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Thought of the Week Archives
November 1998
November 2, 1998
How to write a Chinese Poem
A well-known Japanese poet was asked how to compose
a Chinese poem.
"The Usual Chinese poem is four lines," he explained.
The first line contains the initial phase; the second line, the continuation
of that phase; the third line turns from this subject and begins a new one;
and the fourth line brings the first three lines together. A popular Japanese
song illustrates this:
Two daughters of a silk merchant live in Kyoto.
The elder is twenty, the younger, eighteen.
A soldier may kill with his sword,
But these girls slay men with their eyes.
from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
edited by Paul Reps
[Note: Zen Flesh, Zen Bones is a wonderful little book of Zen
and Taoist stories and parables.]
November 9, 1998
...the meaning of life differs
from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters,
therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific
meaning of a person's life at a given moment. To put the question in general
terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: "Tell
me Master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such
thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation
in a game and particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds
for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of
life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life...which
demands fulfillment.
Victor E. Frankl
Man's Search for Meaning (p. 130-131)
November 16, 1998
The meaning of the symbol does not lie in
the symbol itself but points to something else outside it. According to
Goethe [referring to religious symbolism], true symbolism is found wherever
'the particular represents the general, not as a dream or shadow, but
as a living, momentary revelation of the inexplicable.' ... The symbol
is at once concealment and revelation.
- Manfred Lurker
November 23, 1998
- Note: Once in a while I run into two ideas which, when juxtaposed,
highlight an interesting or important idea. Here are two such ideas,
one from Neil Postman of Princeton and one from Vartan Gregorian, director
of the New York City Library.
- ~
from Neil Postman, in a Canadian Broadcasting System interview:
[There is ] a very dangerous idea imbedded in it is this idea [of
the computer]. That what the world needs is more information because the
computer can store information and retrieve it and more of it and in a
more accessible way than any other technology was able to do. So people
begin to believe that...the problem that they have to solve is how to
get more information faster. That's the idea of the computer. But that's
not the problem. ...if America and Russia--if there is a Russia - blow
the world up with nuclear weapons, it won't be because they didn't have
enough information. And if children are starving in Ethiopia it's not
because we don't have enough information. And even at a personal level,
if you're not getting along with your wife or children, it's not because
you don't have enough information. Yet along comes the computer and it
has this sort of metaphysical idea that the important problems of the
world can be solved through more information more accessibly retrievable.
Well, we have to look at that to see whether or not we want to govern
our lives with that idea.
~
- from Vartan Gregorian, in a 1991 interview with Bill Moyers published
in A World of Ideas:
[Bell Labs reported that there is more information
in one day's edition of the New York Times than a single man or
woman had to process in the whole of his or her life in the sixteenth
century. Their report also said that available information doubles every
five years. Moyers asked Gregorian what the explosion of information meant
for education and information retrieval.] Gregorian's response:
...it's very dangerous because we're now able to
retrieve less than five percent of the available supply of information.
Unfortunately, the explosion of information is not equivalent to the explosion
of knowledge. So we are faced with a major problem--how to structure information
into knowledge. Because otherwise, what is going to happen? There are
great possibilities of manipulating our society by inundating us with
undigested information. One way of paralyzing people is by inundating
them with trivia, giving them so much that they cannot possibly digest
it all in order to make choices.
(and later)
- ...education's sole function now is to provide the introduction
to learning. We can no longer claim, as we did in the sixteenth century,
that in four years we can produce an educated, cultured person, plus
give this individual professional training and know-how and a vocation.
Life has become more complex. ...We have to tell our students that life
is complex. We're living in awesome and exciting times. We're going
to provide you with a compass, with a rule, with a Geiger counter, and
we're going to give you a critical mind to be able to search throughout
your entire life, in order to be an educated and cultured person.
Comment:
- What are the compass, the rule, and
the Geiger counter to which Gregorian refers? Perhaps a philosophy,
a sense of values, a "calm center in the turning universe." Our problems
in school are not going to be solved with more information. Information
is readily available. We need to help students develop the skills to
digest the information and turn it into knowledge. Computers will not
do this.
- Has our educational system turned into a
training ground for technology or a cheap source for drone workers?
What ever happened to "a well-rounded education?" What happened to the
humanities?
What do you think?
November 30, 1998
...The point is to find out how you do what you do. When you find that out,
if you are not satisfied with what you do, you can begin to change it. You
cannot change what you are doing until you know how you are doing it. ...
It is for this reason that the question in Gestalt is always, How? and never,
Why? Why you are doing it can be an excuse to continue it. Knowing how you
are doing it gives you an option for change.
Paul Rebillot
The Call to Adventure
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