Treasure-hunting.

My eleven-year-old recently sat for his first set of fill-in-the-bubbles, comprehensive nationally standardized tests.  Till now we've fulfilled our legal obligations with an annual sitting of the PIAT-R or "Peabody" test, which is administered verbally; I like that format for younger children, but of course I'd prefer my older kids to get comfortable with the format they'll be using for college boards and the like.

I'm satisfied with his performance, but I had to point out to him something that amused me about his lowest score.  It was on the topic "Searching for Information" on the "Reference Materials" test.  

Let's just put it this way:  When was the last time you used an almanac?  When was the last time anyone used an almanac?    Isn't the answer to "Where would you find this sort of information?" always "Google it" now?

Don't get me wrong, I'll sit down with him and teach him about the various uses of an almanac, a multivolume alphabetical dead-tree encyclopedia, an atlas — heck, I'll teach him about the Guinness Book of World Records if I have to.  But I'm afraid it's going to have to be a history lesson.

+ + +

The instant availability of searchable information has affected far more academic pursuits than those of schoolchildren writing reports about the annual rainfall in Colorado or the principal exports of Nicaragua.

I had this thought while reading over Melanie's latest installment in her "Blogging T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land" series.  

The Waste Land is an exceptionally intricate poem, exceptionally difficult to analyze — even to read and experience.  Advanced high school students can deal with something like The Hollow Men;  The Waste Land, by contrast, is packed full of so many allusions and references that the person who aspires to read it and understand it with any degree of ease must either possess

(1) a wide-ranging literary background including some facility in several languages  –OR–

(2)  a heavily annotated edition of the poem in which all the literary references are explained to you.

Number one is difficult, and renders the poem inaccessible to almost everyone.   Number two is not so hard to come by, but it is not very fun, and it also ruins the experience of sitting and reading.

That has been what it takes, for many years.

+ + +

But now, our information environment is so very different — the experience of reading something like The Waste Land is more like a treasure hunt.  The reader reads along, comes upon a place that catches the eye:  Here is something intriguing; what can it mean?  

So, for example, in lines 31-34 of the poem, you come to this:

Frisch weht der Wind/Der Heimat zu/Mein Irisch Kind/Wo weilest du?

And hey,  I can recognize it as German, but I don't speak or read German.  I can guess at some of this (fresh is the wind? my Irish child?) but not much.  

But it's a simple matter to Google the whole mess and to discover that the passage is a quote from Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde. 

You could follow the links that are all about The Wasteland, of course, and other people's ideas about why Eliot quoted Tristan und Isolde just here, and why this passage.  That is, you could if you were in a hurry, or if you wanted to cheat, and if you were more interested in hearing what other people think than in thinking about the poem yourself.  (Nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want.)

But if you are more interested in the treasure hunt, and coming up with your own ideas, you could instead turn to Googling Tristan und Isolde, in which case you'd discover that there is a British movie version released in 2006, and you'd also find the Wikipedia page with a synopsis, with a synopsis, plus other topics such as the influence of Schopenhauer on the plot of the opera.  

Maybe you would follow the Schopenhauer thread ("Hm, it says here 'The world-view of Schopenhauer dictates that the only way for man to achieve inner peace is to renounce his desires!' Could that be a theme of The Waste Land?") or maybe you would keep searching until you found a translation of just that bit of the passage.  That might lead you to compare different translations, as Melanie has in her latest post.  

We can meet the poem in a sort of middle ground now.  Even people who haven't had a really top-notch literary education can have all the references at their fingertips, and we can follow the rabbit trails of the poem as we will with relative ease.  We can do this now without having to passively listen to a lecturer explaining each line at a time, or passively checking the footnotes of our annotated edition.  Now we can read and enjoy it actively, individually, according to what strikes our fancy; exploring and discovering the poem on our own.  

Something like The Waste Land  is no longer a sealed message from one high-end mind to its fellows, accessible only to those privileged by a lavish education or the luxury of enough leisure time to become self-taught.  It is now almost like a puzzle carefully crafted by Eliot, a puzzle that the ordinary literate person can tease apart bit by bit, independently, or perhaps in a conversation among friends — like the one unfolding in Melanie's combox.

If you enjoy that sort of thing, it's fun.  A lot more fun for me than it was before the Internet.   And if anyone ever asks me "In what source of information would you look to find out the analysis of a difficult piece of literature?" I'll be filling in the circle that goes with "the blogosphere."