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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.

Recovering memory is more like picking up shards of your past. But even that can be beautiful, because they can be reassembled as a mosaic, which, as the author Terry Tempest Williams says, is “a conversation between what is broken.”

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.

(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.

I looked up half expecting some kind of synchronicity between my consciousness and The World.

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

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.

According to Buddhist principles, in seeing ourselves, our emotions and thoughts, exactly as they are right now, and in not trying to make them go away or improve or change them, we have the opportunity to befriend ourselves and cease suffering. This no-escape witnessing, when we can do it with “precision and gentleness” (the gentleness is key), ho