The best way for the student to retain the content he has just learned is to explain it, however partially or imperfectly. Teachers and students know this, which is why it is common practice. However, it is also clear that in doing so, if one doesn’t see it as a mere exercise, one risks arbitrating on knowledge that has not yet been consolidated, and naturally one makes mistakes, and a lot of them. The curious thing is that this seems to be a necessary process, and we often come across the connoisseur who, years before, had wandered far from where knowledge had taken him. Mastering a subject is perhaps no more than intimately gathering the arsenal of errors that surround it.
Category: Notes
It Is a Beautiful Thing to See the Serenity…
It is a beautiful thing to see the serenity that springs from a proper, and therefore stimulating, routine. Very often, impatience is nothing more than a symptom of a clear maladjustment. Once it is corrected, it ceases and brings with it the other collateral factors that make a man believe he is wasting his life. But not only that: as if by magic, previously unthinkable qualities emerge, giving rise to the right manifestation of the personality and resulting in the serenity that brings about a real transformation.
One of the Dilemmas Faced by the Modern…
One of the dilemmas faced by the modern novelist stems from the realization that, in many respects, today’s daily life would be incomprehensible to men of the past. When we read stories from five hundred or eight hundred years ago today, we can easily understand the activities, customs and societies of those times, even though the contrasts are obvious. Planting, harvesting, celebrating, sailing, fishing, fermenting, weaving, riding, praying, building, marrying, painting, playing… all of this is very old and very current, making possible countless scenes and entire books whose meaning will never be lost. On the other hand, modern tasks such as “surfing the internet” or simply operating a computer, something on which one makes a career and spends a lifetime, certainly do not have the same timeless quality. The novelist, looking at them, that is, looking at a considerable part of the material of his time, has to decide how much he can use them, and although he knows that to hide them might be to falsify himself, he experiences the impression that, if incomprehensible to the great men of other times, his story will probably be worthless.
It Is a Real Shame That the Average Student…
It is a real shame that the average student can only learn a handful of languages in depth, some of which, in truth, he may never learn sufficiently. And then one depends on translations which, as a rule, hide qualities of the original. The most unfortunate thing is that one cannot grasp the beautiful particularities of distant languages, which would completely alter one’s understanding of their works. Sometimes, quite happily, a translation provides glimpses of such particularities; and, having grasped them, we are left with the sad feeling that, in this life, it will not be possible to get to know them better…