The centaur mosaic was found in the 18th century on the site of the sprawling, luxurious villa complex near Tivoli that once belonged to the Roman emperor Hadrian.
The Diet of a Man/Horse
In C. S. Lewis’s Chronicle, The Silver Chair, he describes how a centaur feeds:
“A Centaur has a man-stomach and a horse-stomach. And of course both want breakfast. So first of all he has porridge and pavenders and kidneys and bacon and omlette and cold ham and toast and marmalade and coffee and beer. And after that he tends to the horse part of himself by grazing for an hour or so and finishing up with a hot mash, some oats, and a bag of sugar. That's why it's such a serious thing to ask a Centaur to stay for the weeekend. A very serious thing indeed.”
I don’t think even Homer paid so much attention to the nutritional needs of these great beasts. Lewis goes so far as to describe the specific requirements of a man stomach and a horse stomach. Children, like centaurs, must be fed completely in their education.
Having been pushed through the factory-style education system of the 1950s and 60s, I feel like a “one size fits all” approach to learning deprived part of my being. Fortunately, I was raised by engineers (though I’ve always imagined wolves would be cooler). They provided what factory education lacked. I remember when mom took me to visit a friend of hers who was a sculptor. I left her home with a carving tool and a block of ivory soap. I made a soap-sized Sphinx. Then, for the pure heck of it, I made a tray full of sand into the Nile Valley, complete with pyramids.
It shall come as no surprise that I have come to view the nurture of young imaginations as akin to feeding centaurs.
I see it in our homeschool students. They certainly need to master the grammar and mathematical skills needed for further discovery — they don’t need to be force-fed volumes of facts. They need to learn how to learn.
My granddaughters go to St. George Classical School. If you are not familiar with this type of learning, you’re probably thinking “they learn Latin.” Yes, they do.
But their day is full of so much more. They play guitar, put on plays, do wonderful exploration into the visual arts. They learn martial arts. They learn in the grazing manner of a centaur. They are nurtured in a small community that feels like a family, body, soul, and spirit (do humans actually possess THREE stomachs)?
The ‘grammar’ they learn seems directed towards preparing students for further exploration and growth. The enriching activities — well, it seems like some of what I experienced in the freedom of summer has infiltrated the curriculum.
Dangerous Drosselmyers
I’m privileged to have been party to such activities as building a model of a French château, making and performing shadow puppets, and numerous other activities — all directed by the unfettered creativity of young hearts!
Children need relatives who bring enchanted gifts. By that I mean those enchanted gifts that feed their imaginations and their creative impulses.
They need to be given the tools, then they need to bang their thumbs.
One of my most prized possessions is my father’s hammer. I still use it to hang the occasional picture, but it doesn’t go out to projects anymore. It is too precious, for it represents the passing of a torch.
I learned how to drive a nail with that hammer. I learned what happens when you hit your thumbnail full force with it (fortunately I was eleven and couldn’t hit that hard). It was the tool. It opened up a world of learning for me. Just a few years later, I built a greenhouse.
Parthenon Metope south XXVII, Centaur and Lapith — British Museum