Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Robert Harris
Version Date: March 26, 2013
read the poetry of the Bible, you can understand what youre reading. You read,
How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind take refuge
in the shadow of your wings (Psalm 36:7, ESV), or Have you an arm like God,
and can you thunder with a voice like his? (Job 40:9, ESV), you will be able to
understand that God doesnt really have arms or wings but that these metaphors
help our limited minds to grasp something about him that we would not otherwise
have access to.
The Creativity Answer
Tell me something. What do you think is the key to a successful life?
My answer is that the key a successful life is the ability to solve problems. Problem
solving is really what we do all day long. It is said that we make 5,000 decisions a
day, most of them smallshould I walk over to see John or should I text Sarah?
But they get bigger as life goes onshould I buy this house now, or rent and wait?
The basis of decision making is problem solving, since every decision is in some
respects a problem that needs to be solved.
And what is the foundation of effective problem solving? Its creative thinking.
The ability to identify exactly what the real problem is, what are some possible
solutions, and which solution is most likely to work best with the fewest tradeoffs.
And how do you learn creativity? By studying art and poetry and literature and
books in general. The creative associations we find in literature are precisely those
useful for developing a creative mind. And thats how the brain works. When you
have a thought, and then another thought, the brain allows the two to overlap in a
combination, a creative association, that helps solve problems.
The Brain Train Answer
The brain is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. Older
people who want to avoid Alzheimers or other forms of dementia are encouraged
to keep using their brainsdoing puzzles, reading, and even explaining the
figurative language of poetry.
But while you are young, poetry and literature are helpful because they open up
new ideas. New ideas are valuable because in order for the brain to learn
something, it needs to associate it with something it already knows. Briefly, the
new idea enters your working memory, and your brain takes a look in its long term
memory storehouse to find something similar it can compare the new idea to. This
is called schema retrieval. You can see how useful it is to know about similes,
analogies, and metaphors because they are all about comparing unlike things to
each otherthe same way schemas work. If you have only a few schemas in your
mental treasury, learning something new is more difficult. In one sentence,
then, The more you know, the more you can learn. Another way to express this
is, The more you learn, the better you can see.
The Analytic Thinking Answer
Understanding poetry is sometimes challenging, not only because of the imagery
and rhetorical devices used (catachretic metaphors, as in Shakespeare's "I will
speak daggers to her," but also because of obscure allusions, inverted syntax, plays
on words (puns), unusual diction, and even intentional ambiguity. In order to come
to the richest and fullest understanding, you need to analyze the poem thoroughly.
And in this process, you develop your ability to think analytically. This ability is
part of critical thinking, which is one of the most important products of education.
It has been said that many college and university students will get jobs in areas that
did not exist when they enrolled as freshmen. An example is the data scientist,
someone who can apply creative analysis to big data (an emergent field in
business) and develop ideas for finding commercial applications of the huge
amounts of data now being generated.
The subject matter of your education will grow stale. You will change careers at
least four times if averages hold true. So it's not what you learn in college so much
as it is how you learn to think. The ability to think analytically will go with you
through job change after change. And studying poetry is among the best methods
to develop your thinking ability.
once had.
Finally, a wise old man who had just been released from prison for reading a
useless book of poetry, spoke up. It is because you are missing that which only
art can grant. Without art, you have facts but not truth, desires but not love, use but
not beauty. I am old and ready to depart this realm, so I can say this. Life is not
merely about the practical. In fact, the practical exists to support the real value of
life. By abolishing whatever is not immediately useful, the king has left us with
glass to put in windows but no beautiful gardens to look at through the windows.
In his obsession with usefulness, the king has stolen half your soul.
The man was quickly arrested and sent to the torturers. Yes, the king still had a
dungeon, because, while his ban on useless things had eliminated beauty from his
kingdom, it had not eliminated ugliness.
Conclusion
Never going to use what you learn from studying poetry? Of course you are. You
wont learn whether to use a two by four or a two by six to support the floor of
your new house. But poetry is not a how-to field of knowledge. Studying poetry
does add knowledge, but its greatest use is that it changes who you areinto a
better, wiser, more circumspect you, someone more capable of discernment,
sympathy, and understanding. And youll be using who you are for the rest of your
life.
http://www.virtualsalt.com/usefulpoetry.html