Fabricando fabricamur [By creating, we create ourselves.]
"We've imposed educational programs that kill the capacity to think independently, or even tFabricando fabricamur [By creating, we create ourselves.]
"We've imposed educational programs that kill the capacity to think independently, or even the desire to do so. While we point to thinkers—Leonardo, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Curie—who model the disciplined, independent questing intellect we claim to revere, we enforce systems ensuring that our own young people could never emulate them."
"The ed-tech-industrial complex's fetishizing of means is symptomatic of our deeper ailment, the inner contradiction of an end that is the endless production of means without an end."
"The emancipatory artes liberales were crafts of freedom: the highest level of thinking."
'The Greeks say poet from the verb poein which is halfway between creating (creare), which is proper to God when he brought everything into being from out of nothing; and 'making' (fare) which is proper to men when in each art, they compose from material and form. For this reason, although the poet's figment is not entirely out of nothing, yet he departs from making and approaches quite near to creating. And God is a poet, and the world his poem.'
Scaliger, Tasso, and others concurred: There is no one in the world who deserves the name of Creator but God and the Poet. Against this audacious comparison, Auden countered: poetry makes nothing happen. What a bleak evaluation! one that sanctions every hostile suspicion about the frivolity of reading.
"The root of 'attention' means to stretch toward something. It's both a physical and a mental effort—one yearns to become one with the object, the slender tendrils of the mind curling around it. We attend to it, just as a servant must attend to a ruler—with all the docility and contortion that implies."
"Jorge Luis Borges crafted fables that crystallized our own technological quandaries. In one such story, a Bible salesman appears at the narrator's door, offering a fantastic book 'called the Book of Sand because neither the book nor sand has a beginning or an end...The number of pages in this book is literally infinite. No page is the first; none the last.' Beguiled, the narrator purchases this impossible book. But he comes to find its infinitude monstrous, something that overwhelms him: I felt it was a nightmare thing, an obscene thing, and that it defiled and corrupted reality."
"Attention is the natural prayer that we make to inward truth." Nicolas Malebranche
"Genius—the emergence of a truly remarkable and memorable work—seems to appear when a thing is perfectly suited to its context...When the right thing is in the right place, we are moved." David Byrne
"A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite enquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labour of coping, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labour;—the real labour of thinking." Sir Joshua Reynolds
"Intellectual work is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward." Mark Twain
"I had to claim my birthright. I am what time, circumstance, history have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all." James Baldwin...more
"Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of "Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. A thinking reed.—It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world. Pascal, Pensées
'When we cultivate an inner life, we set aside concerns for social ease or advancement. We forget...the anxious press of necessities...Or we may seek out a mountain retreat, a monastery, or a college campus removed from the city, a place that seems a world unto itself.'
'Intellectual development requires a chosen asceticism, a conscious rejection of available luxury. It marks out a way between rustic simplicity and the decadence of wealth.'
"As youngsters we gazed, inclined to giggle; then came a moment of silent awe as awareness of 'night clad in the beauty of a thousand inauspicious stars—the vast of night and its void'—seeped into consciousness." Alice Foley
"Great is the power of memory, exceedingly great, O my god, a spreading limitless room within me. Who can reach its uttermost depth? Yet it is a faculty of soul and belongs to my nature. In fact I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself; but where can that part of it be that does not contain itself?...As this question struck me, I was overcome with wonder and almost stupor. Here are men going afar to marvel at the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movements of the stars, yet leaving themselves unnoticed and not seeing it as marvelous that when I spoke of all these things, I did not see them with my eyes, yet I could not have spoken of them unless these mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and the ocean of which I have heard, had been inwardly present to my sight; in my memory, and yet with the same vast spaces between them as if I saw them outside of me.' Augustine (I did not realize Augustine was capable of a thought that does not irritate me. I am pleasantly surprised. Perhaps Augustine is more than just Moaning Myrtle, as I have frequently described him...alas, nevermind, there is still something unbearable about him, which I cannot overcome.)
"The inward focus shown by Mary's studiousness is also part of the meaning of Mary's perpetual virginity. She does not submit to the common purpose that her community established for women...the social world is a realm of suspicion: the locus of ambition and competitive striving, the engine of using and instrumentalizing, the dissipation of energy into anxiety and petty spites. Only in withdrawing from it can the fundamentals of human and divine life become clear."
"Our humanity is not a profession to be left to the accomplished few." [image]...more
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