Theme-Ideas

I confess that I went through school being largely unaffected by books and the reading of them. Perhaps Shakespeare's, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth; and a few pieces from the Victorian Education Department's justly famous 'readers'¹ stayed with me but only just.


In secondary school, I was earmarked for the 'science' stream which further cut me off from reading literature. After school, I worked as a trainee industrial chemist for three years but then left to train as a primary (elementary school) teacher.

In second-year teachers' college, we were taught English Literature by a grumpy, bitter, 'old' lecturer who transformed my indifferent outlook on literature and reading to one of excitement. (Although a scarey man in class, Mr D. was a kind and gentle man on a one-to-one basis.)

As I write this now, I hear the thunder of his first lecture from 45 years ago: 'Art is not Nature; Nature is not Art'. He scorned the supposition that 'natural' heaps of dirt and weeds around our college could be construed as 'art' just because they looked somehow 'artful' to the eye.²

I am grateful to Mr D. for his teaching that literary works contain theme-ideas (with setting, plot, characters, and a 'point-of-view' - [third-person or first-person viewpoint]): with this discovery, books became more intellectually robust adventures for me.

Of course, it may be that everyone else at school had understood this and I had missed it completely. But whatever the reason for the gap in my schooling, I am thankful for my time at College and for the teaching of this lecturer. 

Today though, it's amazing how little people read; how few books people take time to read given the great privilege we all have. Perhaps it has always been that way but my suspicion, borne out by some studies of this question, is that since the advent of television, the general populace does less and less reading. It might even be said that we are gradually losing the ability to read, and to read critically.

What we also don't realise at times is that the large issues of our Western lives have been shaped by print. Just think of the King James Version of the Bible and the influence this one mighty text empowered by God's Spirit has had across the entire world. To this we could add, The Pilgrim's Progress and the works of William Shakespeare.

And print, even a murder mystery by Agatha Christie³ is molded by theme-ideas intentionally and sometimes less intentionally with artfulness.⁴ And these theme-ideas emerge from heart-held religious⁵ convictions about the meaning of life.

Some of these considerations above I will be pursuing in this blog by highlighting certain works on my bookshelves.

1. These readers were the basic reading material for each year so if a pupil got through his reader in a short time but wanted more to read then tough! Books and especially children's books were in short supply in the 50s to early 60s when I was at school. No one complained because our parents had had it worse. Most of my peers were not interested in reading anyway.
2. A view that is still being prosecuted in the art-world today and costing art-investors millions.
3. In fact, it's interesting to note how AG's stories are taken by modern film-makers and rewritten to present a different worldview from the one Christie espoused.
4. Even more so with television because this medium does not easily enable the watcher to replay what has caught his attention.
5. By 'religious' I don't mean necessarily following a recognisable or traditional religion but I believe that man is incurably religious.