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All education—whether it’s tailored for scholars, slackers, spies, or saboteurs—is really an education in the signs of belonging. We learn to wear the right clothes, say the right things, know the right codes—sometimes for a cover identity, sometimes for an identity we’re determined to make our own.

(Perhaps the enduring impulse that drives a life of scholarship is like the enduring impulse that drives a life of art: not asking a question that you don’t know the answer to, but answering a question that you never figure out how to formulate.)

Sleep was key to thought, and to intellectual development. As man’s thoughts became ever more complex, the longer he needed to sleep. The longer man slept, Bruno said, the more he dreamed, and the more penetrating and wondrous his waking thought became.

John Stilgoe, a professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the author of several books, including Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. Stilgoe believes the power of acute observation is one of nature’s most useful learning tools.

our imaginations allow us to experience the things we hear and see as if they were our own, which leads to powerful connections.

if you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.

Some of the earliest practices of reading were not of letters, words, or books, but of stars, entrails, and birds, and these practices had a significant impact on the way literature was read and understood in the ancient world.

One of the main components of the modern idea of the self is interiority or inwardness, the feeling that there is a personal inner space that we alone have access to.

I believe that welcoming subjectivity into our lives opens the doors to seeing the unseen. Subjectivity offers us a way of seeing from different angles and myriad perspectives. It fuels an examination of a nascent point of view and helps bring clarity to the amorphous, fuzzy concepts and questions we grapple with. It is only when we experiment and