No, really. Here is what narration is like sometimes: behind a cloud, but you still see the light.
At the moment I am losing an online chess game. It's kind of pathetic. The person who challenged me to this game KNEW that "challenge" is pretty much a euphemism for "invite to a rout," and I don't know why that would even be fun, but anyway, here we are. You look at his side of the board, and there are the pieces arrayed in what is obviously a formation, which I didn't see coming until it was already formed. On my side: some random straggling. So now I'm going to watch all my poor little pieces get wiped off the map.
I lead with this anecdote mainly because it happens to be what's actually going on right now. Also, my opponent happens to be a person whose grasp of the big picture always surprises me. It's easy – easier, actually, when we're not playing chess and I delude myself that I know something about the big picture – not to realize just how much he knows.
The person of whom I speak is a person who does not much like narrating, and generally, throughout his entire narrating life, has contrived to tell me as much as possible in as few words as possible, and have done with it. Famously, he once narrated the first chapter of H.E. Marshall's English Literature for Boys and Girls in a single sentence: "Our ancestors were illiterate nudists." And friends, I am here to tell you, he was not wrong.
I've spent years writing, Say more! on every written narration tendered to me. At the same time, one thing I've realized is that the cumulative effect of daily sentences (like "Our ancestors were illiterate nudists") is – well, cumulative. Write enough sentences like that, day after day, especially once your mother twigs to the idea of asking you to write one sentence per, say, paragraph sometimes, and eventually you wind up with something a little more detailed than that one grand summarizing idea.
This has, in fact, been my focus in asking for written narration so far this year. I'm asking for a lot of "narrate this section, narrate this page, narrate this paragraph." This way, for one thing, I can assign longer readings (we're talking about a high-school senior here), but still get better narrations than if I just said, "Narrate this reading."
So, that's working well, to get him to apply attention to things I want him to read. Strategies like this definitely work. Note to self, and maybe to you, too.
But then there are other . . . benefits? Surprises? I'm not even sure how to categorize what I'm about to say. I'll assign, for example, the first three chapters of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and as a narration for Chapter 2, I will (which is to say, I DID, this week) receive the following:
"He’s God, so he’s above the angels, but also a human so he’s below them. He’s Schrödinger’s Messiah."
Again, ladies and whatsits, he is not wrong. Aside from the fact that two sentences, not one, comprise this response, what made me give him more than one plus mark (a single plus mark = okay, fine, you did it, fair enough) what knocked me sideways is that somehow, and don't ask me how, he knows about the paradox of Schrödinger's Cat.
If, depending on your interpretation, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead, OR alive in one reality but dead in another, you can see how we have an analogy going on here, a metaphor. Metaphors aren't perfect, of course, and the ways that they break down can be as interesting as are the ways that they hold fast. But this struck me as an interesting, and fairly erudite, metaphor for the hypostatic union, the Personhood of Christ as both God and Man, above and below, exploding what we think we know about the way things are. This, I believe, is exactly what the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews is trying to get at.
This, then, is one example of what you might be looking for in a narration. I could wish, perhaps, for longer narrations from this particular person; on the other hand, a student might write a lot more than that and still not be perceptive at this level. One thing you're looking for in a narration is detail, but you're also looking for assimilation, connection, and synthesis. I have no idea how Schrödinger got into this narration, or how he entered this particular child's mind at all, but there he was, and here he is, illuminating something the child (well, he's 18, so maybe not a child, except in the "of God" sense) wants to formulate. Believe me, folks, you WANT this kind of thing.
Additionally, this narration is a timely reminder, because yes, I, even I, sometimes forget: the mind is a spiritual organism. It's not a lump of clay, waiting for me to press my fingerprints into it. It's not an empty sac, waiting for me to dump some knowledge in. The mind is alive, awake, interested, doing its work all the time. It learns from its reading, but it brings things to that reading as well. It knows how to do what it was made to do. You might, uh, have to remind it not to blow off its Dante readings (for example), but you don't have to tell it how to think and learn and know.
Also, he won.
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