You are invited to attend our next monthly meeting to be held on Friday, January 9th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. We will be discussing “Of Cicadas and Mayflies: Literary Education” by James Matthew Wilson from the Summer 2025 issue entitled “Education” (Volume 52.2).
Here are excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
In “Of Cicadas and Mayflies: Literary Education,” James Matthew Wilson asks how literature forms the soul. How can a work of fiction lead one into truth? Is it a mere aid for those not yet ready to face reality directly, or does it remain essential even at the highest stages of contemplation? Wilson answers that the literary—poiesis and mythos broadly understood—marks the full arc of education, beginning in an exitus and culminating in a reditus. Literature initiates the movement of the soul toward reality and fulfills it in the vision of form. Drawing on Plato, he shows that Socrates understood poetry as the opposite of sophistry: the latter “beneath reason,” using speech to obscure truth; the former “above reason,” revealing truth through image and symbol. Poetry presents to the soul what reason can reach only by slow ascent. It sends the soul forth toward truth, yet also remains the ground to which thought returns in rest—the beginning and the end of contemplation. For Wilson, this rhythm defines all genuine education. Works of art are not diversions from reality but encounters with it. They begin as responses to the world and become explorations of it, calling us not to abstraction but to dwell with the concrete form in its fullness, where the particular and the universal, the made and the real, meet. The work of art, he continues, is itself a mode of knowing. The act of making expresses a bodily, incarnate intelligence, and the finished work embodies a truth that can be contemplated. “The made work of fine art participates in an essential manner in the act of knowing,” he writes, “in the intellectual response that rational animals make to reality, to being as it gives itself.” Following Maritain, Wilson joins poetic and metaphysical knowledge: one seeks essences, the other encounters existence. From Augustine, he draws the insight that our patterns of making mirror the creative patterns of reality itself. Against Etienne Gilson, who sought to divide artistic fact from aesthetic reflection, Wilson insists that both belong to one movement of knowledge—the soul’s going forth and return within the order of being. Education, in its final sense, is therefore an act of contemplation, a “kind of aesthetic dwelling.” We should avoid dissolving form into abstractions; rather, we must see “into” it, until its unity discloses itself as the form of reality. Wilson ends with Richard Wilbur’s “Mayflies,” which captures for our author the experience of being wounded by the beautiful form contemplated to the one who has consented to receive being through that form’s fullness.
We will meet in the Kateri Room located at St. Michael’s Church, 240 Hemlock Street, Waterloo, Ontario. Use the east side parking lot and enter by the rear doors. Walk up the stairs. The Kateri Room is on your right before you enter the church proper.
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