Blackboard Of Life Quotes

The game of life does not proceed like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes they make five, or minus four, and sometimes the blackboard topples over in the middle of the sum and the pedagogue is left with a black eye.

I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.

On the Left side of the blackboard I print a capital F on the right side another capital F. I draw an arrow from left to right, from FEAR to FREEDOM. I don’t think anyone achieves complete freedom, but what I am trying to do with you is drive fear into a corner

With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? - A.Y. 'I'm going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,' he said. 'Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don't want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.

Sex, once a law as undisputed as gravity, has been disproved. The equation is erased, the blackboard broken

I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid I haven't been alive enough. It should be written on every school room blackboard: Life is a playground - or nothing.

the professor had refused surgery for the rupturing aorta that was wiping his personal equation off the blackboard of life. “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially,” Einstein had told his physicians.

That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, muck later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: 'Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process.

Life says: " Write down your experiences in a notebook, not on a blackboard. Don't start with a clean slate, but with a new page, so you can look back.

WELCOME TO THE BLACKBOARDS This is the Cordovites' premier wormhole, where time ticks backward, trees grow down, light eats itself, fear is an opening, and life is Sovereign, Deadly, Perfect.

Don’t forget to be specific…Details. Put in all the details. The boys appreciate all that detailed daily life sh*t they don’t get anymore. If you’ve got a teacher you’re hot for, tell ‘em what her hair looks like, what her legs look like, what she eats for lunch. If she’s teaching you geometry, tell ‘em how she draws a bloody triangle on the blackboard. If you went down the shop for a bag of sweets yesterday, did you ride your pushee? Did you go by foot? Did you see a rainbow along the way? Did you buy gobstoppers or clinkers or caramels? If you had a good meat pie last week was it steak and peas or curry or mushroom and beef? You catchin’ my drift? Details.

The black can be sooty, soily, glazed, cindery, blackboard black, kohl black, coal black, noir, schwarz, nero. I don’t know how many words and phrases there are to describe black—slate black, cast-iron black, jet black, flat-screen-TV black, ink black, burnt black, liturgical black, hell black—but the raven’s black is as various and as a dense as there are meanings and values attached to the very idea of black, black representing death, mourning, negation, sin, solemnity, the vacancy of space, and all the horrors of human terror and the exercise of power.

When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.

Death is [...] the blackboard on which life is written.

All us kids had found out by now that all teachers had a sore spot; some went crazy over gum chewing, others insane over behind-the-back giggles, still others nuts over the repeated squeaking and scuffing of shoes on the linoleum. Machine-gun coughs, donkeylike snorts, a fusillade of throat clearing, spitballs stuck to the blackboard: all these were arsenals in the battle against Hitlerian teachers.

All us kids had found out by now that all teachers had a sore spot; some went crazy over gum chewing, others insane over behind-the-back giggles, still others nuts over the repeated squeaking and scuffing of shoes on the linoleum. Machine-gun coughs, donkeylike snorts, a fusillade of throat clearing, spitballs stuck to the blackboard: all these were arsenals in the battle against Hitlerian teachers. Who knows?

I was extraordinarily confused, because the one thing happening in my universe was Mr. Jiminez writing on the blackboard, and I couldn’t fathom how he could be both an auditory and a visual presence in my life.

Entropy is the degree of randomness or disorder in a system, Doctor.” His eyes fix on Werner’s for a heartbeat, a glance both warm and chilling. “Disorder. You hear the commandant say it. You hear your bunk masters say it. There must be order. Life is chaos, gentlemen. And what we represent is an ordering to that chaos. Even down to the genes. We are ordering the evolution of the species. Winnowing out the inferior, the unruly, the chaff. This is the great project of the Reich, the greatest project human beings have ever embarked upon.” Hauptmann writes on the blackboard. The cadets inscribe the words into their composition books. The entropy of a closed system never decreases. Every process must by law decay.

I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, or life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase 'Christian child' or 'Muslim child' should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.

I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase "Christian child" or "Muslim child" should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.

Entropy is the degree of randomness or disorder in a system, Doctor.” His eyes fix on Werner’s for a heartbeat, a glance both warm and chilling. “Disorder. You hear the commandant say it. You hear your bunk masters say it. There must be order. Life is chaos, gentlemen. And what we represent is an ordering to that chaos. Even down to the genes. We are ordering the evolution of the species. Winnowing out the inferior, the unruly, the chaff. This is the great project of the Reich, the greatest project human beings have ever embarked upon.” Hauptmann writes on the blackboard. The cadets inscribe the words into their composition books. The entropy of a closed system never decreases. Every process must by law decay. The

With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? —A. Y. “I’m going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,” he said. “Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze,

1) Nothing is real, everything is possible. If you never make a choice, anything is possible. 2) At my age the candles cost more than the cake. I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid I haven't been alive enough. It should be written on every school room blackboard: Life is a playground - or nothing. 3) You don't exist. Neither do I. We only live in the imagination of a 9 year old child. We are imagined by 9 year old child, faced with an impossible choice.

Einstein went on to Princeton, where he delivered a weeklong series of scientific lectures and received an honorary degree “for voyaging through strange seas of thought.” Not only did he get a nice fee for the lectures (though apparently not the $15,000 he had originally sought), he also negotiated a deal while there that Princeton could publish his lectures as a book from which he would get a 15 percent royalty.47 At the behest of Princeton’s president, all of Einstein’s lectures were very technical. They included more than 125 complex equations that he scribbled on the blackboard while speaking in German. As one student admitted to a reporter, “I sat in the balcony, but he talked right over my head anyway.

After being conditioned as a child to the lovely never-never land of magic, of fairy queens and virginal maidens, of little princes and their rosebushes, of poignant bears and Eeyore-ish donkeys, of life personalized, as the pagans loved it, of the magic wand, and the faultless illustrations—the beautiful dark-haired child (who was you) winging through the midnight sky on a star-path in her mother’s box of reels—of Griselda in her feather-cloak, walking barefoot with the Cuckoo in the lantern-lit world of nodding mandarins, of Delight in her flower garden with the slim-limbed flower sprites … all this I knew, and felt, and believed. All this was my life when I was young. To go from this to the world of “grown-up” reality … To feel the sexorgans develop and call loud to the flesh; to become aware of school, exams (the very words as unlovely as the sound of chalk shrilling on the blackboard), bread and butter, marriage, sex, compatibility, war, economics, death, and self. What a pathetic blighting of the beauty and reality of childhood. Not to be sentimental, as I sound, but why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life? To learn snide and smutty meanings of words you once loved, like “fairy.” —From The Journals of Sylvia Plath

We were scarecrows in blue uniforms. After a grand total of five days of blackboard instruction and fifty rounds at the NYPD firing range, my new police academy classmates and I were standing out on the sidewalks of central Brooklyn pretending to be police officers. They gave us badges. They gave us handcuffs. They gave us guns—standard police-issue Smith & Wesson .38 Specials. They told us, “Good luck.” In early July 1966, riots had broken out in East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brownsville, Brooklyn. Hundreds of angry young men were roaming the streets and throwing bottles and rocks. Already they had injured police officers and attempted to flip over a radio car. On one corner, police found eighteen Molotov cocktails. The borough commander was calling for reinforcements—and fast.

I have become comfortably numb.’ and I do not feel anymore. My dreams feel like real reality, and day-to-day life feels like I am not even there. My body is just like an empty shale that I am stuck in now, that seems to be cracking. My mind is still sprinting around the room. What to say, what not to say, what to do, what not to do. Do I look okay, does this uniform look good today, my hair looks like crap? AHH! Is it time to go home yet! My internal voice does not shut up; it runs fragmented thoughts constantly. Yet my exterior voice does not stand up for me, yet all those words have to make sense. So why say anything at all. Sometimes I jump five feet in the air when the voices come over the intercoms, and it screeches in my ears like Miss. Manco’s nails on the blackboard. The message sounds like it has no rhythm or conclusion. Just more shit my brain has to process.

I have here Alaska’s final. You’ll recall that you were asked what the most important question facing people is, and how the three traditions we’re studying this year address that question. This was Alaska’s question.” With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? —A. Y. “I’m going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,” he said. “Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don’t want us to forget Alaska, and I don’t want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we’re trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers—how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called ‘people’s rotten lots in life.

The leader of the Red Guards stepped up to Nien Cheng. “We are the Red Guards. We have come to take revolutionary action against you!” Nien Cheng held up the copy of the Constitution and looked the leader in the eye. “It’s against the Constitution to enter a private house without a search warrant.” The man grabbed the Constitution out of Nien’s hand and threw it on the floor. “The Constitution is abolished. It was a document written by the Revisionists within the Communist Party. We recognize only the teachings of our Great Leader Chairman Mao.” One of the Red Guards took the stick he was carrying and smashed the mirror hanging over a wooden chest in the entryway. Another guard replaced the mirror with a blackboard that bore a quotation from Mao: “When the enemies with guns are annihilated, the enemies without guns still remain. We must not belittle these enemies.”2 With that, the young guards tore through the house, smashing furniture, dumping shelves of books onto the floor, slashing priceless paintings by Lin Fengmian and Qi Baishi. On a rampage, the eager students looted the closets and drawers, tearing most of Nien Cheng’s clothing and linens. They overturned the bed mattresses and hacked them to pieces. Then they smashed her music recordings. Pressing on, they found the food pantry and dumped flour, sugar, and canned goods onto the ravaged clothing. They broke several bottles of red wine, pouring it over the mess.

Lloyd moved to the blackboard and wrote ‘Maneater, Hall and Oates’ at the bottom of a long list of songs and artists. The blackboard in the kitchen had once been installed as a way of communication for the house. It had turned into a list of Songs That You Would Never See In The Same Light Again. This was basically a list of songs that our serial killing landlord had blared at one time or another at top volume to cover the sound of his heavy electric power tools. It was a litany of 70’s and 80’s music. Blondie, Heart of Glass was on the list. So was Duran Duran’s ‘Hungry like the Wolf’. Sam had jokingly given him an Einstürzende Neubauten CD on the premise that his tools would blend right in to the music, and he’d returned it the next day, saying it was too suspicious-sounding and made him very nervous for some reason. The next weekend, we had gone right back to the 80’s with the Missing Persons and Dead or Alive. I tried not to think about why he was playing the music, but it was a little hard not to think about. The strange thumps sometimes suggested that he’d gotten a live one downstairs and was merrily bashing in their skull in the name of his psoriasis to the tune of ‘It’s My Life’ by Talk Talk. Other times I listened in horror as my favorite Thomas Dolby songs were accompanied by an annoying high-pitched buzzsaw whine that altered as if it had entered some sort of solid tissue. He never borrowed music from us again – he claimed our music was too disturbing and dark, and shunned our offerings of Ministry and Nine Inch Nails in favor of some­thing nice and happy by Abba. You’ve never had a restless night from imagining someone deboning a human body while blaring ‘Waterloo’ or ‘Fernando’. It’s not fun.

what I knew that morning in March 1977 as we settled around the conference table. I wasn’t even sure how these guys reached us, or how they’d arranged this meeting. “Okay, fellas,” I said, “what’ve you got?” It was a beautiful day, I remember. The light outside the room was a buttery pale yellow, and the sky was blue for the first time in months, so I was distracted, a little spring feverish, as Rudy leaned his weight on the edge of the conference table and smiled. “Mr. Knight, we’ve come up with a way to inject . . . air . . . into a running shoe.” I frowned and dropped my pencil. “Why?” I said. “For greater cushioning,” he said. “For greater support. For the ride of a lifetime.” I stared. “You’re kidding me, right?” I’d heard a lot of silliness from a lot of different people in the shoe business, but this. Oh. Brother. Rudy handed me a pair of soles that looked as if they’d been teleported from the twenty-second century. Big, clunky, they were clear thick plastic and inside were—bubbles? I turned them over. “Bubbles?” I said. “Pressurized air bags,” he said. I set down the soles and gave Rudy a closer look, a full head-to-toe. Six-three, lanky, with unruly dark hair, bottle-bottom glasses, a lopsided grin, and a severe vitamin D deficiency, I thought. Not enough sunshine. Or else a long-lost member of the Addams Family. He saw me appraising him, saw my skepticism, and wasn’t the least fazed. He walked to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and began writing numbers, symbols, equations. He explained at some length why an air shoe would work, why it would never go flat, why it was the Next Big Thing. When he finished I stared at the blackboard. As a trained accountant I’d spent a good part of my life looking at blackboards, but this Rudy fella’s scribbles were something else. Indecipherable.

With that, there was no holding back Rommel or his men: Benghazi fell that night, the British departure hasty and unorganized. (A few days later, when inspecting the port facilities, Rommel came across a blackboard where a cheeky Tommy had chalked an admonishment for the new owners: “Please keep tidy! Back soon!” Rommel grinned and then growled, “We’ll see about that!”)

Instinct can be roughly divided into two urges: the urge to survive and the urge to reproduce. In humans, the conscious mind is aware of these urges. We built a society to manage our instincts. In fact, society so thoroughly mitigates our instincts, it is easy to forget that we have them at all.” He turned to the blackboard and began jotting a frenzied list. “We have customs, manners, governance, the constabulary, traditions, education, fashion, commerce, creative invention, sports, and on and on. All of these expressions of our society work to the same goal of suppressing and managing our instinctual response.” The blackboard rattled and rocked on its feet, shaken by Senlin’s emphatic jots. “Instinct is the fuel that fires the engine of civilization. Generations have labored to build and perfect the engine. Each of you, I hope, will spend your life working to preserve it. Because without it, we would be dangerous beasts.

the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.

Years passed—or was it just a moment? Hard to say. Phyllis’s cognitive mind slipped farther and farther away and a different kind of awareness bloomed. The swamp breathed and she breathed with it. She saw everything: the creatures, the flowers, the tender shoots of green and the towering trees, the depths of the water. All that was dead and dying. All that was bursting with life. Her notebooks, tucked away in their plastic container, were gradually forgotten. The urge to record, to quantify, left her. Instead, she returned to the inclination that had guided her through all the years when her mind was sharp. The root of her curiosity: a simple and enduring desire to notice. There were moments during this last stretch when she occupied herself so completely that she forgot there had been any other time than now, any other way to exist but this. And there were also moments when she fought against the ebbing of logic and analysis, feeling adrift and upset, as if something precious had been taken from her that she would never have again. All of this was true. All of it was right. Memories of childhood dusted her skin like pollen. All it took was a brisk gust of wind to send it all scattering. She remembered learning—the crispness of a washed blackboard, a good mark on her paper, the perfect loneliness of a library; she remembered men she’d known and she remembered intimacy; she remembered her parents, having them and losing them; she remembered her sister, pretty and harsh and unwilling to imagine the future Phyllis had foreseen; she remembered teaching—the way her hands shook at the start of every term, her students and their litany of excuses; she remembered her research—working in the field, working at her desk, the minutiae of life glimpsed through a microscope; she remembered every forest she’d ever walked through; she remembered every city she’d ever visited; she remembered preparing, preparing, preparing. And then all of this was gone. Piece by piece, Phyllis said goodbye to each part of her life that had come before. She held on to Wanda the longest. As long as she could. She replayed every moment they had spent together. She repeated Wanda’s name to herself when Wanda left her alone in the tree house, reciting it like a chant, a prayer, so that when she came home, it would already be on her tongue. This didn’t always work. Sometimes Phyllis arrived in a moment she hadn’t been aware of—like time travel, hopping from one place to another with smooth, easy leaps. It was only when she saw the exhaustion on Wanda’s face that she realized she had missed something in between. “I’m sorry,” Phyllis said. “I think I…was somewhere else.” “That’s all right.” “What are we doing?” “We’re weaving nets. Do you want to help?” “Yes. Yes, please.” They sat

The Marshall Society talk was doubtless interesting, but probably not altogether pleasant for Hayek. Some forty-odd years later, Joan Robinson in her Ely Lecture talked about how Hayek had “covered the blackboard with his triangles” and about the “pitiful state of confusion” within economics that his talk, in retrospect, represented. In her recounting, Kahn had “asked in a puzzled tone, ‘Is it your view that if I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat, that would increase unemployment?’ ‘Yes,’ said Hayek. ‘But,’ pointing to his triangles on the board, ‘it would take a very long mathematical argument to explain why’” (Robinson 1978a [1972], 2–3). In his own reminiscence, Kahn (1984) observed: “It is only fair to Hayek to mention that he had to condense four lectures into one, and that they were written when he had a high temperature” (182).

One billion years of real time = 24 days on the cosmic calendar. And then on the wall next to it: THE COSMIC CALENDAR Jan. 1: Big Bang May 1: Origin of the Milky Way Galaxy Sept. 9: Origin of the Solar System Sept. 14: Formation of the Earth Sept. 25: Origin of life on Earth Oct. 2: Formation of the oldest rocks known on Earth Oct. 9: Date of the oldest fossils known to man Nov. 1: Invention of sex (by microorganisms) Dec. 16: First worms Dec. 19: First fish Dec. 21: First insects Dec. 22: First amphibians Dec. 24: First dinosaurs Dec. 26: First mammals Dec. 27: First birds Dec. 29: First primates Dec. 30: First hominids Dec. 31: First humans On the blackboard, my mother had written: If one day equaled the age of the universe, all of recorded history would be no more than ten seconds. I copied this into my green notebook. My mother wiped the chalk off on her skirt. “I just thought you should know,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you did.

While I sat in back in the dark, snug and comfortable, my aunt had several removes lectured me: “You have to erase from your memory everything that happened in Europe. You have to make a new beginning. You have to forget what they did to you. Wipe it off like chalk from a blackboard.” And to make me understand better, she gestured as if wiping a board with a sponge. I thought, she wants me to get rid of the only thing that I own for sure: my life, that is, the years I have lived. But you can't throw away your life like old clothing, as if you had another outfit in the closet. Would she want to wipe away her own childhood? I have the one I have, and she has a different one – I can't invent one for myself that's more respectable. Struggling with foreign words that seemed to lurk behind seven veils, I told her why I had to reject this invitation to betray my people, my dead. The language was recalcitrant. My aunt hardly listened to my alien gibberish.

My affliction decided to join us, forcing me to push my toes on the floor as though I were trying to eject myself from the chair. I prayed she didn’t notice what the affliction was making me do. I half expected to be eaten alive or murdered and buried out back in the school yard. “I’m not afraid of you, ya know,” I said, although I was terrified of her. The words hurt her, but that wasn’t my intent. She turned her face and looked out the window into North Cliff Street. She knew what her face and twisted body looked like, and she probably knew what the kids said about her. It was probably an open wound for her and I had just tossed salt into it. I was instantly ashamed of what I done and tried to correct myself. I didn’t mean to be hurtful, because I knew what it was like to be ridiculed for something that was beyond one’s control, such as my affliction, and how it made me afraid to touch the chalk because the feel of chalk to people like me is overwhelming. If I had to write on the blackboard, I held the chalk with the cuff of my shirt and the class laughed. “You look good in a nun’s suit,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say, but I meant well by it. She looked down at the black robe as if she were seeing it for the first time.

           •   On dunces: in the old days, if you were found out to be a dunce on any given subject you would have been asked to don a donkey hat for an hour, and made to stand to the right of the blackboard with your back to the class, dodging an array of projectiles -bits of erasers, paper planes, dried snot balls et cetera- but nowadays, in startling contrast, you’d be invited to stand outside, in the cold hallway, thereby sharply decreasing your chances to learn anything of the lesson you were supposed to catch up on. Another triumph of modern thinking!

Don’t forget to be specific,’ Slim always says. ‘Details. Put in all the details. The boys appreciate all that detailed daily life shit they don’t get any more. If you’ve got a teacher you’re hot for, tell ’em what her hair looks like, what her legs look like, what she eats for lunch. If she’s teaching you geometry, tell ’em how she draws a bloody triangle on the blackboard. If you went down the shop for a bag of sweets yesterday, did you ride your pushy, did you go by foot, did you see a rainbow along the way? Did you buy gobstoppers or clinkers or caramels? If you ate a good meat pie last week, was it steak and peas or curry or mushroom beef? You catchin’ my drift? Details.

She touched him lightly with her fingers and left a trail of goosebumps on his skin. Life flat chalk on a blackboard. Like breeze in a paddyfield. Like jet-streaks in a blue church sky. He took her face in his hands and drew it towards his. He closed his eyes and smelled her skin. Ammu laughed. Yes, Margaret, she thought. We do it to each other too. She kissed his closed eyes and stood up. Velutha with his back against the mangosteen tree watched her walk away. She had a dry rose in her hair. She turned to say it once again: ‘Naaley.’ Tomorrow.

In the cool of evening people gather on deck to watch stars emerge from the twilight—at first single pinpricks and then a swarm, uncountable. The sky tilts steadily night by night, revealing new parts of itself as our changed latitude tips old constellations below the horizon and hoists new ones aloft. Soon there is a thrilling first glimpse of the Southern Cross, its iconic quadrangle pointing toward the antipodes, just below the shadow of Corvus the crow. The North Star sinks lower, steadfast pivot of the heavens until a day at the equator when it will dip to the horizon and vanish. In the northern hemisphere, Polaris will always make an angle with the horizon equal to your latitude—a cosmic geometry first revealed to me in magic diagrams by an astronomy professor, rocketing across the blackboard in a cloud of chalk dust.

The most common way to establish contact with our fellow men is through language. Yet like Strindberg, Bergman distrusts language as a means of communication in any deeper sense. We have already seen how Elisabet in Persona chooses muteness in the conviction that words equal lies. Taking Hummel’s remark in The Ghost Sonata to heart that languages are “codes” invented “to conceal the secrets of one tribe from the others,” Bergman often demonstrates how language rather than serve as a means of communication serves as a conscious or unconscious barrier. This idea is fundamental in The Silence, where the main characters are confronted with a language, construed by Bergman, which is as unintelligible to them as to us. The inability to understand the foreign language is here a metaphor for our inability to understand one another truly. While Anna in The Silence tries to communicate via the senses, her sister Ester, a professional translator, tries to do so via reason. In her attempt to understand the foreign language she is, like the Student in The Ghost Sonata, a seeker who tries to understand life intellectually. In the nightmarish exam scene of Wild Strawberries, professor emeritus Isak Borg, who has been a harsh examiner, finds himself in the position of his former students. It is now his turn to be harshly examined and to fail his exam. His failure is serious since the blackboard text Isak is unable to decipher tells what a doctor’s—read: man’s--primary duty is: to care for your fellow men. The sequence is a contamination of the Asylum scene in To Damascus I and the school scene in A Dream Play. In the former the Stranger is condemned for the wrongs he has done to his fellow men, in the latter the Officer, recently conferred doctor, finds himself returned to primary school. In Wild Strawberries we have a thematic counterpart of the school scene when young Sara tells Isak, as she holds a mirror in front of his face, that although he knows a lot, he knows in fact almost nothing—that is, about the essentials of life. When Tomas, the doubting priest in Winter Light sits down at one of the pupils’ desks in the local school, it is a discreet reminder that he, like Isak Borg and the Officer, needs to “mature” as it says in A Dream Play.

Was it wise of me at all to have confined my career to one small classroom in one small town? Wouldn't I be coming away from my life's work with a higher heart if I hadn't been washing the same blackboard for forty-six years?

Courage is the helium of the soul.

The most common way to establish contact with our fellow men is through language. Yet like Strindberg, Bergman distrusts language as a means of communication in any deeper sense. We have already seen how Elisabet in Persona chooses muteness in the conviction that words equal lies. Taking Hummel’s remark in The Ghost Sonata to heart that languages are “codes” invented “to conceal the secrets of one tribe from the others,” Bergman often demonstrates how language rather than serve as a means of communication serves as a conscious or unconscious barrier. This idea is fundamental in The Silence, where the main characters are confronted with a language, construed by Bergman, which is as unintelligible to them as to us. The inability to understand the foreign language is here a metaphor for our inability to understand one another truly. While Anna in The Silencetries to communicate via the senses, her sister Ester, a professional translator, tries to do so via reason. In her attempt to understand the foreign language she is, like the Student in The Ghost Sonata, a seeker who tries to understand life intellectually. In the nightmarish exam scene of Wild Strawberries, professor emeritus Isak Borg, who has been a harsh examiner, finds himself in the position of his former students. It is now his turn to be harshly examined and to fail his exam. His failure is serious since the blackboard text Isak is unable to decipher tells what a doctor’s—read: man’s--primary duty is: to care for your fellow men. The sequence is a contamination of the Asylum scene in To Damascus I and the school scene in A Dream Play. In the former the Stranger is condemned for the wrongs he has done to his fellow men, in the latter the Officer, recently conferred doctor, finds himself returned to primary school. In Wild Strawberries we have a thematic counterpart of the school scene when young Sara tells Isak, as she holds a mirror in front of his face, that although he knows a lot, he knows in fact almost nothing—that is, about the essentials of life. When Tomas, the doubting priest in Winter Light sits down at one of the pupils’ desks in the local school, it is a discreet reminder that he, like Isak Borg and the Officer, needs to “mature” as it says in A Dream Play.

That’s why there are meaningless coincidences. Every time someone encounters this sort of coincidence, he moves a bit on the scale. To one side or the other. And this movement can be difficult, like a fingernail screeching on a blackboard, or pleasant, like an infant caress. That's why we perform them, these coincidences. In order to get people moving on the scale, because this movement on the scale, any scale, is called life. That’s the way it is. The main thing is to move.

But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is. And if I die—God forbid—I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, “Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?