A Jacaranda Paradise

The last week in May and first week in June are the prettiest time of year in Los Angeles. The jacaranda trees are in bloom and life just seems to sing. Last week I watched and waited; the flowers were unfurling on the branches above in their luminous purple but somehow the trees didn’t quite seem fully clothed. Yesterday morning, as we ambled out with the dog, I looked up and all was right with the world; the foliage was verdant and thick and the flowers glowed in their fullness. Paradise has come to play briefly in LA and I’m reminded of the beautiful garden scenes in Oscar Wilde’s tale of The Selfish Giant.

I’m pulled under by the eternal current of retrospection whenever these magnificent trees appear in all of their colour. I first truly saw them when we moved up to Los Angeles from Orange County. It’s been four years now that we’ve spent in this decaying city. It manages to hold my heart yet, as if the shimmering lights of those angels can still be felt amidst all the rotting squalor. 

This past year has been one of the strangest that I can remember. Separated from those dearest to us overseas I catch myself existing blindly as if on an alien planet; seeing my way feelingly as it were. However it has also been a time of powerful change and personal restoration. I suppose I’m learning to live with the fact that both of these readings of experience can be true simultaneously.

In the midst of the Covid chaos we’ve created a landscape of learning centred around truth and beauty at home for our children. Our elder, finally freed from the stupefying shackles of American education is soaring on the wings of his untrammeled intellect. I blink, and the boy he once was is standing in the doorway of adult life. My deep fear that, in our move across the Atlantic, we had somehow shrunk the extent of his potential has joyfully evaporated. After a year of self directed study, with a little input from online tutors and his old Classics teacher mother he is exactly where he should be. A further two years of A Level study and he will fly the nest. Praise be to the uncertain world which forced me to screw my courage to the sticking place and act upon the truth which had been self evident for quite some time; if you are determined to ensure your child’s moral and personal success, a curated home education is as good a place as any to start. 

As I turn the pages of my planner and reflect upon the progress our six year old daughter has made this past year I take a breath and smile at how right we were to magic up a teaching room on the ground floor of our home. The fire of learning burns brightly and I have watched entranced as her natural attentiveness and quiet studiousness have blossomed.  I find myself looking towards the past more and more these days; devising and dreaming of ways to marry it with the present. If a child fifty or one hundred or five hundred years ago could do such and such then that is a goal which I will bring out today and plan to achieve. Why should we accept the limits which our dreadful modernity seeks to impose upon minds as bright and eager to learn and absorb knowledge as they ever were?

I have recently fallen in love with the conversations of Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) an extraordinary French music teacher. She taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the twentieth century and is in fact one of the most important figures of the musical heritage of the French Conservatory. Her thoughts on many topics, particularly on the subject of virtuous behaviour, she was a devout Catholic, resonate at a frequency I don’t often find outside of Buddhist texts. The acuity of her understanding of children is remarkable. I will quote a paragraph here to give some sense of her train of thought. This is taken from a conversation on the topic of craftsmanship, on the specific point of teaching:

‘The only thing I can do for my pupils is to put at their fingertips the liberty that knowledge gives of the means of self-expression; it is to lead them by an established process, by an imposed discipline to retrieve the essentials of language. 

I believe that a man is made of all that comes before him. In Mozart’s life there was the marvellous presence of his father, so unjustly judged, who gained him so many years by his support and strictness. Loving a child doesn’t mean to give in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult. Leopold Mozart taught his son to overcome the impossible. He didn’t ask more than he was capable of, but then his son could do everything.’ *

As this academic year saunters towards its summer finale with insouciance, I’m already looking forward to the next. It feels a little as though we’ve finally embarked upon a great adventure that has been calling us for some time now. We’ve climbed aboard the boat and cast off from the moorings and who knows where the future will take us. Wherever it does we will be steadfast in our endeavour to do all that we are capable of. It is, after all, only by working with all that we are for that which sustains us that we can experience true contentment. 

• Extract from ‘Mademoiselle, Conversations with Nadia Boulanger’ by Bruno Monsaingeon