Out of the Cell | Pico Iyer | Granta Magazine

As a little boy in Oxford, I was encouraged to worship the mind. I and my friends, often sons of professors, were being drilled in French and Latin and Greek before we turned seven, and not long afterwards were to be found wrestling with Occam’s razors and Pythagorean theorems. We learned how to write with spurious fluency on every aspect of Plato or King Lear, and the less we knew, the more commandingly we could write. The mind became an instrument we could deploy as sword, shield and moat; on its own terms – and they were the only terms we were taught to honour – it was impossible to defeat.

Source: Out of the Cell | Pico Iyer | Granta Magazine

 

Raony Guimaraes