`It Is Like Writing to Music'

Of necessity, I often write to the sound of children playing; that is, fighting. My younger sons are four and seven, and every moment brings new provocation. They howl and bite like feral dogs. My brother and I were the same, for this is essential mammalian behavior and should cause us no anxiety. In fact, I’m suspicious of the sweet-natured little darlings who play together like sedated Unitarians.

Some of this I owe to decades spent in newsrooms, where the police scanner and the whining of reporters meld into ignorable white noise. I once worked for a newspaper that piped Muzak into the newsroom. Another outraged reporter and I removed the speaker from the ceiling above our desks and snipped the wires, so the swelling of strings would no longer distract from the cacophony. Charles Lamb, perennial bachelor, found solace in the hollering of children, even while writing. If a man requires silence and tranquility before he can write, I assume he has little worth saying. This is from one of Lamb’s Elia essays, “The Old and New Schoolmaster”:

“The noises of children, playing their own fancies—as I now hearken to them by fits, sporting on the green before my window, while I am engaged in these grave speculations at my neat suburban retreat at Shacklewell -- by distance made more sweet -- inexpressibly take from the labour of my task. It is like writing to music. They seem to modulate my periods. They ought at least to do so—for in the voice of that tender age there is a kind of poetry, far unlike the harsh prose-accents of man’s conversation.—I should but spoil their sport, and diminish my own sympathy for them, by mingling in their pastime.”

Though childless, Lamb knew kids. Last week we transferred our 4-year-old from a conventional pre-school program in a public school to a Montessori program in another public grade school. His new teacher is a Swedish translation of Mr. Rogers, all attentiveness and empathy, and David is much happier. Later in his essay, Lamb confirms a frequent observation of mine:

“Why are we never quite at our ease in the presence of a schoolmaster?—because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place, in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours. He cannot meet you on the square. He wants a point given him, like an indifferent whist-player. He is so used to teaching, that he wants to be teaching you.”

But this is not the case with Mr. Johanson. He has ideas, but is content to keep them to himself. He is not that monster of pedagogy, the proselytizer, even for Maria Montessori, whose precepts he honors. His temperament seems naturally balanced. A petty part of me is tempted, as an experiment, to irritate him, but he has invited me to read to the kids next month -- Caps for Sale, by Esphyr Slobodkina, which I deliver with a juicy, pan-Slavic accent. And Mr. Johanson has already rendered the supreme act of a civilized person: He loaned me a book.