Now is the Time for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.1 Education still "trains" students by setting up certain expectations: to be passive receptacles, "told" or "shown" what they should know and become, wherever it takes place, inside classrooms or out. The students picked it up when they opted to test the boundaries, not just of the educational space, but of the now conventional wisdom from our latest "trainers": that literature has no relevance or place in this age of engineering, science, business interests, and technology. The guerdon would be in discovering that familiar issues of our own time, both personal and professional, would figure in the literature: a female author's medieval French poem featuring a "lady" who seduces a male knight without being judged or punished for acting on her desires juxtaposed to Arthur's queen who later questions the sexuality of that same knight when he refuses her offer of an assignation.. Midnight being come at length, I read another tale, for a nightcap— (2) M.T. tours England's past and present both through Malory and by visiting an actual castle: as a reader, he goes back in time, entering the putative chivalric world of King Arthur;in the novel's present, he has just returned from touring historic Warwick Castle.