What school?

A student interrupted me in class today to ask: 'What is your background?'  When I inquired, he explained that on one of my tours, he had been impressed by the novelty of the perspective I had presented, and that, that morning in the class, he was again. But his question was really, I guess, about where I had gone to school, that is, what was my source of originality. Who did I get it from?

Schools don't give you new ideas but thinking does. Of course, there are many books with original and well-articulated ideas. As I read, I absorb the perspectives of the authors (and hope always to properly attribute them). Often I find the really interesting points of view require my close attention in long study over the course of which I find myself responding to the author's views even as I assimilate them. The key element is the thoughtfulness of the author.

Lively conversation wrestling with issues, the give and take of idea presentation and criticism, the extension of extrapolation and focus of interpolation, does with a dynamic immediacy what reading does calmly over time: generate new ideas, new ways of thinking about something. The key factors are the quickness of mind of the participants.

What connects both of these is my thinking mind, mine, trying to make sense of what I've just read or just heard vis-a'-vis what I've been thinking up till now and what I can't ignore around me. Rather than encounter originality already baked, as it were, in a book or sizzling from the wok of conversation, my thinker comes up with fresh ideas as if it tickles trout: mysteriously, after long quietness, but with an indisputably cookable fish at the end.

My thinker is a mysterious beast. I feed it with impressions and projects, give it permission to play, pull it when it falls asleep, push it back on track when after it's wandering off, yet it's is not always Platero plodding, sometimes it's Pegasus soaring.

Sometimes I can feel it scrambling to keep its footing; other times it trots along. Sometimes it's biddable; other times, it answers my entreaties with silence. Sometimes, it coughs up sharply articulated phrases and concepts; other times, only promising cloud-like notions that require patient poking to find what's solid inside. Never dispassionate even in its neutrality, it's dry and witty or louche, aloof or ravished. It can't always be trusted or relied on, but when I give my thinker his head (mine), I am sure (indeed, expect) to be intrigued and impressed and delighted.

So, my student, the answer to your implied question is this: my school consists of books, talk (not enough), but mostly the solid activity of my thinker thinking. Even as it write this, I've been feeling my thinker's contribution, for which I feel hearty gratitude, and even more: deep affection.

To each, I say, enjoy the friendship of your thinker.