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Open the Windows

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Sukant Ratnakar

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“If you are investing in your education and you are learning, you should do that as early as you possibly can, because then it will have time to compound over the longest period. And that the things you do learn and invest in should be knowledge that is cumulative, so that the knowledge builds on itself. So instead of learning something that might become obsolete tomorrow, like some particular type of software [that no one even uses two years later], choose things that will make you smarter in 10 or 20 years.”

“A person can draw from three resources to understand and evaluate human existence: study of self, observation of other people, and reading books. Self-study is the most difficult learning methodology and it is rife with dangerous pretentions, but also the most fruitful. Studying other people is infinitely fallible because of our inability to establish an unbiased perspective and the subjects’ propensity to hide their secret thoughts, which obscures our vision. Book reading is a laborious process and even diligent reading can lead to faculty perception due to writers’ agenda to persuade us instead of merely conveying information. Nevertheless, by incorporating all three learning methodologies into a regime of studious reflection I might learn about the world, other inhabitants, and the self, and use such knowledge to cleave a fitting personal place in the world.”

“A person can learn at any stage of life. Education requires more than learning how to read a book and write a sentence. What good does it do to read and write if a person lacks the ability to evaluate and judge the truth and falsity of what they read and write? Learning how to speak and argue is of little utility to a person has nothing sensible to say or who argues in favor of falsehoods. Learning how to think is of extremely valuable because it provides the needed contexture to make reading, writing, speaking, and rhetoric useful. Thinking cannot exist in a vacuum. A person must demonstrate the talent to be a proficient observer before thinking is a viable activity.”

“Books are the mind's ballast, for so many of us--the cargo that makes us what we are, a freight that is ephemeral and indelible, half-forgotten but leaving an imprint. They are nutrition, too. My old age fear is not being able to read--the worst deprivation. Or no longer having my books around me: the familiar, eclectic, explanatory assemblage that hitches me to the wide world, that has freed me from the prison of myself, that has helped me to think, and to write.”

“During one of our sessions I had the feeling that the therapist was trying to lead me to some major insight that might help save the day for me. When I asked if that was the case, she acknowledged it, but when I asked if she would be willing simply to tell me in some many words what the insight was, she demurred. That was not the sway psychotherapy worked, she said. It was something I would have to come to on my own if it was to have any real value for me, she said, or something like that. But then as the end of the hour drew near, she relented and put into words what it was she had been trying to lead me to see. There was nothing in the world just then that I was more fascinated to hear - for all I knew my recovery itself might depend on it - but even later that same day I couldn't have told you what she said nor could I possibly tell you now. I was simply not ready to hear it yet. The words I could hear all right, but in terms of their meaning I was as deaf as my mother before me, and possibly, like her, because I chose to be deaf. Possibly I was not ready to be well yet either.”