It is tempting to imagine, in teaching and elsewhere, that the more you plan and prepare, the better things will turn out. Up to a point, this is true, but too much planning can go awry, and a bit of spontaneity can set things right. When you plan too hard for something, and it doesn’t turn out the way you intended, the overplanning is partly at fault. I don’t mean that teachers should improvise all the time–but we should be willing to adjust course. We say this continually but still forget it.

For weeks I had been planning a lesson on poetic song verse (for a twelfth-grade English class). It didn’t go as I had hoped. I had envisioned it as part planned, part spontaneous: I would present some songs, and students would too. We would see what came out of the combination. But four students were absent; of those present, only a few offered comments, and no one presented songs. I found myself speaking rather stiffly about the songs I had brought; I don’t think I conveyed much. We have only one class left, and then the students graduate–so I wish I had done better somehow. I understand, though, that the students are ready to move on with their lives.

But another class that day turned into song. We went over a test that the students had taken the day before, and then I taught them the song “Today,” which I sang at my high school graduation and which I thought they would enjoy. (I think they did.) Then they asked to sing songs by Abba and Queen, and I happily went along with that (and introduced a couple of songs too). Day after day, we have been preparing for their school-leaving exams, so this was a nice way to spend time with them before the end.

The contrast helps me see something else as well. In the lesson on poetic song verse, I wanted us to talk  about the relation between a song’s lyrics and its music. I thought I had brought memorable examples (Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen, and others) that they might not have heard otherwise. I realize, though, that it’s a mistake to talk analytically about a song before actually absorbing it. It’s hard to talk about songs at all, but it’s especially difficult in a rush. The students needed time that wasn’t there. If we had had the semester ahead of us, and if it had been a course on songs, then there would have been time. But we are at the end.

Also, songs have a visceral effect. You can’t persuade others to like them–or maybe you can, but only under the right conditions. I remember how others introduced me to various songs over the years–in class, in conversation, at concerts, etc. Some of these songs became favorites; others I never grew to like. Liking isn’t necessarily the point–but when I share a song with someone, or when I teach it formally, I hope that the person will ultimately find it worth hearing. Even that can’t be guaranteed.

Maybe the lesson went better than I thought. Maybe there was something interesting in it for someone. But if it did flop, it’s partly because I had planned something that didn’t match the situation–and didn’t fully realize this until the lesson was over.

So the lesson is not “don’t prepare,” but rather “don’t stake too much on your preparations” and “attend to the situation at hand.”

Otherwise this was a profoundly good day–but more about that another time, when it is not so late. There is a lot to say. At the end of the day I took part in the Holocaust memorial run–from the sugar factory to the synagogue–and then danced with many others in the evening light.

One of my favorite words in Hungarian is “bonyolult,” (“complicated, messy, intricate”), which sounds like what it means: all wound up in a bundle. According to Wiktionary, it is the past participle of bonyolul, (“to become complicated”), “an archaic verb which was formed from the bonyol- stem of bonyolít (‘to make something complicated‘).” Some linguists trace bonyolít to the Proto-Finno-Ugric *puńa (“to wind up, twist”).

The photo above (which I took on Sunday evening) expresses bonyolultság well. The stump is full of life: if you look closely, you can see leaves on some of its thin branches. The water looks dark, but in the upper left corner, there’s a hint of pink (since the camera is facing north or north-northeast, and the sunset was not yet over).

I would not say that complexity is the crowning principle of life. It goes along with certain simplicities. Complexity on its own becomes unintelligible, whereas simplicity becomes reductive. Neither one, at the exclusion of the other, can be beautiful, nor does the combination guarantee beauty. Beauty is one of the strangest things in human life: on the one hand subjective and private, and on the other, breaking out of subjectivity; on the one hand, conditioned by society, and on the other, proudly unconditioned. When you find something beautiful, you are all alone and in company, both of these purely, both at once.

This weekend I bicycled from Szolnok to Szeged–most of it on the first day, and the remaining 2-3 hours on the second. It was a glorious trip, with long stretches through fields and forests, where I saw farm animals, deer, rabbits, storks, red pheasants (?), and many trees in bloom. I had originally planned to spend the night in Csongrád, but arriving there at 3:00 in the afternoon, I decided it was too soon to stop, and headed onward to Ópusztaszer, along the Tisza. I made a reservation at a guesthouse there. I was bicycling through fields, on dirt roads, at sunset, and arrived in town shortly after dark. When I came to the guesthouse, the owner said that they were full–but when I explained that I had made a reservation and paid for it, he decided to look more closely into the situation. He took me to another nearby guesthouse, where a room was available, and we sat down at the computer together. Eventually we figured out what had happened; I had made the reservation online, but before checking his email, he had subsequently rented the room to someone else. He and the host of the other guesthouse (perhaps a married couple) apologized for the situation and offered me a room there. I happily accepted; it was a lovely, elegant bedroom with all the comfort I needed for the night. We worked this all out in Hungarian, which is nothing unusual for me now, but still rewarding, given that they were strangers and this situation was new for us all. So the takeaway might have been, “They messed up,” but the reality was far different. I was treated not only to a room, but to their helpfulness and kindness, and their willingness to look into an error.

While I was biking, a few momentous things happened in the U.S.: Robert S. Mueller released his report on his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign; the investigation also considered whether Trump had obstructed justice. While finding no evidence of collusion or conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign, Mueller explicitly refrained from drawing conclusions regarding Trump’s possible obstruction of justice.

Later (after I returned to Szolnok), Attorney General William P. Barr delivered his own summary and concluded, on his own authority, that Trump had not obstructed justice. This quickly turned into a takeaway: Trump trumpeting that he had been EXONERATED (in capital letters). This is yet another time to “take away the takeaway”: Mueller’s hesitation to draw a conclusion should not be so quickly translated into a certainty. This is out of my hands; what happens or does not happen from here will have nothing to do with me. I was about to say, “if there were ever a time to take away the takeaway, it is now,” but that is not true; there are other times, other occasions, every day. How many times do we rush to conclusions that favor or disfavor us–that confirm, in some way, what we want to think? How many times do we take a tenuous statement as absolute truth? Takeaways have their place, but they should not have the final say; they need courageous unrolling. I will write about this again soon in relation to Hamlet.

(Take Away the Takeaway was the working title for my second book, which became Mind over Memes. It is still the title of the first chapter–and of my TEDx talk, and of this blog.)

The first photo is of Ópusztaszer; the second, of a dirt road near Dóc. If you zoom in on the upper part of the second picture, you can see a jackrabbit on the road. Most of the deer and rabbits were much too fast for the camera, but this one hesitated.

Well, no, this was not the first stork, but the first I have seen in 2019. That there have been thousands before, and will be thousands more, only lifts the event; without repetition, life would be dull.