The Great Conversation: M.F.K. Fisher and the Material World
Posted on 10/21/2025
By Nicolás Alvarado, Head of Lower School
Not long ago I went home from school with a bad cold and took to my bed. After a few hours of sleep, the only thing that sounded good to me was a few more pages of M.F.K. Fisher’s Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me, a collection of journals from the writer of whom W.H. Auden said in 1963, “I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose.”
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher lived her storied life and wrote it down in sentences so brisk and clean that taking them in feels like drinking a tall glass of ice water with lemon.
She writes:
It is cold today. The mountains are near and high.
And:
In the gardens under the plane trees I bought a ham sandwich and sat on a chair eating it and watching some little boys sail their boats across the pond.
And:
I sit in a low chair by a good fire. I wear soft black velvet pajamas with green on the neck and sleeves, and my nails are stained green from painting this house. It is the Parrishes’ beach house, and we are cleaning it and earning $30. Today we painted hard until late afternoon. Then a rainstorm blew in on it all and floated the paint right off the railings.
This is writing that doesn’t need to make a case for itself. In narrating her days plainly, truthfully, in all their dailiness (and sometimes in all their bracing awfulness—fair warning: it can be an upsetting book, not one for the faint of heart), she gets right into the heart of life.
But what strikes me now is less the excellence of the prose—and it is excellent, even as it gives us an author writing in her most casual and intimate mode—and more the distance between her world and ours.
M.F.K. Fisher lived in a material world. It was a world made of earth, peaches, oysters, yeast; of cloth and metal and wood and paper. Life took the time that it took. There were long stretches of quiet, of stillness, of boredom, with no entertainment available at the touch of a button. Except for those times one was transported through books, radio, film, dream, one was inescapably in the reality of one’s body, one’s life. Her journals from the 1930s are not that far from us in time, but they could as well be from the 1730s in how they give an unmediated feeling of what it is to be alive in the world.
In the Thirties it would have been a strange person indeed who spent seven-and-a-half hours a day in the same physical space as everyone in the room while engaged in a wildly divergent non-physical mediated world. But that is the number of hours, according to the American Child Psychiatry Association, that young people now spend on screens each day.
It is worth repeating and contemplating that statistic. The average child. Seven and one-half hours. On screens. Every day.
We are fortunate to have our students with us in a low-tech environment for fully a third of the day. And so many of our students go home to play outside, to do homework on paper, to help cook dinner with their families, to read real books. So many of our students are not, in fact, “the average child.” But beyond our walls the fact remains that many children today are coming of age with an entirely different sense of what it is to inhabit a human body in the physical realm. Their world is one both of remove and of instantaneity: events on screens happen when one wants them to happen, events expertly designed to capture a child’s attention and imagination. It’s a world in which faraway people are alive before them—not warm to the touch, exactly, but immediate, on-call, the impossible distances of the physical world collapsed. And a world in which one can always turn away from the mundanities of real life (chores, walks, garden beds, other human beings) to find something more stimulating, more immediately thrilling near to hand. A world in which boredom can (must!) always be kept at bay with devices.
We share this world with our students, but we at least have a memory of something more like M.F.K. Fisher’s world. They have no such memories.
We don’t yet know the ramifications of this profound shift in the experience of living. What we know is that it is a different experience from that of the human beings who came before us. And we have a pretty good sense that it isn’t making us happier and healthier.
What is the role of education amid all this? What can and should schools do?
If we believe (and it is safe to assume that at MacLaren, we do) that the experience of being human is an embodied experience—an encounter of the world that takes place, first, through our senses—then it seems self-evident that part of our task is to recall our students to themselves, to the physical reality of existence. We must, in other words, bring our students to their senses.
This is easier said than done. But we start by immersing them in the real for as much time as we can. Hence: no phones and very few screens in school. Hence: books made of paper and glue. Hence: wooden desks and wooden pencils and playgrounds made of metal and wood.
And we proceed by giving them games, language, paintings, songs. The great What Is of science and the arresting What Was of history. Maps and equations. Investigations and attempts. We give them endless opportunities to look and listen, and perhaps, to see and hear. We return their attention to that which is right in front of them, and teach them to attend to it. (Attend: from the Latin ad, “to or toward” + tendere, “to stretch.”)
None of this happens quickly. It is infinitely harder to learn to write well with pencil and paper than it is to swipe at a shiny screen. Making a playlist on Spotify takes mere minutes; learning to pick apart the structure of a melody and recreate it with your singular human voice takes years of effort and practice. The slow, difficult work of translating the code of print into sentences in the mind, and those sentences into the waking dream of a novel—this is not the passive experience of watching the latest Marvel movie.
But this work is rich and good, like earth, peaches, oysters, and yeast. It is lasting like the mountains, so near and high.
On September 19, 1934, M.F.K Fisher wrote this in her journal:
Now I am in our house. We have lived in it ten days and nights, and we are very happy in it. It is a good peaceful little house. We grew tired before we finished painting, even with much help from the Parrishes. And after the Sunday we moved—on a truck from the News office, with Harrison’s help—we were quite numb and incoherent. For several nights we slept like stones in our new beds. Now we are wide awake again.
With the soporific numbing aid of technology, children are at risk of sleeping like stones in the face of the world: its beauty, its sorrows, its physical being and coming-into-being. We need them wide awake, and here.