Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Provision for the intellect

According to poet A. E. Housman, the purpose of liberal study is to awaken the joy of learning.
The pleasure of learning and knowing, though not the keenest, is yet the least perishable of pleasures; the least subject to external things, and the play of chance, and the wear of time. And as a prudent man puts money by to serve as a provision for the material wants of his old age, so too he needs to lay up against the end of his days provision for the intellect.

But I'm not sure.

4 comments:

Pants said...

Hi Luny

I'd apply Pascal to this one - what have you got to lose?

xxx

Pants

Lunar Brogue said...

True Pants. I have next to no super, so maybe this (?) at present slight intellectual investment will be my only nest egg.

(Funny: I've just finished a biography of George Orwell, who read Balzac in French among London tramps. Somehow these down payments did not arouse any special curiosity.)

Ann ODyne said...

those of us with nothing* at all, have not been burdened with extra worry by the recent world financial drama


* oh no they can't take that away from me.

peace and love

Lunar Brogue said...

The World Financial Drama!

Like Louis Nowra's Inside the Island, where an outbreak of madness caused by ergot wheat fungus transforms an otherwise serenely imperial landed gentry type scenario on a farm in Western NSW into a murderous and chaotic disaster zone.