Last night I ate dinner at De groene olifant with Roger. Roger, by the bye, has most of English poetry committed to memory, which is a little relevant to what follows and more relevant to what I want to write about tomorrow.
But for now, know that De groene olifant is one of a sizable but finite number of cafes in Amsterdam that serve a meat dish, a fish dish, and a veggie dish for dinner. Though slightly interchangeable, these cafes are made distinct because you get to know the bartender at one or another or because of how this one or that one is where you go to meet a particular friend. Roger and I had not been to the green elephant before, for instance, but I imagine we will eat there again the next time he is in town.
Since they are not special or extraordinary, I doubt anyone dreams of eating in such establishments. And yet to do so is more than dreamy. Being in a place that borders on home and serves you with no pretension, where people are simply enjoying one another, makes the whole experience far more satisfying than meals that cost three times the price. This, in its way, is glorious.
Roger and I talked about how our students and colleagues in education became more homogenous over time. The students all imagine the same big house and the same shiny car as the end goal of their education. Meanwhile, the eccentrics who used to be drawn to teaching are no longer welcome at schools that are more and more run—“administrated” would be more accurate than “run”—as businesses. Experimental ideas, free expression, and peculiar forms of living that stretch out what it means to be human are hard to manage and rarely jibe with the spreadsheet.
As we talked, Roger quoted me a few lines from R.S. Thomas:
What to do? Stay green.
Never mind the machine,
Whose fuel is human souls
Live large, man, and dream small.
Can you think of any idea that runs more counter to the American status quo? It is tough to imagine an influencer or politician or speaker at commencement saying, “Listen up everybody: Dream small.”
Now admittedly, Thomas’s poem (which I read later) is about being eighty-five years old and so the “dream small” speaks to the time the poet has left. But even so, I think the idea has value for an eighteen-year-old too, or especially.
Let me try to argue that by offering two quotes from Ben Okri and referring you to a video.
Here’s the Okri:
Poet’s seem to be set against the world because we need them to show us the falseness of our limitation's, the true extent of our kingdom.
Our lives have become narrow enough. Our dreams strain to widen them.
It looks a first as if Okri pushes for big dreams too, that these make life larger. But it is not about the size of the dream so much as what they do to our lives and consciousness. Big house, big car, big reputation . . . these offer no width and certainly no depth and are, in fact, a terrible kind of box, a false limitation. If our dreams fit too easily onto the spreadsheet or are machine-made, they will not widen life, no matter how large the numbers or grandiose the engineering.
Now check out this short video, one of many from a guy whose days come with more sensations than you will get in a lifetime in a McMansion. Note too the technical excellence of the video itself and how much you want to eat what he cooks. My biggest dreams look flat compared to what he holds in his hand, cuts, chops, and hears all around him.
It is easy to wish school had a strong element of what you see in his videos. Five minutes in the woods with this guy as part of my formal education would have made me an infinitely more capable person—less narrow, more at home in the ordinary and glorious.
I’ll say more about why this is about the Internet and connect it to Rodger’s memory tomorrow.