Word: unlearn
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...boat and a car, maybe a canoe and a bicycle too for the skinny inlets and alleys along the way, and a lot of time and patience. We could at best splash in it a little, to see what it felt like, and what we might learn--and unlearn--by stopping along the way. It was worth remembering Huck Finn's lesson: the river is the sanctuary; the shore is where you get into trouble...
...efforts to analyze and footnote may leave us numb to the beautiful and incapable of being moved by the magnificent. Just as an average teenager's desire to fit in leads him or her to squelch a sense of awe, the demands of our education may lead us to unlearn our natural sense of wonder...
Instead of allowing our desire for mastery over the unknown encroach upon our sense of wonder, we ought to cultivate that sense of wonder, or at least refuse to unlearn it. There is a middle ground between rational analysis and naive innocence, and a robust sense of wonder ought to occupy that middle ground. If we forbid ourselves from feeling awe and excitement, we may do long-term damage and risk setting ourselves on a collision course with midlife crises...
Summers, who was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard history, was every bit as much a rocket scientist as the economists at LTCM. But Greenspan says one of the keys to Summers' success in Washington is his ability to unlearn much of what he once taught. "Larry has one overriding virtue: he is very smart," Greenspan explained one afternoon last week, as a springlike day cooled into night outside his Washington office. "And unlike people who are smart and believe they are smart, he is open to the recognition that a lot of what he thinks is true...
...revealing about the insecurities that plagued her when she took over the Post after Phil's death. "I still had little idea of how to relate to people in a business environment," she says, "and no idea how closely I was being watched by everyone." She also had to unlearn a few of Phil's bad habits. He had thought nothing of mingling politics with journalism: a close friend and adviser to Lyndon Johnson, for instance, the Post publisher was instrumental in persuading John Kennedy to pick L.B.J. as his running mate in 1960. After becoming President, Johnson cultivated...