Tag: philosophy

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.

The affirmation of values almost always occurs as a reaction to the propagation of opposite values, often in situations where silence would be extinction. The threat prohibits inertia, attesting to the fact that, in order to exist, a value must manifest itself. Sometimes, however, the reaction is too late, and comes out like the last breath of something that is dying, for which nothing more can be done. In silence, it ended up allowing itself to be crushed…

The moment of farewell is always remarkable and significant, as it marks not only a change, but the point of no return, after which the past circumstance, whether very important or not, will live on only in the memory. The usual tears show the awareness of the irreversible, as well as the appreciation of what has been lived. It is beautiful and it is relevant, and it seems that, without such an experience, one never really assimilates the importance of what there was and, perhaps fortunately, will never be again.

It is amazing how much can be learned from symbols, how much more powerful the imagination becomes with their study, even though one does not, or simply cannot, lock them down into definitive practical knowledge. There will always be an open door, always possibilities to be noticed, which perhaps contrast with what one thought one had learned. So study, no matter how deep, is always inconclusive, since a symbol can never be exhausted. But it pays off, and with it the imagination reaches a new level.