As it may be a note of relief to all of you, the semester has finally come to an end. For some of us, it’s an end to one chapter and the beginning of another in our academic lives.
For others, it’s perhaps an end to a dreadful experience of college, no longer forced to deal with pedantic people, professors and the obnoxious experiences of exams and finals.
As such, this will be my last column. I have never really been good at goodbyes and probably won’t do a great job saying goodbye here either.
With that said, I thought it’d be neat to share some of my favorite inspirational thoughts uttered by some very smart and inspiring people. I know reading them has gotten me through tough times in school and I am hoping they’ll do the same for you, should you need it.
Victor Hugo, 19th-century author of novels like “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” and “Les Miserables” once wrote: “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.” This quote by Hugo seems to epitomize the importance of education.
Conversely, Oscar Wilde – 19th-century English novelist – wrote in his “The Critic as Artist” that “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught,” for all of you who emphasize the importance of street-smarts.
G.K. Chesterton, one of England’s most prolific writers, commenting on the social importance of education wrote: “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.” It feels as if, with all these cuts to education, our politicians think that it is not a soul worth preserving.
During my time in school, even during this particular semester, I have met a lot of people for whom college is an experience – a phase that one must go through – at the end of which life returns to normality; for some of these people, academic progression is only a matter of cultural obligation that needs to be made in order to be taken seriously. Albert Einstein, in negating that line of thinking, reminds us: “Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.”
One of the more important lessons I learned from reading Lao Tzu’s “Tao Te Ching” is that persevering lets you get at the difficult corners of life with a sense of ease: “For all things difficult to acquire, the intelligent man works with perseverance.”
And finally, I want to share with you a very important lesson the meaning of which I certainly haven’t grasped fully, but adaption of which has been immensely helpful all this while. No matter what you do, or how difficult things are, try to laugh as often and as hard as you can.
Kurt Vonnegut, that literary hero to so many of us, once wrote: “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterwards.”
Thank you all for reading and for your kind emails. Good luck.
Reach Sohail at sbayot@asu.edu
