On Weeding the Garden

Marion Montgomery

On Weeding the Garden

“Poet, novelist, intellectual, and literary critic, Marion Montgomery taught composition, literature, and creative writing at the University of Georgia for thirty-three years. He also wrote hundreds of poems, dozens of short stories, three novels, one novella, and more than twenty books of literary and cultural criticism.”¹

Marion Montgomery penned this letter to his son, who was spending his senior year of high school as an exchange student in Germany. Originally published in The Red and Black (Athens, Ga.) August 07, 1975 

To My Son, Going away to School

Dear Marion:

Is it possible? A week ago we sat on the tailgate of our truck, eating the first cantaloupe from the garden. Now we are separated by an ocean and several countries, and you are struggling with what must seem a barbarous language. A long way from crab grass and coffee weed and bull nettle in Oglethorpe County. And so I encourage you to believe that your wide change will be worth the shock. And I suggest that our summer garden work is closer to you still than you suppose and will hold us together.

You will be returning sooner than you think for college and a new shock. Very quickly you will find yourself moved out of our high school climate, which a British critic describes as “organized amnesia,” into one where the mind is widely assumed an instrument to be calibrated for its technical service to a machine called society. I put it starkly, but only to assure you that, given its worst, you will survive the educational factory our age has devised. If you learn to discriminate, to distinguish. Hence an advantage of this radical experience abroad. 

I don’t think you’ll hear as many of your classmates there ask, “What use is history, philosophy, algebra, literature?” It is a common question here, as you know. For how does one explain the “use” of a cantaloupe to those who have been given a stone for bread? The question of the “use” of humanistic studies is asked most destructively, not by the questioning student in whom it is proper, but by our political and intellectual leaders, who assume the question rhetorical, its answer “NONE”. Unless, of course, those ripening disciplines called the humanities may be convincingly shown to keep us ahead of the Russians in some technological way, or help multiply gross national product.

It was difficult enough to distinguish pea vine and coffee weed without getting some distance, remember? We leaned back a little to look at leaves and blossom. And it is no doubt early for you to worry about fighting back rank jungle growth that closes upon the campus. But you ought to be aware of it. What I mean is that I hope you will resist the predominant assumption in American higher education that the primary justification for training the young mind (i.e. spending tax money on education) is that it assures a supply of better air conditioners or cheaper cantaloupe, or more intricately engineered social and political structures to impose upon that beast “society.”

There is a distinction to be made between social and economic mechanics and community life. Hence the necessity of my answer to that indiscriminating rhetorical question, which intends to negate the human dimension whatever pretty words deny the intent. Because man is what he is, it is better to know than not to know. There are many lifetimes of thought in those words. One’s particular life, even its “useful” dimension, flows best from this educational principle and bears with it all manner of healthful, helpful, and pleasing things, visible and invisible. Let the “uses” of knowledge wait then, at least the duration of your educational retreat. When you are a “rising junior” (which locally means when you pass sixth-grade grammar), we will talk of uses.

Not “What use is history?” but “What is history?” That question first. Thoughtful, you will find history an active part of your continuing present. As one knowingly participates in it, he bears lively witness to the best of the past, as aid to the present and hope for the future. That is to say, one becomes a patron of civilization. Your mind informed by active discrimination, you become a substantial support of a community larger than that touched by the present date on your calendar or on my letter. History is not simply an aggregate of the past, anymore than philosophy is a catalogue of ideas. To become educated through the humanities is to enjoy the company of faithful minds. And it is to bring to that company your own private times and places and things, into that timeless place your mind, wherethrough you are sustained in the world and the world through you. Let me give example of what I mean. You will hear Shakespeare’s Hotspur say in a heated moment, in Henry IV. “Out of this nettle danger we pluck this flower safety.” Now last week we weeded butterbeans by hand, you and I, and you learned firsthand, you might say, what bull nettle is. Action and knowledge seemingly far removed from any attempt to overthrow a king. Still, you know the shock of encounter with that prickly, poisonous weed. How quickly you learned caution, digging down a bit to grasp a smooth root.

Remembering all this, you will know Hotspur alive in his bravado and compare him to his cautious, wily Uncle Worcester. You will value a difference between Hotspur’s pluck and its distortion of the heroic and your first innocent grabbing of a Georgia weed. You will no doubt conclude that Hotspur’s character leaves something to be desired, even as you learn that words reveal not only actions in nature, but the character of the mind that acts in nature.

You will begin to discover that all labors go together where there is a discriminating mind to govern them. Any practical use of such knowledge is implicit, the largesse of knowing. As for instance when you listen next year to political rhetoric your first voting year, or when you encounter patent medicine or deodorant ads on television.

I have much more to say, but naming “labor” reminds me that those potatoes down by the lake are now ready to dig, before Dog Day rain rots them. You are not here to help—and yet you are. Next letter I’ll say something about a phrase out of St. Paul—“each in his nature.” So then you will have: it is better to know, than not to know, each in his own nature. Through which we become members one of another, parts of a body, not of a machine.

I remind you once more to remember that, whether the word be German, English, algebraic, “To use the wrong word is to bear false witness.” Distinguish. Discriminate. You recall the newspaper story we read, the murdered man called an “alleged victim” by a cautious reporter? Last night’s paper bore a headline, “Zoning Loopholes Glare.” Enough to put even surrealist poets out of business. One might smile at such, if “higher education” were less the source of such contamination of the instrument of education, language. Here, from an official publication of your state university, very seriously put: “It is true that, in general, air space is coming to a screeching halt in this country.” You must remember that such home-grown and disseminated weed is the great enemy of the mind’s garden, out of heads gone to seed. They’re blown constantly into our minds and take root when we don’t think.

Welcome, then, to the labor of weeding the mind. But be careful not to mistake pea vine for coffee weed and pull it. You know the difference between the coffee weed quoted above and the careful garden we talked about last week, eating our cantaloupe at dusk. We were dirty, hot, tired of fighting the army of the encroaching weeds. Looking over the garden, trying words in tribute to the bounty we shared, even before full harvest shared not only with each other, but with the soil and seed and, as always, the weeds. The beginning of Dog Days, between old and new seasons for you and me.

So we talked the garden’s promise. The watermelon vines had grown so fast they’d dragged most of the little melons off, and the corn ears were threatening to run out the shuck ends. We knew what we were saying. If you must sometime speak of space coming to a screeching halt, know what you are saying in the light of Ptolemy, Newton, Einstein, of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. Not just in the light of Walt Disney. Words defend themselves; a man’s metaphors are a judgment upon him, whether he knows or cares or not. Don’t put your foot in your mouth without good cause. And above all, remember that I and a host of those you know and do not as yet know send you and yours our love and encouragement.

* “The Red and Black debuted in 1893 as a newspaper devoted to the interests of the University of Georgia’s student body.”

1. Jordan, Michael. “Marion Montgomery.”New Georgia Encyclopedia