Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [65]
And if you do not know what it is I am talking about—then we must accept as true that the unbelievable suggestion that not only bird, lightning, music, rain, the words of a nursery rhyme
How many miles to Babylon?
Four score miles and ten.
Can we get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again!
but a man talking in a rather ugly lecture room can be charged with this quality and not be aware of it. As a bird can sing all summer and never know that the sounds it makes will remain for a lifetime in the ears of a child in stained streets as the crystallisation of a promise of a recurring spring.
If you do not know what I am saying, do not recognise anything, then …
It was early this year, at the beginning of spring. I was spending the weekend with friends near Cambridge, ex-pupils of mine. They have small children. They were very excited, because full of plans for a new kind of school—no, not to supplant ordinary education, what the State provides, but to supplement it. Some kind of a weekend school with emphasis on unorthodox individual teaching. As I write I am conscious of a feeling of staleness and boredom—yet now as then I am attracted to such ideas. It is that I have been attracted by them so often!
You were to address a couple of dozen parents, because you had been involved for some time in similar schemes. The idea of sitting through an evening in a lecture room nearly kept me at home, yet I believe that such individual efforts to educate, enliven, and provoke are vital—that any country goes as sleepy as a pear, without such efforts. More, that any democracy depends on them. I went, and found myself as I expected, in a rectangular space, coated over with plaster painted grey that was still damp—it was a new hall. It was inadequately heated. There was a wooden platform at one end on which stood the speaker—you. Rows of individuals sat to attention in front of you. The chairs were hard uprights. This is the uninspiring setting that we allow ourselves for the working-out and discussion of the dreams we dream for a better world! The village hall. The local hall. The church hall. We take it for granted of course. A man or woman stands on a low platform with a table by him that has a glass of water on it and perhaps a microphone and in front of him a collection of people who sit facing him, looking up to listen to what he, or she is saying. Out of this process come better schools, hospitals, a new society. We may take it for granted but what could it look like from outside? Very odd, I am sure. Anyway, you were the one that night, a middle-aged man, used to standing on platforms, accomplished and easy in manner, so as not to upset or offend your audience. This is not a criticism, though perhaps it sounds like it. I remember sitting there as you began speaking and thinking you had a perfect platform manner the way doctors have bedside manners.
I was restless and irritable—extraordinarily and unreasonably so, about the whole thing. And I was angry with myself for being like this. I liked what was being said. I liked the fact that all these young parents were proposing to put themselves out in time and expense to educate their children in ways the ordinary school system could not or would not do. I approved of you, the speaker, insofar as it was possible to see what you were like, behind the professionalism of your delivery. Yet I was seething with rebelliousness, with emotion—why should one always have to sit on hard chairs in a characterless hall to hear ideas discussed, why, when one wants to be