Mr Sammler did feel somewhat separated from the rest of his species, if not in some fashion severed-severed not so much by age as by preoccupations too different and remote, disproportionate on the side of the spiritual, Platonic, Augustinian, thirteenth century. As the traffic poured...
--Bellow.
Michael said to me, as he scoffed down his second slice of cake after dinner, "You're becoming destabilized by too much reading". There was some truth to that, but it really is too much fragmented reading that is the problem; more than that it is the belief, what is now a plainly obvious false belief, that reading is the solution.
He must have started drinking by four o'clock in the afternoon. Vodka, gin. Hard stuff. The lights were out, a game of chess abandoned, he just sat there in the cold with his woolly hat on, looking out into the dusk. By the time you met him he was sloshed, his mind stuck in a groove as he endlessly repeated the same old one-track thought: 'In my grandfather's time...' Nothing could be more boring than a lone drunk. He's thirty-five and washed out for no apparent reason-except perhaps boredom (if that's a reason).
We don't know who the students are. Yes, but there is a deeper problem: we don't know who we are. The idea that teachers know that much more than students, I mean really know, is, I think, something of a fallacy. Yes, read more; yes, know more tricks and techniques. But in terms of what they've seen of the world, in terms of what they've learned from their experiences-if they've had any- they're remarkably similar (which is what accounts for the childishness of academics).
--Bellow.
Michael said to me, as he scoffed down his second slice of cake after dinner, "You're becoming destabilized by too much reading". There was some truth to that, but it really is too much fragmented reading that is the problem; more than that it is the belief, what is now a plainly obvious false belief, that reading is the solution.
He must have started drinking by four o'clock in the afternoon. Vodka, gin. Hard stuff. The lights were out, a game of chess abandoned, he just sat there in the cold with his woolly hat on, looking out into the dusk. By the time you met him he was sloshed, his mind stuck in a groove as he endlessly repeated the same old one-track thought: 'In my grandfather's time...' Nothing could be more boring than a lone drunk. He's thirty-five and washed out for no apparent reason-except perhaps boredom (if that's a reason).
We don't know who the students are. Yes, but there is a deeper problem: we don't know who we are. The idea that teachers know that much more than students, I mean really know, is, I think, something of a fallacy. Yes, read more; yes, know more tricks and techniques. But in terms of what they've seen of the world, in terms of what they've learned from their experiences-if they've had any- they're remarkably similar (which is what accounts for the childishness of academics).
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