To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?
Interpretation
Engaging deeply with reading can transform one's understanding of life and challenge routine beliefs.
Adrienne Rich emphasizes the importance of immersive reading that connects deeply with one's beliefs and life experiences. She suggests that reading should not be a passive activity; rather, it should invigorate one's thought processes, unsettle comfortable routines, and encourage critical engagement with the material, much like preparing for a significant exam demands focus and clarity.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literature in education, this quote can highlight the transformative power of reading.
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.
The things that have been most valuable to me I did not learn in school.
If your words aren't truthful, the finest optically letter-spaced typography won't help.
I believe that every child in this world needs to have a relationship with the land...to know how to nourish themselves...and to know how to connect with the community around them.
I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.
Do you wish to learn? There are books that can teach you anything, and there is no cheaper form of education, nor one whose effects are more lasting. My education came from books, and they have been my companions by many campfires, in bunkhouses, ships' forecastles, in hotels and on planes. No matter where you find me, I am never far from a book.
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