Looking for a Reading

[bicker]

I'm looking for ideas for a reading of approximately 400 words, on which to base a small-group discussion regarding something close to the theme "vision of the future". (Just to give you some idea how far from the theme is still "in bounds", the last session I put together started out with the theme "literacy" and ended up with the theme "misery to hope".) The reading cannot be prescriptive, in any way. It needs to raise questions, and, most importantly, evoke feelings: It shouldn't answer questions; it shouldn't project a specific direction; it shouldn't cut-off any reasonable perspective.

I don't have problems finding readings for sessions like these, but necessarily, what I find tends to be heavily-influenced by what I've read, what resources are sitting on my bookshelves, what I've been exposed to, etc. There's nothing wrong with that; I'm just one member of the committee, and we're a diverse group, so among the sessions that the group comes up with, overall, there's going to be a lot of different sources drawn on. By the same token, it surely doesn't hurt to benefit from other folks sharing their favorite readings related to the topic.

If you'd like to help out, please provide a link to the text. I've got a short deadline, this time, and so I won't be able to track paper copies down, or some-such. And thanks in advance for you help!

 

[OceanAnnie]

What does this theme, "vision for the future", encompass? It can be rather broad or narrow.

 

[bicker]

The theme is really just a rough guide: "You do something about the time of year. You do something light and fluffy. And you do something forward-looking." It's just to make sure that two (or three) of us don't do ostensibly overlapping sessions. The key criteria are the ones that are definitive (about 400 words, non-prescriptive, and prompts the reader to respond on an emotional level, about some significant aspect of life).

The key, for you, I think, is that this is a reading that you've had close to your heart, one that you've always wanted to have a chat about with some friends.

 

[kaytieeldr]

I don't know if this is the kind of thing you mean, but WBZ's Conversation Nation seems to have some interesting, multi-sided topics to discuss. The descriptions aren't real readings so may not qualify for your group, but certainly invite discussion http://pod08.prospero.com/n/blogs/blog.aspx?webtag=wbz_morning

 

[bicker]

We are indeed looking specifically for readings (poems, essays, etc.); not "issues".

And, we avoid political issues.

Here's an example.... it's the reading from the most recent session I've put together:

Frederick Bailey was a slave. As a boy in Maryland in the 1820s, he had no mother or father to look after him. He was one of countless millions of slave children whose realistic prospects for a hopeful life were nil.

The slaves had drummed into them, from plantation and pulpit alike, from courthouse and statehouse, the notion that they were heredity inferiors, that God intended them for their misery.

There was a most revealing rule: Slaves were to remain illiterate. In the antebellum South, whites who taught a slave to read were severely punished. “[To] make a contented slave,” Bailey later wrote, “it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.”

So now picture Frederick Bailey in 1828 – a 10-year-old African-American child, enslaved, with no legal rights of any kind, long since torn from his mother’s arms, and condemned to a life of drudgery with no prospect of reprieve.
Bailey was sent to work for Capt. Hugh Auld and his wife, Sophia. In this new environment, he came every day upon letters, books, and people who could read. He discovered what he called “this mystery” of reading. Surreptitiously, he studied from young Tommy Auld’s Webster’s Spelling Book. Eventually, he asked Sophia Auld to help him learn. Impressed with the intelligence and dedication of the boy, and perhaps ignorant of the prohibitions, she complied.
Captain Auld discovered what was going on. Furious, he ordered Sophia to stop. In Frederick’s presence Auld chastised Sophia.

But [in doing so] Auld had revealed to Bailey the great secret: “I now understood . . . the white man’s power to enslave the black man. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.”

Without further help from the now reticent and intimidated Sophia Auld, Frederick found way to continue learning how to read. Then he began teaching his fellow slaves: “Their minds had been starved . . . They had been shut up in mental darkness. I taught them, because it was the delight of my soul.”

With his knowledge of reading playing a key role in his escape, Bailey fled to New England, where slavery was illegal and black people were free. He changed his name to Frederick Douglass (after a character in Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake), eluded the bounty hunters who tracked down escaped slaves, and became one of the greatest orators, writers, and political leaders in American History. All his life, he understood that literacy had been the way out.

The most significant criticism of this reading is that it is a bit too much of a biography, but that's forgiven because it's not the point, and it isn't obvious until the end of the reading.

 

[Art 1]

The camel knows the way.

 

[bicker]

reposted

 

[bicker]

(about 400 words, non-prescriptive, and prompts the reader to respond on an emotional level, about some significant aspect of life)

The camel knows the way.

http://www.amazon.com/Camel-Knows-Way-Lorna-Kelly/dp/0966478622#reader_0966478622

Which passage I should looks at?

 

[bicker]

Well, it was a difficult set of specs, but thanks for considering it, for those who did.

I've settled on the first two minutes and eight seconds of the following:

http://www.wimp.com/saganwanderers/