One Who Learns – Teaches¹

No Contradiction can occur between
What a Student Learns at School and
The Reality of the Lives of the People²
Live with the Unknown in Front, always
Receding: a Vanishing Moving over it all³
All you Perceive, all you Experience, all that is
Given or Taken from you – all that you Love or
Hate, Need or Fear Teaches you – if you’ll Learn⁴
Set out, first, to Learn, second, to Learn, and third,
To Learn – and then see to it that learning does Not
Remain a Dead Letter or a fashionable Catchphrase,
But that learning becomes part of our very Being⁵
The Words of the Textbook Creep off the Pages,
Over the Fingers, and Sink straight into the Skin⁶
Are you a Reader, a Student merely – or a Seer?⁷
Scholars need to go Outside and Sniff around –
Walk through the Grass & Talk to the Animals⁸
Increase of Knowledge: Augmentation of the
Complexity & Intensity of intelligent Life –
Enrichment of Harmony and the great glory
Of God – Curiosity, Adventure, Delight⁹
Do not Read any more – Look!
Do not look any more – Go!¹⁰

¹ Ethiopian Proverb
² Tayeb Salih tr. Denys Johnson-Davies, Seasons of Migration to the North
³ Jorie Graham, I’m Reading Your Mind
⁴ Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
⁵ Vladimir Lenin tr. Skvirsky & Hanna, Better Fewer, But Bette
⁶ Zoe Robertson, Patty Perkins and the Poltergeist Plot
⁷ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
⁸ Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh
⁹ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
¹⁰ Paul Celan tr. Michael Hamburger, The Straitening