Another role for university: learning how to live
Jenny Erpenbeck:
It would be nice if the university weren’t something like the gateway to a career, some sort of dues paid to the outside world where you have to succeed if you want to pay your rent, if it didn’t just give you time to learn how you work, but instead time to learn how you live, to learn what matters to you and what doesn’t, if the university could be the affirmation of one’s inner life, of a far-off, remote, uncharted, maybe even uncongenial landscape with its own calendar, where those who are seeking their own way have time to get lost, time to take detours, to meet this or that person along the way, to get excited about something, to despair of something, and sometimes just to lie in the grass, look at the clouds passing overhead, and leave room for thoughts to grow. Because what I referred to earlier as the ‘kernel of truth’ may find you where you least expect it.
“On ‘The Old Child’” (Bamberg Lecture I; reprinted in Not a Novel: a Memoir in Pieces," p. 92)
