All new learning looks at first like chaos.
Interpretation
New learning often feels overwhelming and confusing at first.
This quote by Adrienne Rich emphasizes that the process of learning something new can initially seem chaotic and disordered. It suggests that the confusion and struggle that accompany new knowledge are a natural part of the learning journey, and that through perseverance, clarity and understanding will eventually emerge.
In practice
Motivating students during the first days of a challenging course.
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.'β
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!'
The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings
I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as a Privatdozent. After all, the Senate is not a bathhouse. Objecting to sex discrimination being the reason for rejection of Emmy Noether's application to join the faculty at the University of Gottingen.
Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.
The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.
At Chicago I offer a course on Emotion, Reason and the Law that law students just love. But I am not there as a lawyer, my job is to teach philosophy.
No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.
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