There are ideas that mature and ideas that time makes rot. All of them, however, seem to benefit from time, with the exception only being those that burst forth and demand immediate transposition onto paper. But these, if properly analyzed, may not be ideas at all, or just ideas, but passing states of mind that, once wasted, may never return.
Patriotism and Anti-Patriotism
If one thing is certain, it is that patriotism and anti-patriotism go beyond the realm of rationality and are based above all on temperament, which is shaped primarily by experience. In short, a patriot is someone whose sense of belonging manifests itself, while an anti-patriot is someone who feels out of place. They are different psychological attitudes, based on different sensations, and that is all they are: psychological attitudes arising from sensations.
The Practical Man and the Thinking Man
Thomas Bernhard, in Extinction, makes a very sharp reflection on what can be called the practical man and the thinking man. According to his reasoning, the practical man hates idleness and usually identifies it with the thinking man. However, the practical man, unaccustomed to thought, only conceives of action as practical action, and therefore cannot understand the absence of practical action as anything other than idleness. But the truth is that idleness does not exist for the thinking man, because it is precisely under the appearance of idleness that he experiences his states of greatest excitement. This, however, is far beyond the comprehension of the practical man. The curious thing about all this is that, in fact, it is precisely the practical man who slips into the idleness that he hates so much: incapable of thinking, only for him does the absence of practical action mean genuine and absolute inaction.
The Real Student Is the Teacher
The real student is the teacher. Because teaching is, in essence, also studying; but studying in a depth that can only be achieved through teaching. Or rather: it is teaching itself that demands it, since it brings up a multitude of problems that lead to further research, unimaginable to the average student. So the teacher, if he is not a bad teacher, the more he teaches, the deeper he gets into the subject, the more he learns about its details, the more he crystallizes the theory in his mind and the more able he becomes to teach, because he discovers what the student needs to learn.