The Sweetest Dream (70 page)

But the little girl did not want to be gathered in and held,
she spun around on herself, singing for herself and to herself,
‘Yes, my Colin, yes, my Sophie, yes, and there's my poor little
Johnny . . .'

What Has Been, Can Be Again

Upon Receiving the 2001 Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature in Madrid

Once upon a time, and it seems a long time ago, there was a respected figure, the
Educated Person. He — it was usually he, but then increasingly often she — was
educated in a way that differed little from country to country — I am of course
talking about Europe — but was different from what we know now. William
Hazlitt, our great essayist, went to a school, in the late eighteenth century, whose
curriculum was four times more comprehensive than that of a comparable school
now, a mix of the bases of language, law, art, religion, mathematics. It was taken for
granted that this already dense and deep education was only one aspect of development,
for the pupils were expected to read, and they did.

This kind of education, the humanist education is vanishing. Increasingly governments
— our British government among them — encourage citizens to acquire
vocational skills, while education as a development of the whole person is not seen
as useful to the modern society.

The older education would have had Greek and Latin literature and history, and
the Bible, as a foundation for everything else. He — or she — read the classics of
their own countries, perhaps one or two from Asia, and the best known writers of
other European countries: Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the great Russians,
Rousseau. An educated person from Argentina would meet a similar person from
Spain, one from St. Petersburg meet his counterpart in Norway, a traveler from
France spend time with one from Britain, and they would understand each other:
they shared a culture, could refer to the same books, plays, poems, pictures, in a
web of reference and information that was like a shared history of the best the
human mind has thought, said, written.

This has gone.

Greek and Latin are disappearing. In many countries the Bible, and religion —
going. A girl I know, taken to Paris to broaden her mind, which needed it, though
she was doing brilliantly in examinations, revealed that she had never heard of
Catholics and Protestants, knew nothing of the history of Christianity or any other
religion. She was taken to hear mass in Notre Dame, told that this ceremony had
been a basis of European culture for centuries, and she should at least know about
it — and she dutifully sat through it, rather as she might a tea ceremony in Japan,
and afterwards enquired, “Are these people some kind of cannibal then?” So much
for what seems enduring.

There is a new kind of educated person, who may be at school and university for
twenty, twenty-five years, who knows everything about a specialty (computers, the
law, economics, politics) but knows about nothing else — no literature, art, history
— and may be heard enquiring, “But what was the Renaissance, then?” “What
was the French Revolution?”

Even fifty years ago this person would have been seen as a barbarian. To have
acquired an education with nothing of the old humanist background — impossible.
To call oneself educated without a background of reading — impossible.

Reading, books, the literary culture, was respected, desired, for centuries. Reading
was and still is in what we call the Third World, a kind of parallel education, which
once everyone had, or aspired to. Nuns and monks in their convents and
monasteries, aristocrats at their meals, women at their looms and their sewing,
were read to, and the poor people, even if all they had was a Bible, respected those
who read. In Britain until quite recently trade unions and workers' movements
fought for libraries, and perhaps the best example of the pervasiveness of the love
for reading is that of the workers in the tobacco and cigar factories of Cuba whose
trade unions demanded that the workers should be read to as they worked. The
material was agreed to by the workers, and included politics and history, novels and
poetry. A favorite of their books was The Count of Monte Christo. A group of workers
wrote to Dumas and asked if they might use the name of his hero for one of
their cigars.

Perhaps there is no need to labor this point to anyone present here, but I do feel
we have not yet grasped that we are living in a fast fragmenting culture. Pockets
of the old excellences remain, in a university, a school, the classroom of an old-fashioned
teacher in love with books, perhaps a newspaper or a journal. But a
culture that once united Europe and its overseas offshoots has gone.

We may get some idea of the speed with which cultures may change by looking
at how languages change. English as spoken in America or the West Indies is not
the English of England. Spanish is not the same in Argentina and in Spain. The
Portuguese of Brazil is not the Portuguese of Portugal. Italian, Spanish, French,
grew out of Latin not in thousands of years but in hundreds. It is a very short time
since the Roman world disappeared, leaving behind its legacy of our languages.

One interesting little irony about the present situation is that a lot of the criticism
of the old culture was in the name of Elitism, but what is happening is that everywhere
are enclaves, pockets, of the old kind of reader and reading and it is easy to
imagine one of the new barbarians walking by chance into a library of the old
kind, in all its richness and variety and understanding suddenly what has been lost,
what he — or she — has been deprived of.

So what is going to happen next in this tumultuously changing world? I think we
are all of us fastening our seat belts and holding on tight.

I drafted what I have just read before the events of the 11th September. We are in
for a war, it seems, a long one, which by its nature cannot have an easy end. We all
know that enemies exchange more than gunfire and insults. In this country, Spain,
you know this better perhaps than anyone. When feeling gloomy about the world
I often think about that time here, in Spain, in the early Middle Ages — in
Cordova, in Toledo, in Granada, in other southern cities — Christians, Moslems,
Jews, lived harmoniously together: poets, musicians, writers, sages, all together,
admiring each other, helping each other. It went on for three centuries. This wonderful culture went on for three centuries. Has anything like it been seen in the
world? What has been, can be again.

I think the educated person of the future will have a wider basis than anything we
can imagine now.

— Doris Lessing

About the Author

Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia in 1919 and
moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five
years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever
since. She is the author of more than thirty books-novels, stories,
reportage, poems, and plays. Doris Lessing lives in London.

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By the same author

NOVELS

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

The Summer Before the Dark

Memoirs of a Survivor

Diary of a Good Neighbour

If the Old Could . . .

The Good Terrorist

Playing the Game: a Graphic Novel
(illustrated by Charlie Adlard)

Love, Again

Mara and Dann

The Fifth Child

Ben, in the World

 

‘Canopus in Argos: Archives' series

Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five

The Sirian Experiments

The Making of the Representative
for Planet 8

Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

 

‘Children of Violence' novel-sequence

Martha Quest

A Proper Marriage

A Ripple from the Storm

Landlocked

The Four-Gated City

OPERAS

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (Music by Philip Glass)

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (Music by Philip Glass)

SHORT STORIES

Five

The Habit of Loving

A Man and Two Women

The Story of a Non-Marrying
Man and Other Stories

Winter in July

The Black Madonna

This was the Old Chief's Country
(Collected African Stories, Vol. 1)

The Sun Between Their Feet
(Collected African Stories, Vol. 2)

To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories, Vol. 1)

The Temptation of Jack Orkney
(Collected Stories, Vol. 2)

London Observed

The Old Age of El Magnifico

Particularly Cats

Rufus the Survivor

POETRY

Fourteen Poems

DRAMA

Each His Own Wilderness

Play with a Tiger

The Singing Door

NON-FICTION

In Pursuit of the English

Going Home

A Small Personal Voice

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

The Wind Blows Away Our Words

African Laughter

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Under My Skin: Volume I

Walking in the Shade: Volume II

Credits

Jacket design by Susan Degan

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products
of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events,
locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the
intent of either the author or the publisher.

THE SWEETEST DREAM
. Copyright © 2002 by Doris Lessing. All rights reserved under
International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required
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permission of HarperCollins e-books.

 

EPub © Edition ISBN: 9780061760334

 

First published in the United Kingdom in 2001
by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

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