In one of the books he learned that the most important text in the literature of alchemy contained only a few lines, and had been inscribed on the surface of an emerald.
"It's the Emerald Tablet," said the Englishman, proud that he might teach something to the boy.
"Well, then, why do we need all these books?" the boy asked.
"So that we can understand those few lines."
There is a kind of indeterminacy, quite different in essence from the famous principle of Heisenberg but just as effective in limiting our knowledge of nature, which lies in the fact that we can neither consciously sense nor think of much at any one moment. Understanding can only come from a roving viewpoint and sequential changes of scale of attention.
Tea is said to be the way. This is because it is something one learns to appreciate through feeling, not through verbal instructions. If a person maintains a state of quietness, only then will one appreciate the quietness inherent in tea.
Irwin's terms of sudden, physical realization – bam! – call to mind the suddenly enlightening Zen slap or rap on the forehead. It also calls to mind [Philip Guston]'s own remark..."Look at any inspired painting...it's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation." Reverberation is another way of suggesting a kind of sudden, energetic, physical experience.
Instead of mechanically applying or merely implying laws and rules
of color harmony, distinct color effects are produced
– through recognition of the interaction of color –
by making, for instance,
2 very different colors look alike, or nearly alike.The aim of such study is to develop – through experience
– by trial and error – an eye for color.
This means, specifically, seeing color action
as well as feeling color relatedness.As a general training it means development of observation and articulation.
This book, therefore, does not follow an academic conception
of “theory and practice.”
It reverses this order and places practice before theory,
which, after all, is the conclusion of practice.
When we say we “know Hamlet”, we do not mean merely that we can memorise the whole succession of words and events in Hamlet. We mean that we have in our minds an awareness of Hamlet as a complete whole—“the end in the beginning”. We can prove this by observing how differently we feel when seeing a performance of Hamlet on the one hand and an entirely new play on the other.
A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to clearly hear a lyric, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.
American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, writing that as a girl, when her mother read to her from Percy's Reliques, she had misheard the lyric "layd him on the green" in the fourth line of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" as "Lady Mondegreen".
One can study an object and note its features, but that only touches the surface. A knowledge of an artwork’s properties does not lead to an understanding of its essence.
The concept of seamfulness prompts designers to ask how an object can aid understanding and usage by showing its users what’s going on inside. How can we create what Mark Weiser, later revising his ideas of seamless design, calls “beautiful seams” — thoughtfully-crafted moments of revelation? Notion doesn’t show us how it’s literally working — the background processes constantly running to enable editing, collaboration, and the like. We don’t need to see our car’s engine to know it’s running. But it shows users how their understanding is working, how our ideas are structured, connected, and evolving.
Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.
The act of drawing serves to remind us that hands are agents of thought and experiment. Photography has a great future, but no matter how much ancillary wizardry photography accumulates, it will not be in competition with “drawing” in the broadest sense of that term. There will always be a role for exploration by the hands, encumbered by no more than a piece of ocher or a stick of charcoal.
Its practical utility is as a manifestation of the mind struggling with the meaning of what it encounters and what it wants to explore.
Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.
The physicist Victor Weisskopf once said to his MIT students who worked exclusively with computerized experiments:
When you show me that result, the computer understands the answer, but I don't think you understand the answer.
When I was still doubtful as to his ability, I asked G.E. Moore for his opinion. Moore replied, ‘I think very well of him indeed.’ When I enquired the reason for his opinion, he said that it was because Wittgenstein was the only man who looked puzzled at his lectures. — Bertrand Russell
The most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't know something. Striving to be the dumbest person in the room.
When you don’t have to filter your inquisitiveness through a smoke screen of intellectual posturing, you can genuinely receive or listen to new information. If you are always trying to disguise your ignorance of a subject, you will be distracted from understanding it.
If you can understand a city, then that city is dead.
The most powerful way to gain insight into a system is by moving between levels of abstraction. Many designers do this instinctively. But it's easy to get stuck on the ground, experiencing concrete systems with no higher-level view. It's also easy to get stuck in the clouds, working entirely with abstract equations or aggregate statistics.
This interactive essay presents the ladder of abstraction, a technique for thinking explicitly about these levels, so a designer can move among them consciously and confidently.
The ability of the physical world — a floor, a wall — to act as a screen of near infinite resolution becomes more powerful the more time we spend heads-down in our handheld computers, screens the size of palms. In fact, it’s almost impossible to see the visual patterns — the inherent adjacencies — of a physical book unless you deconstruct it and splay it out on the floor.
It is difficult to get people to understand something, when their salary depends on not understanding it.
The hardest thing about customer interviews is knowing where to dig. An effective interview is more like a friendly interrogation. We don’t want to learn what customers think about the product, or what they like or dislike — we want to know what happened and how they chose... To get those answers we can’t just ask surface questions, we have to keep digging back behind the answers to find out what really happened.
Given there’s an explosion in software to accrete and organise knowledge, is the page model really the best approach?
Perhaps the building blocks shouldn’t be pages or blocks, but
neighbourhoods
roads
rooms and doors
landmarks.Or rather, as a knowledge base or wiki develops, it should - just like a real city - encourage its users to gravitate towards these different fundamental elements. A page that starts to function a little bit like a road should transform into a slick navigation element, available on all its linked pages. A page which is functioning like a landmark should start being visible from two hops away.
Form comes from wonder. Wonder stems from our 'in touchness' with how we were made. One senses that nature records the process of what it makes, so that in what it makes there is also the records of how it was made. In touch with this record we are in wonder. This wonder gives rise to knowledge. But knowledge is related to other knowledge and this relation gives a sense of order, a sense of how they inter-relate in a harmony that makes all things exist. From knowledge to sense of order we then wink at wonder and say How am I doing, wonder?
Free from obscurity and easy to understand; the comprehensibility of clear expression
One of the major principles of extensive reading is that if a learner can comprehend material at 98% comprehension, she will acquire new words in context, in a painless, enjoyable way. But what is 98% comprehension?
Reread a book enough times, or often enough—keep it at hand so you can flip to dog-eared pages and marked up passages here and there—and it will eventually root itself in your mind. It becomes both a reference point and a connector, a means of gathering your knowledge and experience, drawing it all together. It becomes the material through which you engage with the world.
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
The world doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
I do not sit down at my desk to put into in verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind I would have no incentive or need to write about it. I am an explorer…We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand.
It is not evident, though many people, from the early Greeks on, implicitly act as if it were true, that all things, whatsoever they may be, can be put into words—you could talk about anything: the gods, truth, beauty, and justice. But if you consider what happens in a music concert, then it is obvious that what is transmitted to the audience cannot be put into words—if it could, then the composer and musicians would probably have used words. All the music critics to the contrary, what music communicates cannot (apparently) be put into words. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, for painting. Poetry is a curious field where words are used but the true content of the poem is not in the words!