelled, can save her from the curse of the Bœotian lovers.

Let us build the Southern university - William and Mary, Trinity, Georgia, Texas, Tulane, Vanderbilt, and the others—fit to live; let us build, too, the Negro universities:

Fisk, whose foundation was ever broad; Howard, at the heart of the Nation; Atlanta at Atlanta, whose ideal of scholarship has been held above the temptation of numbers. Why not here, and perhaps elsewhere, plant deeply and for all time centres of learning and living, colleges that yearly would send into the life of the South a few white men and a few black men of broad culture, catholic tolerance, and trained ability, joining their hands to other hands, and giving to this squabble of the Races a decent and dignified peace?

Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schools and kindergartens, industrial and technical schools, literature and tolerance,—all these spring from knowledge and culture, the children of the university. So must men and nations build, not otherwise, not upside down.

In this last paragraph, how beautifully he encourages in his ideal for a ‘university student’ some of the gentlemanly, lady-like qualities that shape a person to civility and refinement, when he encourages the black folks to blacks to pursue “patience, humility, manners, and taste,” and that, albeit from the top of the socioeconomic ladder (which is  exactly where, one quite badlyyyyyy needs them, and in higher measure at that!) 

So much for the power contained within such words of encouragement to transform individuals and thereby societies for the better!

More quotable quotes for y’all from the pages of The Souls of Black Folk –

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line. (page 3)

The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. (page 29)

The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. (page 48)

There stand in the South two separate worlds; and separate not simply in the higher realms of social intercourse, but also in church and school, on railway and street-car, in hotels and theatres, in streets and city sections, in books and newspapers, in asylums and jails, in hospitals and graveyards. (page 72)

America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons. (page 104)

Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked “For White People Only.” (page 146)

To be continued…

image courtesy: amazondotcom