The devil, the details, and the leopard's spots
Paul Klee - Around the Fish - 1926
A surprising—if not shocking—fact of history (if confirmed) is that the cliche idiom, “The devil is in the details,” as we know it in English, dates to the 1990s.1 “No way!” said I to myself upon reading this. The idiom has the feel of antiquity about it, like Ring Around the Rosy, which, it turns out, may be subject to “a false folk etymology”.
One of the more salient memories I retain from high school was of a particular day in history class when it became all too clear that the teacher had already given precisely the same monotone history lecture, in the same bored tone, two or three times that day. Likewise, he had given the same lecture, or so it seemed, at least a hundred times before. It would have been more efficient, I thought, had he recorded the first of such on a tape recorder and read that day’s newspaper as his students listened to it. History was not alive for him, and so it wasn’t much alive for his students. We were just there to remember the Important Dates and the Important People who did the Important Things of history. He taught for the exam. And we learned for the exam. And that was the unconscious Wittgensteinian language game we played together. The meaninglessness of it all was context dependent. The idea was to remove the concrete particulars—the details—of a place and time, reducing that place and time to pure, airless, almost geometrical mnemonic abstractions. I can remember nothing other than his monotonous tone and the subtle but potent sense that the room was airless and its inhabitants (myself included) barely alive. I had yet to learn the courage to walk out of class so I could dance madly out on the manicured turf outside, or stand up on the desktop to loudly quote Whitman. “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
I wonder now what would have happened to me if John Keating had been our teacher instead. He may have stood atop his desk and begun in a sonorous tone with “On Monday, June 27th, 1853, a giant sequoia was felled by a band of gold-rush speculators in Calaveras county, California. It took these men three weeks to cut through the base of the 300ft-tall, 1,244-year-old tree, but finally it fell to the forest floor with a whoosh and a boom.”
….
“A portion of the bark from the "Mammoth Tree", as newspapers called it, had already been removed and was sent to San Francisco to be put on display.”
He might have shared this image with us.
Or this one.
But we would have been presented with another perspective on history, one less focused on men, deeds (wars and battles mainly) and dates and one which included more inquiry into how it is we came to be a culture which would cut down such a tree in order to celebrate it. He might have asked, “Or, rather, perhaps it was not the tree that these men were celebrating, but their own mastery over the natural world.” But Keating would have had us ponder the details as well as the grander picture—together, as a whole. He would have encouraged us to make the story personal, even sensuous, not abstract. He might have taken us out of the classroom onto the forest trail. He might have had us smell the vanilla-like scent on the ponderosa pines. He would likely have had us take up handfuls of forest soil to smell, too.
"When I study history,” he would have said, “I like to get up close to the thing and examine the minutia, the fine-grained details. And then I like to zoom out as if I’m on a rocket to the moon, looking down upon the Earth as if I were on Apollo 11.”
“The devil is in the details,” he would have said. “The important thing is the return trip.”
Likely, some of the ancient Greeks had an idiom which meant something very similar to the idiom concerning the devil and the details. I don’t know. My interest in history is geared toward accuracy, honesty, understanding and appropriate detail. I strive to see both the forest and the trees. But, for me, the understanding of history serves the understanding of the present. I doubt I can understand one without understanding the other.
The idiom which has it that “a leopard cannot change its spots” has a variant in the Bible. But it appeared in the Bible only after the ancient Greeks had been saying this for a while. (Were there leopards in ancient Greece? Perhaps it was some other animal in their case.)
So why, then, is understanding the present, in context with history, important and valuable? As I see it, the answer to this question contradicts the essential meaning of the idiom about leopards, in that I take it as a given that a culture can change its spots. It can transform. Maybe some people will never change, but a culture can. And cultures have. Indeed, cultures are always changing, and have always changed over time.
But I must go a step further here and suggest—as it is my view—that cultures can transform deliberately, as ours must (if we wish to preserve and protect that which deserves to be preserved and protected).
Standing on the desk
Standing on the desk, as Keating says explicitly in the book, symbolizes seeing the world from another point of view; that is, challenging traditional ideas and stereotypes in order to be free. - from Standing on the Desk Symbol in Dead Poets Society | LitCharts
Cultures begin to transform when individuals begin to stand on the desk—together. Such transformation depends on our standing on desks as individuals—together. That is, we must be willing to risk such awkward perspective shifts together, whether or not this occurs in a classroom. If habits of thought, perception and belief are the essence (prima materia), of culture, cultures can undergo transformation only when we take such a journey of discovery. Understanding history, I would say, is a crucially important feature of such discovery. Personal psychology may sometimes have us ask “How did I get here?”, but cultural history asks “How did we get here?”
It was for such an inquiry that The Heron House was born.
— To be continued in part 2 of The devil, the details, and the leopard's spots
Further research suggests a slightly earlier origin. The devil is in the details - Wikipedia
Standing on the desk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzhkyK_V7Gc