Learning To Learn


When James settled in to the bed they had given him to use, that
night, his head was spinning with all that he had learned that day,
much of which was not anything he had been taught by the old, now
younger man. He had, by dint of close listening, finally heard the
woman, whom he assumed to be Battie, as it was the only name the man
had mentioned aside from James, refer to the man as Barry. It seemed
an odd set of names to him, and told him nothing of where he was nor
when he was.

In all that he had learned, he still knew nothing of where the closest
town was, nor even what country or nation he was in, nor what time
period. Yet he had learned much that was useful to him, not the least
of which was that magic was real here, and that he could do it! No,
not quite, he corrected himself. He had learned that magic was real by
personal experience, but had only been told that he could do it, that
he could learn it. He had not yet experienced that himself. He had
learned other things, though, such as that while he had been
apparently de-aged, he had not lost any of his knowledge, and while
his emotions were perhaps a bit closer to the surface, he did not
really feel like a child in spite of his form. His experience and
memories were still his, he still knew about computers and chemistry,
physics and history.

The man's teaching had not been quite so interesting, mostly being
about the philosophy of magic, the pitfalls and side alleys that could
lead one astray, and how to meditate and focus to build his mental
stamina and willpower to eventually be able to harness magic. He
rather felt as he had after his first philosophy class in college,
taken to fulfill a humanities requirement, in which he had thought
that many things were claimed without sufficient evidence.

Still, the bit about focusing on the difference between things he was
taught, and things he had learned was useful, and the time spent
coming up with ways to test things in answer to Barry's unending
stream of questions had seemed like good and useful practice.

"When someone tells you that you should never touch a certain object,
because it will burn you," Barry had explained, "as a child you may
not listen, and touch it anyway. And if the person was telling the
truth, you might learn a valuable lesson, and listen the next time.
What if they lied? Or what if what they said was true sometimes, and
not others? You might have learned quite a different lesson."

"Knowledge that someone else gives you, whether by words, or example,
or writing, or song, or in any other way, can be useful, or it can be
dangerous. An army that has a lazy scout who wanders off and then
returns with tales of clear riding ahead may find itself in an ambush.
The important lesson for you to learn, and one you will have to teach
yourself, like that child, is that the only knowledge you can ever
really trust is that which you gain yourself, and even that may
sometimes be in doubt."

"The wise man knows this, but knows too that sometimes the thing
warned off may not suffer a test gladly. When a man tells you not to
wake a sleeping giant, taking the child's course may be the last thing
you do. Such is the act of a fool. The wise man considers the words,
and determines for himself how to test such a thing, so that he gains
the knowledge for himself, and knows the truth of it, without risking
his life."

James was not at all sure that he agreed with what Barry was teaching
him. After all, was not the power and height of science due in large
part to scientists building on each others work? Sure, they tested and
replicated, and in the aggregate, this weeded out error, but no
individual scientist could possibly test everything for himself, and
if he insisted on doing so, then he would progress no further than one
man could in a lifetime. Standing on the shoulders of giants was a
metaphor, to be sure, but it was a very strong one, in his opinion,
and he was not much inclined to give up all the lessons of science.
Particularly since one of the more pointed lessons therein was of the
various biases that plagued the human mind, and how any person,
scientist or otherwise, could be led astray by them, and convince
themselves that the outcome of their experiments was telling them what
they wanted to hear.

Of course, though the words ran smoothly in his memory, they had not
been free from interruptions. His mind was still his own, but his
patience and attention span were those of a child now, something he
had struggled with. For a man who frowned and glared as much as Barry,
he had exhibited a remarkable patience, though James had often wished
Barry would give up and stomp off to leave him be.

He had not, whatever James might have preferred, and had instead
pestered James with scenarios, not in a constant stream, like a test,
but peppering them here and there suddenly amongst his explanations of
magic, and of meditation, and of logic.

He would be speaking of mental focus, and then suddenly demand, "A
cook has told you never to place a brick on a pot lid when the pot is
on a fire, how do you determine if this is good advice?"

That James had learned of Alexander Watt and the steam engine in
school impressed the man not one whit, and he insisted that James
concoct a scenario of his own for testing the cook's assertion.

The same had gone for many childhood lessons, teachings that James had
accepted or tested with a child's naivete before, but was now required
to find a wiser method of verifying. Looking back now, as the darkness
filled the home, tempered only by the light of the fire, for he was on
a bed, more of a cot really, though with his frame that was no
problem, in the same large room he had first entered, while the other
two had gone into another room and shut the door, he found that the
questioning had served two purposes. Not only was he being taught
something Barry seemed to think was critical to his ever making it
home, the random nature of the questions' timing now seemed to him to
have been a way of focusing his child-like attention span, keeping him
thinking instead of dozing off or tuning Barry out.

It had been surprisingly effective, and even now he found himself
devising little experiments in his head. How would one test whether it
was safe to wake a sleeping giant? One easy way would be to pay a fool
to do the job, while observing from a safe distance, but how would one
know a safe distance? Perhaps one could pay a fool, and pay another to
watch and report the results.

He mused over experiments he remembered from history, and from the
chemistry lectures. It was odd, he thought as he finally settled down
and drifted off, that it was a magician that was teaching him about
what was surely just another way of wording the scientific method?

---

James awoke early the next morning, though he was not happy about it.
Having gone from evening shadows to the noon-day sun, yesterday had
been nearly thirty hours of continuous activity, and he had been
desperately glad to get to bed the night before. Unfortunately for his
deep desire to sleep in, being situated in the main room of the house
meant that he awoke when the house did, rising bleary eyed to the
smells of eggs and fat in a pan, though there was no sizzle of bacon
to go with them, and to the sounds of movement and speech.

"Come, young fellow, time to rise," Barry called to him, "you've no
time for lying abed. Up, up, and sit and think and puzzle for a
moment, to get your mind awake while the food is readied."

James pushed himself up reluctantly, and slid his feet out of the bed,
looking down at the odd pajamas he wore, which he vaguely remembered
being chivvied into the night before. They had not buttons, exactly,
but rather loops of cord sewn to either side, that a second cord was
passed through and tied off, to hold them together. Likewise the
bottoms were held on by a bit of cord, and as he sat up, Battie swept
by, dropping a shirt and trousers on the bed for him made of similar
design, and he blushed furiously as he hurried through changing,
wondering where his own clothes had wandered, and when he would see
them again.

This time he helped Barry pull the table out and they soon sat to
breakfast, which again was consumed in utter silence, with no Grace
before meals, nor any sort of blessing asked nor thanks given. He
thought Barry was about to speak when all had been eaten, when the man
suddenly paused and looked towards the wall James had guessed to be
the front of the house. A clattering was heard outside, and then
repeated twice more, and Barry rose and walked to the door, opening it
just as a large man stepped inside.

This new figure impressed James instantly with sheer size of his arms,
which were thickly muscled. His chest was broad though his shirt was
loose upon it, unlike the bodybuilders from James' world that he
otherwise rather resembled. His legs were large but did not look so
massive, though again the trousers were baggy, making James suddenly
realize and feel glad that whenever and wherever he was, he was in a
time in which men wore pants and not tights.

The tall, broad shouldered man had a thick shock of black hair flecked
with what looked like wood chips to James, thick leather boots, and a
deep voice when he spoke to Barry. His words taught James something
new, something he had not realized. There was no possible way the man
could have known or been told to speak English, and no reason why he
should have been, so when James understood him perfectly, he finally
realized that Barry and Battie were not speaking English either, that
Barry had somehow magically produced some sort of translation effect.
The moment he realized that, James suddenly found that he could hear
faintly beneath their speech the same unfamiliar tones Battie had
first spoken to him.

"Well met, Master Barry, how are you and the Missus?" the man had
said, and James had missed a bit of back and forth in his startled
understanding, before he finally managed to pay attention in time to
see Barry hand over a few coins to the man, while Battie handed him
something wrapped in a patterned cloth.

He rolled his head about on his shoulders, cracking his neck, before
clasping Barry's arm and then striding out again, Barry closing the
door behind him. Barry returned to the table and the two quickly
cleared it off and James aided him in moving it aside again.

Now finally came the test that James had thought about the day before,
as Barry asked each of the questions he had previously asked,
demanding a new and different way to test each one. James found some
of the challenges easy enough, as he had been thinking of them the
night before prior to falling asleep. Others were not so easy.

Doing the brick experiment over an open fire in a field where he could
get quickly behind a hedge had been his easy answer to the boiling pot
issue the first time, the second time he found a bit tougher. It was a
pretty simple situation, after all, and the test was obvious enough.
How else could one do it? He considered offering the idea to pay a
fool to do it, as with the sleeping Giant thought experiment from the
night before, but realized in time that it was substantially no
different from doing it himself if he observed the test, and if he
went with his second thought, of using a fool to observe, he would
have completely failed the task. The whole point was to test the
veracity of something one had been informed about by a theoretically
knowledgeable person; relying instead on the word of a fool was
certainly a step down from that.

It took a bit of cogitating, but he finally hit upon the idea of
taking a step back from it, and demonstrating it from a different
angle, that would satisfy himself by validating his hypothesis of the
reason for the prohibition, without actually testing it directly. So
he suggested that using a pot with a single hole and allowing the
escaping steam to inflate a bag until it burst would safely
demonstrate the effect without endangering him, or destroying the pot,
which would have been the result of his first test.

Barry never seemed inclined to tell him whether his ideas were right
or wrong, or whether they would actually work. He simply did not move
on to a new topic until he had heard something that satisfied him, and
James did not as yet know what about his answers was or was not
satisfactory, aside from that Barry seemed to somehow know the
difference between his offering an experiment that differed only
slightly from something he remembered reading about, and when he had
come up with something entirely his own, for those were the only ones
that gained a brief smile before his usual dour look returned.

Lunch was again a silent affair, and after lunch they resumed lessons,
which seemed a bit odd to James. While he had never personally lived
in a country house, or on a farm, he had read Little House on the
Prairie and similar books, and was fairly certain that there was
pretty much always something to be done, yet here was Barry taking an
entire day out just to teach him? Perhaps the large man was only one
of many servants that took care of the place? It certainly did not
seem large enough to be a manor house of any sort, and he had not seen
any other homes nearby. Though of course that merely brought up the
question of where then the large man had come from?

He did not have long to ponder this, of course, since Barry had moved
pretty directly into lecturing after the table had been put away from
lunch, and he was quick to notice James' mind wandering, and spring
another of his surprise tests on James. Things went on in this fashion
for the remainder of the afternoon, leaving James a bit weary of all
the talking and thinking, and wishing he could sit alone and listen to
music for a bit and not have to think at all.

Sitting idly was not on Barry's program, however, and he was instead
given a book to read. It was in surprisingly good condition for being
stored in a house where the modern convenience of air conditioning was
absent - or at least, James had at no time noticed the sudden cool
breeze and distant thrum of an air conditioner kicking in, though the
temperature in the house was not at all unpleasant.

The book was bound between wooden plates, carved and inlaid with gold
leaf, and when he opened it, James once again had the uneasy
realization that he was reading a totally foreign language and
comprehending it as though it was English. He could only hope that
whatever was translating for him was not as apt to confusing results
as the online translators with which he was more familiar. The words
on the page were hand-written, as best as he could tell, and it was
what he thought was a luminous manuscript, which he was vaguely aware
was not quite the right term, but he could not think of the right word
for it, but it was the sort of work that if found in a major library,
would certainly be an historic curiosity, and one which would require
the utmost care in handling lest its fragile leaves be further damaged.

The story it told drew him in quickly, and he soon forgot his thoughts
about the book's provenance in his eagerness to read more. It was, he
vaguely realized, a learning text, teaching him about the magic system
here, but it was doing so in the form of a story about an apprentice
to a great mage, a situation that rather well matched the one he found
himself in.

Here and there bald-faced statements were made, and after merely a
full day, between this morning and the previous evening, he found
himself noting them for later devising of tests to verify their
accuracy. Regardless, the overall theory presented fit fairly well
with the philosophy of magic that Barry had explained, one which did
away with many of the objections he had previously harbored regarding
magic in various fantasy fiction he had encountered.

It was more, he thought, the magic of a Merlin than a fantasy wizard,
more in the person than the props, as it were, though as a philosophy
it explained some of the underpinnings that might lead to props.
Humans have muscle memory, a memory that allowed physical movements to
be improved and near-perfected by sufficient practice, as in the
ability of a musician to play without needing to consciously consider
the fingering of each note, or an accomplished typist to type at high
speed without needing to look at the keyboard to find each key. Magic
was fundamentally a mental art, but when paired with learned and
trained muscle memory, it could gain benefits in terms of speed and
precision, and especially repeatability.

In a similar vein, the child in the story learned of mantras and their
use, the idea that learning repeated phrases could condition the mind
for meditation and focus. This instantly brought to James' mind the
image of the nuns that ran the Catholic school he had grown up near,
and how often he would see them walking as he passed, Rosary beads
clicking in their fingers as they murmured prayers even as they were
guiding children, or cleaning up after them.

He almost lost the thread of the story entirely when he ran into a bit
where the child pushed too far ahead and animated a broom to perform
his own chores. The following sequence was so familiar that it took
some time before the child in the story lost the appearance of the
mouse famously depicted in another tale of an apprentice.

Pushing past that, he moved on into detailed descriptions of the
exercises the child learned, and found himself eager to try them, and
curiously wondering when he would learn from his own experience that
he could perform magic, and not have to rely on Barry's statement that
he could.

He had read the third such exercise when he was brought from his
focused reading by Barry's hand, interposed between the book and his
eyes. "Time to eat. A mind works better when the body has what it
needs, though never faster than when what it needs is beyond grasp."

James carefully laid the book aside and once more entered the simple
routine of the meal. None of the meals so far had been very different.
All had involved various things cooked together, more or less
resembling a stew or sometimes more like a stir fry, depending on the
ingredients, and all had been accompanied by a simple loaf of black
bread.

After dinner, James was permitted to return to his reading, though
that was soon made impossible by the approaching darkness, as he was
reminded once more, being more aware this evening, of the absence of
any electric lighting in the house. As he once more changed into
simple night clothes, he wondered again at the strange contradictions.
If these two were in fact so powerful in magic as their de-aging of
him and themselves and Barry's retailoring of his clothes indicated,
why did they not have equivalents of modern conveniences, like
lighting at night? He had not even seen a candle as yet, nothing other
than the fire itself. And why did they live so simply?

He had no frame of reference to judge what a wielder of magic ought to
be like aside from the fiction from his own world, but the man and his
wife did not seem to fit them very well. With the magic they
demonstrated already he could not believe that they lived this life
out of necessity, and he wondered what their reasons might be as he
once more drifted off to sleep.