The Gift of Fire

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The Gift of Fire
by Richard Mitchell

"Richard Mitchell is a superb shatterer of icons. In The Gift of Fire, passion, commitment, exquisite reasoning and Mitchell's unique sense of humor are trained on the vital question: How do we use and, more commonly, misuse our minds? An important work." -- Thomas H. Middleton

"There exists in every age, in every society, a small, still choir of reason emanating from a few scattered thinkers ignored by the mainstream. Their collective voices, when duly discovered a century or so too late, reveal what was wrong with that society and age, and how it could have been corrected if only people had listened and acted accordingly. Richard Mitchell's is such a voice. It could help make a better life for you or, if it is too late for that, at least for your children. Ignore it at your and their peril." -- John Simon

The Underground Grammarian is back with the most important book of his career. Richard Mitchell, author of the classics Less Than Words Can Say, The Graves of Academe, andThe Leaning Tower of Babel, delivers in The Gift of Fire a series of fiercely witty, brilliantly considered "sermons" on an issue as old as Socrates but still controversial today: What is the role of morality in education, and therefore in our daily responsibilities? And how do we decide what morality should be taught, and why?
Those familiar with Mitchell's legendary Underground Grammarian will recognize the sound of Mitchell's voice crying in the wilderness -- with considerable humor -- as he uses telling examples and wicked, witty parables to illustrate his belief that the American education establishment and society itself have failed to teach us mental discipline, independence of thought, individual responsibility, or even the right books. From The Gift of Fire's first chapter, "Who Is Socrates, Now That We Need Him?" to the book's stunning, emotionally moving conclusion, Mitchell decries "feel good," "I'm OK, You're OK" American public education-based on teaching to the lowest common denominator-and argues for a return to studies based on the work of thinkers like Socrates, Aquinas, and Ben Franklin. In this way, all of us learn to think for ourselves, not just the privileged.
Here, too, are Mitchell's beautifully written, exquisitely argued explorations of not what but how to think about the knotty moral issues that face us every day: ambition, violence, nuclear weapons, political conflict, patience, duty, love, and even child-rearing. In the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mitchell considers the world around him in a manner that is thought-provoking, fascinating and entertaining,
Thousands of enlightened readers know Richard Mitchell as one of our most brilliant, passionate, funny, and quintessentially American thinkers. Join them in reading The Gift of Fire. It will change your life -- or at least how you think about it.
About the Author: Richard Mitchell is editor and publisher of The Underground Grammarian and a professor of classics at Glassboro State College. He is the author of Less Than Words Can Say, The Graves of Academe, and The Leaning Tower of Babel.

Introduction
I suspect that those who have read some of my other works will be a little surprised by this one. I am a little surprised by this one.
That, in itself, is nothing new. I have never yet written anything, long or short, that did not surprise me. That is, for me at least, the greatest worth of writing, which is only incidentally a way of telling others what you think. Its first use is for the making of what you think, for the discovery of understanding, an act that happens only in language.
I have habitually found it convenient, and perhaps just a little too easy, to look for understanding by paying close attention to failures of understanding, which always take the form of bad language. Just as there is nothing but language in which to make sense, there is nothing but language in which to make nonsense. So, in my works, at least, the examination of sense and nonsense has ordinarily been a sometimes clever and amusing castigation of fools, who can be shown to imagine that they make sense when they don't.
The castigation of fools is, of course, an ancient and honorable task of writers and, unless very poorly done, an enterprise that will usually entertain those who behold it. No matter what else we imagine that we believe about the propriety of compassion for the unfortunate, we do like to see fools exposed. It's funny. And it is not only funny; it is the great theme of Comedy, and a mild, domestic counterpart of the great theme of Tragedy, in which we rejoice, however sadly, to see villains brought down.
So it is that the habitual contemplation of folly, which does not seem to be the worst thing in the world, leads little by little to