The Gift of Fire

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