The title of this blog is an allusion to many things.
There’s Sir Guyon, the Knight of Temperance in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene. Temperance a fruit of the Holy Spirit, so it’s a gift from God. But the practice of temperance is connected to Aristotle’s idea of the Golden Mean, that virtue lies between two opposite vices.
It recalls the mixture of the four humours (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm) which create a person’s temperament.
My youngest son reminds me that it also refers to steel and the hardship it must endure in order to be both firm and flexible.
But it’s primarily an allusion to J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Northrop Frye’s Well-Tempered Critic. In this sense, “well-tempered” means that rather than being tuned to a specific musical key or being a specialist in one branch of literature, the musical instrument is able to perform reasonably well in any key, and the literary critic has knowledge across all the fields of literary scholarship and is able to see the big picture, how all literature relates to the world of literature. I love many things and I’ve never managed to specialize in anything, but I hope that my devotion to so many different fields of life — music, nature, stories, liturgy, history, nutrition, even fashion — will help me be like the well-tempered clavichord, able to “perform” reasonably well in any circumstance life throws at me, and like the well-tempered critic, able to see the big picture of Life.
To be well-tempered in all these senses is a goal that I’m reaching for, not something I’ve arrived at. I invite you all to travel this path with me.
I am a veteran homeschool mom of seven and the wife of a retired Air Force sergeant. I have a life-long love of music, nature, stories, and tradition, and believe they are all intimately connected. I’ve been teaching literature and Medieval and Renaissance cosmology to teens and adults in local co-ops and online classes since 2015.