Finding the Education for Your Vocation with the Hornstra Sisters

The Literary Life Podcast

Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks welcome back Addison and Ella Hornstra for an update on their evolving literary lives and educational journeys. The sisters discuss

Key takeaways

• Education should be tailored to one's vocation rather than following conventional academic paths.
• Learning foreign languages deepens reading comprehension and transforms how literature is experienced in English.

Main topics

• Vocational education
• Language learning and reading

Notable quotes

"We don't tell ghost stories to make ourselves scared. It's actually exactly the opposite—that we tell them to give ourselves courage."

Conclusion

Addison and Ella Hornstra exemplify a lifelong, vocation-driven approa

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:18) This is not just another Book Chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading well. Explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week, we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone, because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever-unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is The Literary Life Podcast. Speaker 2 (1:28) Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford, and here with me, as always, is the man behind the mystery, the mysterious Mr. Banks. Speaker 1 (1:37) Hello, hello. Speaker 2 (1:38) See? See how mysterious that is? I don't even know who you are. It's a mystery. Speaker 1 (1:44) Today, Speaker 2 (1:45) we have a fun episode. We have the updated literary lives of Addison and Ella Hornstra. You might recognize their names. They've been around a lot. They both now work and teach at House of Humane Letters with Mr. Banks and I. Ella teaches Fundamentals of Latin. She is director of the House of Humane Letters Tutoring Center, which is something we're quite proud of. This is our free, completely free tutoring center for our students because we want them to feel very supported and we want our language students to succeed. So she directs that. Both Ella and Addison are TAs in the HHL fellowship that I run. Addison is also an Anglo-Saxon tutor and the TA in the Anglo-Saxon class. Both of them, I'm sure you've seen, right? You've been around the website. You get the newsletter. You know they're everywhere. Both of them teach. webinars and mini classes for us. Addison is probably most known at this point for her Lewis Carroll webinar and mini class and when she blew our minds and showed us that everything we thought we knew about Lewis Carroll was wrong and we don't know how to read the Alice books, but now we do. And Ella's probably best known for her series on on nature, understanding the grammar of the natural world. And that grew into a full grammar of the natural world mini class. It grew into a Shakespeare in nature class, all kinds of fun stuff from both of them. They also... have both been on the podcast. Ella was on last year about this time, where she helped us go through Brave New World. And Addison is going to be on the very next book we do. She is going to lead us through Lilith. Yay, I'm excited for Speaker 4 (3:27) that one. She says Speaker 2 (3:27) Lilith is just George McDonald's through the looking glass. So welcome, Addison and Ella. Speaker 3 (3:34) Thank you. We're very excited to be here. Got a reputation to uphold now. Since you're twins, Speaker 2 (3:40) okay, so here's how we're going to help people to distinguish your voices. Say hi and say your name and we'll do your voices. Speaker 4 (3:47) Hi, I am Addison Hornstra. This is my voice. And I'm Ella. This Speaker 3 (3:52) is Speaker 4 (3:52) my voice. They sound very similar, so if you can't tell us apart by audio, you are not alone. Speaker 2 (3:57) We also can't tell you apart by video, so there you go. Speaker 1 (4:01) It makes it more surreal and interesting. Speaker 2 (4:03) Maybe I should have called y'all Speaker 4 (4:04) the Speaker 2 (4:04) Mysterious Twin Sisters. Who is who? No one knows. Who is who? No one knows. All right. Before we jump in, though, since all of us teach and work at the House of Humane Letters, which is our day job and which is the business that allows this podcast to be not only free, but advertisement free, we'll tell you what we've got going on in our classes at House of Humane Letters. So we've got a lot of... good stuff coming up this fall. Mr. Banks, on September 30th, you have a webinar coming out entitled Bunyan's Progress, The Life and Genius of an English Puritan. Tell us about that. Speaker 1 (4:40) So it's going to be kind of a primer on John Bunyan and, of course, his most famous book, Pilgrim's Progress. But I'm also going to make a point to try to reveal some of the excellences of Pilgrim's Progress by reference to some of his other and perhaps deservedly lesser known books. So we'll go into both the Bunyan you know and the Bunyan you probably have never heard of. Speaker 2 (5:07) Nice. I am really looking forward to this webinar. You have really, you have had your nose in a Bunyan book. For several months now. And actually, the idea for this webinar came about because you were just reading all this Bunyan stuff for fun. And you kept giving me like these little mini lectures in the morning. I was like, this is so good. You have to share this. This should be a webinar. And it is. Speaker 3 (5:28) Yeah. Speaker 1 (5:28) Yeah. Speaker 2 (5:29) And then in October. Addison has a much anticipated webinar. We have been talking about this for well over a year. And I'm finally excited. I'm so excited it's finally happening on October 29th. That's right. It's Halloween. Addison is going to give a webinar called Prisoners of Time. Why reading ghost stories matter. And I'm going to let you tell a little bit about this. But just this morning, you and I were chatting about this. I said, it seems to me it's the same sort of thing that I did with the Edgar Allan Poe webinar last year, where I showed people that it's not just stories to make you scared. There's something deeper going on. And when I said that, you said about ghost stories. Speaker 4 (6:13) Oh, what did I say exactly? Oh, right. That they're not, we don't tell ghost stories to make ourselves scared. It's actually exactly the opposite. that we tell ghost stories to give ourselves courage. And so part of this webinar will not just be a little bit of a history of the English ghost story, but really a deep dive into the question of why is there a tradition of telling ghost stories? And why is it important in terms of our whole literary tradition? And part of that will be my crazy theory that I've held for a long time, that the ghost stories are really the second half of detective stories and how the two work together. So... Speaker 2 (6:51) Oh, okay. You had me at second half of detective story. No, this is fascinating. And I think it's one of those things where bringing in the literary tradition is going to help us to understand because there's so many things that are highly symbolic and a little confusing for us in our rational modernist minds. But when it comes to ghost stories, I think we just assume it's. An unhealthy fascination with death. It's an attempt to scare us. It's maybe even an ungodly obsession with death. It's the Speaker 4 (7:21) thrill of adrenaline that we all want to be scared. I think really for me, one of the biggest pieces was seeing that the East, Eastern literature has an entire tradition of ghost stories. And then that. leads us all to ask the question, why is it an almost universal tradition? There must be something that is going to be expressed in these stories that we don't understand anymore. Absolutely. Oh, Speaker 2 (7:41) I am very, very sorry. I said, I'm very excited about yours, Mr. Banks. And I said, I'm very, very about her. So no offense. But yeah, I know I do find ghost stories more interesting than John Bunyan. I will be at all of these. OK, maybe the ghost of John Bunyan. That could that could interest me. And then in November. Addison's lovely twin sister, Ella, November 19th, will be doing a webinar on sacred numbers, the symbolism of numbers. And we kind of... We didn't kind of. We got into this in the second Harry Potter class I taught when I explained what she was, what Rowling is trying to do with Arithmancy and sacred numbers. And there was such an enormous interest in sacred numbers after that, that we decided we'd go ahead and do a whole webinar. So Ella, tell us a little bit about your interest in sacred numbers and what someone can expect to learn in this webinar. Speaker 3 (8:29) So my interest in sacred numbers, of course, began where a lot of my interests did, and that is in medieval cosmology. And that is the subject also which kind of spurred on the series of classes we've had on symbolism and nature and the grammar of the natural world, which is relearning how to understand the natural world symbolically in the way that all previous centuries have done up until our modern day. And math and numbers are a big part of that. And they are one of these subjects that has been emptied of its former significance and kind of reduced to the empirical. And so we'll be talking a little bit about the old way that numbers were read. And maybe, maybe numbers were closer to magic than they are now. Speaker 2 (9:20) Ooh, I like, okay, well. Now I'm very, very, very, look, look, we're just building here. I'm very, very, very excited about sacred numbers. Yes, we might find out that our interest in numbers primarily being pragmatic and utilitarian and as a way to have wield power over the natural world, perhaps numbers held a different significance. Perhaps numbers had a primarily spiritual significance. So I'm very excited about all of that. All right. And you can find out about that. at our website, houseofhumaneletters.com. Click on that mini classes webinars tab, browse around, find out more, sign up. And again, if you can't make the dates, everything we do is live or later. The video is yours to keep in our wonderful new My Courses dashboard. Very easy to access all your purchases there. I asked for a Netflix style dashboard on the website and our tech team delivered. So I'm very, very happy about that. Much easier to navigate all of that. All right. Now is the part of the podcast where we each share a quote from something we've been reading. Shall we do ladies first? Twins first? Go Speaker 1 (10:26) ahead. Speaker 2 (10:27) All right, Speaker 4 (10:27) Addison. Okay, so to give you a little background about what I'm going to be reading from, I was in a bookstore one day, the start of all great stories, with a good friend of mine, and I found this book randomly on the shelf, and it had a Chinese name in it. And I thought, I just need to pull this down and start reading it. And I am so glad I did. So this is the only English translation we have of any of the work of quite a renowned classical Chinese scholar named Qian Mu. And the book is called Qian Mu and the World of Seven Mansions by Jerry Dinerlene, probably pronouncing his name wrong. I might get the Chinese right, but the English wrong, apparently. I was just thinking that you're going to nail the Chinese names with the English names. So this is a quote from that book that has really been resonating with me recently. Speaker 4 (11:11) Okay. When studying, one should think only of studies. When wandering among hills and streams, one should think only of hills and streams. One rides on enthusiasm and abandons one's mind to it. That is why the first lesson in the Analects, that is of Confucius, says to learn and then to practice when it is timely. Isn't that the meaning of pleasure? Whether it's studying or hiking in the mountains, it's the same mind that applies to both. As soon as one knows how it is that studying is like hiking in the mountains, studying itself becomes a wonderful form of recreation and proceeds rapidly. Otherwise, one considers studying painful and hiking fun and something is lost in both. Speaker 2 (11:51) That is beautiful. That is a beautiful quote. Speaker 1 (11:53) And Ella, how about you? Speaker 3 (11:55) So I today have a quote from Jorge Luis Borges from an essay of his called The Gospel According to Mark. And I actually pulled this quote because it is something I put in my commonplace book almost four years ago, three years ago, about the time we were on the podcast the first time. But it has increasing significance for me because not only because Borges continues to be an author that has haunts me for. for some reason, but also because as my sister and I have expanded our studies and our studies have taken us all around the world in kind of an important sense, we have also found more and more that there is a universal tradition of story. So this quote, generations of men throughout recorded time have always told and retold two stories, that of a lost ship which searches the Mediterranean seas for a dearly loved island and that of a God who is crucified. Speaker 2 (12:50) I like that quote. You knew I would like that quote. Speaker 1 (12:54) Have I ever shared with any of you the story of Borges' oppression at the hands of the Argentine government? Speaker 2 (13:02) Oh, no, but do tell me. This Speaker 1 (13:04) is my favorite petty dictator move. So Borges, during much of the mid-20th century, Argentina was under the rule of the dictator Juan Perón. So if you know the musical Evita. Evita Perón's husband. Madonna Speaker 2 (13:20) takes over Argentina. Speaker 1 (13:24) Perón was not a fan of Borges, whom he saw for some reason as a political enemy. So instead of throwing him in prison or having him assassinated or something, he made him inspector of poultry in whatever district of Argentina he lived in, even though Borges was... blind after all so this would seem a very um inappropriate and unkind job to give him but uh yeah it's an interesting way of dealing with someone you see as a potential dissident i suppose Speaker 3 (13:51) i feel it's not discussed often enough that one of the dangers of being a scholar is being thought a political enemy whether you are or not Speaker 1 (13:59) yeah i know yeah um but there you are add Speaker 2 (14:03) this to your list of like you know petty punishments Speaker 1 (14:07) Yeah, I've been known to punish students in some very creative and sort of, yeah, passive aggressive ways. Speaker 2 (14:15) Students, you're not going to make anybody chicken inspector in your class. Speaker 1 (14:19) No, no, no. All Speaker 2 (14:22) right. I decided to do something a little bit different. I mean, in some ways, this is like a classic Angelina Commonplace quote. But in other ways, it just I think I marked it in the book because it just felt like such a Mr. Banks quote. Okay, so let's see how I do. So first of all, the book I'm reading, Speaker 3 (14:40) many of you will be delighted to Speaker 2 (14:42) hear I'm reading this. This is a book that my students have been trying to get me to read forever. It's well known that I have never read Winnie the Pooh. I know. Gasp. Gasp. I will eventually get around to reading Winnie the Pooh. I promise. My students, at this point, I'm glad I don't read it because all of them come and give me like these impassioned pleas and do these amazing, like, you know, Natalia says, oh, it's a medieval romance and you have to read it like this. That's just very, that's fun for me to hear them make their case. But they know that I love golden age detective novels and they had pointed out to me something I did not know, which was that A.A. Milne, author of Winnie the Pooh, wrote, in fact, one. one classic detective novel, one locked room detective novel. And I have started reading it. Now, I haven't finished it yet. So, you know, maybe a couple of weeks from now, you'll hear me say, oh, it was garbage. I hated it. But so far, I'm like five chapters in and I'm really enjoying it. And I got a kick out of the fact that the dedication was to his father who had a great love of detective novels. So he wanted to try to write, you know, take the challenge on of coming up with the great locked room mystery. So I started reading it. And he's describing the different characters. And this is a description of one of the characters. And I was actually reading this while I was on a treadmill. True story. Reading the actual physical book while I was on a treadmill. And I wanted to mark the passage. And I tried to mark it while I was still walking. I don't advise that, folks. I actually had to get off to mark it. But anyway, I marked it. So here we go. I feel like this is a Mr. Banks quote. I think you'll all like this, though. Speaker 3 (16:14) He Speaker 2 (16:15) was not Speaker 3 (16:15) what most people call a snob. A Speaker 2 (16:18) snob has been defined carelessly as a man who loves a lord, and more carefully, as a mean lover of mean things, which would be a little unkind to the peerage if the first definition were true. Mark had his vanities undoubtedly, but he would sooner have met an actor-manager than an earl. He would have spoken of his friendship with Dante, had that been possible, more glibly than of his friendship with the Duke. Call him a snob if you like, but not the worst kind of snob. A hanger-on, but to the skirts of art, not society. A climber, but in the neighborhood of Parnassus, not Hay Hill. That Speaker 1 (16:57) was a fabulous paragraph. We're going Speaker 2 (16:59) to love that score, right? That is so good. A social climber who's trying to climb Mount Parnassus. I feel like we're going to be able to use that particular image for so many people we know. Okay. Speaker 1 (17:12) As long as none of them are me, then, you know, great. Speaker 2 (17:15) No, you actually do climb Mount Parnassus. All right. Well, oh, no, Mr. Banks, I left you out. Commonplace quote. Speaker 1 (17:22) Yeah, mine I introduce with no comment. Few people know how to be old. La Rochefoucauld from his Book of Maxims. Speaker 2 (17:33) It's true. I would also say few people know how to be young. Speaker 1 (17:35) That also is true. People know how to Speaker 2 (17:38) be people. Well, that is it. We don't know how to be any age, right? But I feel like the older I get, the more I've realized it's hard to be young. And you guys are young, so this is a perfect segue. You know, my children are all in there. Into our Speaker 3 (17:51) hard knock life. Speaker 2 (17:52) Yeah, exactly. Our hard knock Speaker 3 (17:54) lit life of. Speaker 2 (17:55) That's right. Right now I want to sing the theme song. That's probably copyrighted. They'll come after me if I sing it on the podcast. So I've got to be careful here. Speaker 2 (18:04) But two people who have found that maybe it's hard to be young. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's hard to be old souls in young bodies. But we have with us, as I said, Addison and Ella Hornstra. Now, you may have heard their other literary life of Addison and Ella Hornstra that aired several years ago. We just rebroadcast it last week as a fun kind of introduction to this episode. And let me set the stage. You were on that first podcast episode several years ago. The summer right before you were about to start college. Yeah. And I had made a joke there like, well, see you in four years. Speaker 3 (18:43) And we had quite literally cried our eyes out on the last day, what we thought was the last day of our HHL classes. I Speaker 4 (18:51) know, it was very extreme. Speaker 2 (18:53) But things turned out very differently. Actually, it wasn't see you in four years. Within a couple of weeks, you were contacting me with a different set of tears. And we were right back at it. But before we talk about where you are now and what you're doing now, let's catch our audience up. Okay, so in the last episode, you were both about to start your freshman year at one of these quote-unquote classical colleges. Speaker 2 (19:19) Within a few weeks, you both left that college. So tell us about that. Speaker 4 (19:25) Well, if I were going to put it in a nutshell, I would say that as soon as almost as soon as we arrived at that college, we very quickly realized that it did not fulfill our expectations. And I think we left about after eight weeks. And really the turning point was a realization of the fact that this education delivered at that college was not going to fulfill our vocational needs. But tied to that, I would say that that whole process kicked us into a journey of discovering what our real vocations were, which has brought us to where we are today. Speaker 3 (19:59) Anything to add about Speaker 4 (20:00) that? Speaker 3 (20:01) No, I think many people have asked us after going to New College, I mean, why we went in the first place if we were going to leave so quickly, to which I say we clearly did not go expecting to leave after eight weeks. We wouldn't have known until we had gone what we were, that this place was not going to meet the expectations that we had, the needs that we had. But at the same time, as Addy mentioned, in going there, we were able that much better to clarify for ourselves what our needs were. And I think we had clearly had them. We had a vocational leaning, but it was easier to enunciate those, to put words to that. while realizing that they were not being met. I think it really Speaker 4 (20:48) kicked us into a conversation of what does higher education look like when you're coming from the kind of background we've come from? What can it look like to customize that? Do you have to settle for something that is just, you know, so-so and you get through safely? Or are you actually looking for true education? And what does that actually look like? And so on Speaker 3 (21:07) both sides, it was a disappointment in a way, but also... almost an indispensable one, one that was needed for us for our particular journey. Speaker 2 (21:17) Right. And at the time, so this is several years ago, at the time when people were, when our students who were graduating would ask us, you know, what should we do? Obviously, I was not highly recommending that they go into any kind of humanities program at a state school. I still don't recommend that. You'll hear in just a minute what I do recommend. But at the time, I had so many students with an interest in the humanities that I thought, well, you can't go to a big state school, but maybe, maybe, well, these smaller classical colleges seem like the answer to that and seem like there was a place you could go and they would still be respectful of the tradition. And you would be able to, you know, explore the humanities in a non-hostile environment. That's what I thought. And I had visited this particular school and Speaker 2 (22:08) had seen something that turned out maybe not to be your experience. We'll put it that way. I think there was a disappointment and surprise amongst all of us once you actually got in there to see what the reality was. And as a result of your experience, of course, I no longer make a recommendation to that. In fact, I'm now recommending to my students that they go to big state schools. And we'll talk about why that is in just a minute. But we don't endorse any college. We certainly don't endorse the college that you came from. It became very quickly that it was not going to be four years where you could be immersed in a respectful tradition to the liberal arts. It was going to be four years of frustration, wasted time and worse. And so we all started. And it wasn't even Speaker 3 (22:51) that from a university education we expected to have. only things worth our time and absolutely no busy work. We didn't have that as an expectation, but we did have as an expectation the ability to glean some things that truly would further the most important parts of our education. And we unfortunately found that there were no possibilities for that. Speaker 2 (23:14) Right. And I guess it comes down to you and we have a very particular vision of what education should be, and it's not shared by these small. classical college, they have their own vision. And maybe it's a vision that people are excited about. It wasn't the vision we wanted. And so you went elsewhere. So let's talk a little bit. Well, actually, there's a lot of things. Let me just let me just get everybody at home is like, well, where did they go and what did they do? So let me just say this, OK, because we'll talk about the process, which was a long process. It was a long process of figuring out where to go and what to do. And, you know, you guys dropped out. You enrolled in a. ton of HHL classes. Ella, you began studying Latin, which ended up being really important. Addison, you began studying the Anglo-Saxon language in classes that we offered, both of which ended up being a real part, important part of your journey, which you can talk about in a minute. But just to put everybody out of their misery, okay. After determining your vocations, you both landed at a major prestigious university on the East Coast where Addison is studying the Chinese language and literature and culture, and Ella is studying classics, both Greek and Latin, and Persian. They are both on track to complete graduate degrees in those fields in a few years. And before you all freak out, but what school is it? You're going to see that there's a reason why we're not saying the school because This is not going to be the answer for everybody. This school was the answer for you. And we're going to talk about how to think about college and how to make the decision because there is no quote unquote great school. OK, that the the the state of higher education is there might be a school who can fit a particular need. You have to start with what