Word: oneself
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...habit patterns. A telephone, for instance, is suddenly nothing but a black plastic object of a certain shape-how outrageous and funny to see someone pick it up and talk to it as though it were a person. The boundaries that normally separate things from each other, or from oneself, may be dissolved also. This may cause the impression that one's limbs and torso are liquefying and flowing away (horror!); or that one is in such close rapport with others in the room that one can read their thoughts (love!); or that the barriers of logic have disappeared...
...goals of education, parents particularly prize the development of such personal qualities as honesty, respect for authority, and respect for other races and religions. Also near the top are the "desire to keep on learning throughout life" and such mental skills as "the ability to figure things out for oneself" and "to concentrate." But mathematics beyond simple arithmetic rates near the bottom of the list, presumably because few adults require such skills in their own lives. Similarly, at the very bottom of the rankings is the ability to speak a foreign language. Surprisingly low rankings go to such goals...
...authority itself. A nation needs a sense of history as much as it needs a sense of the future; it needs tradition not as a soporific, but as a means of measuring itself. Anthropologist Loren Eiseley defines the problem: "It would be an awful bother to have to reorient oneself every morning. If you build a skyscraper so rigid that it cannot sway, it will crack and break under the tension. The same is true of social institutions; change must be allowed for. But for an institution to be an institution, it must perforce have some rigidity...
When it comes to exercising the fingers, Rubinstein contends that too much practice destroys the spontaneity of a performance. Besides, he says, "I want to live?live passionately. So I don't believe in all this nonsense of tying oneself to the keyboard all day." While most musicians practice for five of six hours every day, he will go for days without looking at a piano. Some younger pianists, he says, in their note-niggling pursuit of perfection, end up "taking a performance out of their pocket instead of out of their heart." This lack of involvement, he feels, extends...
...response will be when drink is consumed with food and while sitting in a relaxed atmosphere, in contrast to drinking without food and standing in tense circumstances; how the use of alcohol provides meaningful experience when partaken with another, while a drink alone is as uncommunicative as talking to oneself; and how intoxication is sickness and not strength...