Academics (Importance of Learning) - Misc. Newsletters
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Dec. 4, 2008 Newsletter by Rilke:
On Lifetime Learning (Still another character's thoughts in Niels Lyhne):
To learn is as beautiful as to live. Do not be afraid to lose yourself in minds greater than your own! Do not sit brooding anxiously over your own individuality or shut yourself out from influences that draw you powerfully for fear that they may sweep you along and submerge your innermost pet peculiarities in their mighty surge! Never fear! The individuality that can be lost in the sifting and reshaping of a healthy development is only a flaw; it is a branch grown in the dark, which is distinctive only so long as it retains its sickly pallor. And it is by the sound growth in yourself that you must live. Only the sound can grow great.
Rilke's thoughts from Letters to a Young Poet on Lifetime Learning....
"and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer....Read as little as possible of literary criticism...always trust yourself and your own feeling...if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion...wait for the hour when a new clarity is born...there is no measuring of time, a year doesn't matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast.
* The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch June 12, 2008 Newsletter
On academics playing a role in his childhood: We didn't buy much. But we thought about everything. That's because my dad had this infectious inquisitiveness about current events, history, our lives. In fact, growing up, I thought there were two types of families: 1) Those who need a dictionary to get through dinner. 2) Those who don't... "If you have a question," my folks would say, "then find the answer." The instinct in our house was never to sit around like slobs and wonder. We knew a better way: Open the encyclopedia. Open the dictionary. Open your mind.
May 8, 2008 Newsletter
* Frederick Douglass, a freed slave, in the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. 1881.
The importance of learning through the ability to read: The frequent hearing of my mistress reading the Bible aloud, for she often read aloud when her husband was absent, awakened my curiosity in respect to this mystery of reading, and roused in me the desire to learn. Up to this time I had known nothing of this wonderful art, and my ignorance and inexperience of what it could do for me, as well as my confidence in my mistress, emboldened me to ask her to teach me to read. With an unconsciousness and inexperience equal to my own, she readily consented, and in an incredibly short time, by her kind assistance, I had mastered the alphabet and could spell words of three or four letters...Master Hugh was astounded beyond measure and, probably for the first time, proceeded to unfold to his wife the true philosophy of the slave system, and the peculiar rules necessary in the nature of the case to be observed in the management of human chattels. Of course he forbade her to give me any further instruction, telling her in the first place that to do so was unlawful, as it was also unsafe; 'for', said he, 'if you give an... an inch he will take an ell. Learning will spoil the best n... in the world...'
May 8, 2008 Newsletter *F.D. Roosevelt, message to the American Booksellers' Association, April 23, 1942. Power of memorization in dealing with minute details playing in your head to strategies for handling oppression and overcoming evil.
Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory...In this war, we know, books are weapons.
August 16, 2007 Newsletter The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
This novel, Song of the Lark, is the life of Thea Kronberg, who feels stifled artistically in her small Colorado town. She ends up in Chicago studying music for the greater part of the book. This is a dialogue of young Thea with her piano teacher... "Only how can I learn anything here? It's so far from Denver..." Her teacher's serious response... "Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing - desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little..."
