This is one of those moments when I think that I didn’t begin to get a real education until after the age of 50, when I finally settled for me as a teacher.
Me said, “It’s not too late to learn how to think.” I answered, “Ok, Me. Let’s get started.”
Joan was kind enough to make some of Joe Wood’s books available, and there was one I accepted with particular seriousness—“The Conduct of Life,” a collection of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Perhaps true book-larnin’ doesn’t take place until one can center on an idea or theme after confronting it from multiple directions.
A good start, but there’s little chance a revelation will be internalized until put into actual practice.
Here is something I just read from the essay called “Power”—
When Michel Angelo was forced to paint the Sistine Chapel in fresco, of which art he knew nothing, he went down into the Pope’s gardens behind the Vatican, and with a shovel dug out ochres, red and yellow, mixed them with glue and water with his own hands, and having, after many trials, at last suited himself, climbed his ladders, and painted away, week after week, month after month, the sibyls and prophets. He surpassed his successors in rough vigor, as much as in purity of intellect and refinement. He was not crushed by his one picture left unfinished at last. Michel was wont to draw his figures first in skeleton, then to clothe them with flesh, and lastly to drape them. “Ah!” said a brave painter to me, thinking on these things, “if a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There is no way to success in our art, but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.”