Instruction leaves a person trained and better informed – but otherwise unaltered. To stand at the threshold of an education, by contrast, is to stand poised before the possibility of an achieved formation and temper of mind which widens perspectives and matures the power of critical judgment. It is this that we commend when we commend education for itself. To be educated is to stand in a critical and creative relationship to ideas, crucially through contact with teachers, who exemplify in their words and demeanour the life of the mind.If a university has a soul it is to be found here, in the engagement of teachers with their students, in the critical transmission of ideas, including ideas about human nature, that their students have to struggle with and grasp, a struggle that shapes their souls. But this education is becoming more fugitive and teachers less available through a terrible absence of mind, as the ideas that inform the policy and practice of universities slowly eat into their soul.
Trieves, French AlpsLe soleil s’en est allé - The sun went there (by lavanthym)
Lushan, Jiangxi, China
A basic feature of the venture capitalist’s worldview is its narcissism, and with that comes the desire to clone oneself—perhaps literally in Thiel’s case. Thus Thiel fellows will have the opportunity to emulate their sponsor by halting their intellectual development around the onset of adulthood, maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible, and thereby avoid the siren lure of helping others or contributing to the advances in basic science that have made the great tech fortunes possible. Thiel’s program is premised on the idea that America suffers from a deficiency of entrepreneurship. In fact, we may be on the verge of the opposite, a world in which too many weak ideas find funding and every kid dreams of being the next Mark Zuckerberg. This threatens to turn the risk-taking startup model into a white boy’s version of the NBA, diverting a generation of young people from the love of knowledge for its own sake and respect for middle-class values.
I hoped, of course, that I can find the way out, but also the hopeless was an everyday guest. And I was full of energy. It was possible that I explode from all of this situation… . And maybe there was one point when I said, ‘Stop with this old music as a composer.’ Now in this place must be born something of mine — from everything that I have learned in old music, in religion, in life, and how much I was able to see my own sins and imperfections, and to repent it. To say, ‘Yes.’ And if you do, then it is like when you are on a computer, and you write a text and then you press something and it is empty. But it is a good thing. Begin from zero, from nothing. It’s like if there is a fresh snow and nobody has walked, and you take the first steps on this snow. And this is the beginning of new life.
Will an iPhone productivity app make you more productive? It will make you more productive if you’re in a position to become more productive. But better running shoes are not going to make you a faster runner if you’ve never run before — they are just going to make you a fat man with running shoes.
In the postideological YouTube-topia that Orwell couldn’t have foreseen, information flows in all directions and does as it pleases, for better or for worse, serving no masters and obeying no party line. The telescreens, tiny, mobile and ubiquitous, at times seem to be working independently, for some mysterious purpose all their own. This morning, when I sat down to write, I was distracted by a story on my computer about a Google Street View camera that snapped pictures of a corpse lying on a bloody street in urban Brazil. I clicked on the link, unable to do otherwise, and up came the awful, disconcerting image. For a moment, I felt like a voyeur, spiritually dirtied by what I saw. A moment later I was checking the weather report and the status of my I.R.A.Even Big Brother himself was not so cold. He, at least, had a motive for his peeping — to maintain order, to shore up his position and to put down possible rebellions — but I and the countless Little Brothers like me lack any clear notion of what we’re after. A fleeting sensation of omnipotence? The gratification of idle curiosity? Our nonstop trafficking in stolen images, sometimes as consumers and sometimes as producers (is there any meaningful difference anymore?), adds up to a story without a plot. Is it a tragic story? On occasion. It was tragic for Tyler Clementi and for his roommate, who ruined his own life by spying on another’s, but for those who are suddenly lofted to fame and riches by achieving viral visibility, it’s closer to a feel-good comedy.
This is what I tell students: You should be proud of your profession because there’s less lying in journalism than in any other profession. They lie in education, they lie in politics, they lie in banking, they lie in labor; there’s liars all over the place. Sports? Full of liars. And there are liars in journalism, but if there are liars, journalism will out them. They do. When you’re Jason Blair, the New York Times pointed the finger and got rid of him. They got rid of the editor. This is integrity.So be proud. Dress up. What you’re doing is more important that the trillionaire who is running the society ball this year or some movie star.
Isn’t it surprising when people don’t return books? I have lost Norman Rush’s Mortals, the complete poems of Thomas Hardy in a two-volume edition I loved, an edition of Keats ditto, Michel Leiris’s Manhood, my first copy of Infinite Jest, José Saramago’s Blindness, most of the novels of Evan Connell, Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask … the list goes on. It happens. And apparently I’ve been the culprit, too. (My college library tracked me down a few years ago looking for a missing volume of Bleak House—some fifteen years and four apartments after the fact.) I have friends who never lend books for exactly this reason, but I think it’s worth it. A book on the shelf is just waiting to die. And books die: They fall apart. So do their owners. It makes me sad to think that I may be the last person to read some book I own. My suggestion to you is that you keep lending with an open hand. Make peace with the chance that you may not—the certainty that you will not—always get your books back. One nice thing about books is how easy they are to replace.