This is not wisdom yet, this is sleeping wisdom. To wake up, it needs you.
Perhaps, some of the greatest sages, like Confucius, Zarathustra, The Buddha, the Prophets of the Bible, Socrates, the Christ, or even Homer and Aesop never wrote, because they knew the danger of wise thoughts being frozen on tablets: "...if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence." (Phaedrus, 275, D)
The trouble with sleeping wisdom, cast in writing to be preserved, is that it needs to be resurrected from its slumber in changed times and circumstances. To come alive and serve you, those cups fit for wisdom - accounts, metaphors and symbols - will have to be filled with renewed content - today's new wine - and tasted anew; by you, in person, from your point of view and for your time. Understanding is live and personal. Words adjust their meaning. Common sense tends to be a universal and accessible attitude but it changes its references with the centuries. Being contextual and tailor-made in its nature, the meanings of the wise words may be alien to some dissimilar world where they come back to life. They may wake up alone, without their previous fellowship of understanding. A little wisdom stirred in isolation and applied "in general" can even be a dangerous thing. Wisdom received does not teach, it hints; it helps only when fine-tuned with esprit de finesse and applied with prudent good sense. That is, wisdom stated helps only when used wisely. It usually helps you see things in a new light, counsels you what and what not, what is good, right, beautiful, what is preferable or evil and maybe why, but it doesn't tell you in what measure, how exactly, when, and where, and with whom.
You should not believe what you read here but rather examine it with critical sense and try it out carefully. Judging right in a moving context is a matter of having your own head well made, good masters and many flying hours of learning from your own life experience. Yet again the rich – the intelligent and educated - will become richer and the poor in spirit will stay as dumb as they were found.
These “wise words” are worldly wisdom, not divine: things I lived, observed, or read, or heard, or thought up and worded myself. I collect, in the flow of the following pages, examples of what I found to be wise knowledge and action, things I believe within my own limits of understanding. This is, what appeared to me to be wise. Some of it proved in my experience to be wise as it bettered my life and my person. Much of it helped other persons to do better.
I believe now that wise words offer advice to questions like: What is important to know and to understand in order to live well in this world? What to want? What is of value and worth? What to avoid? How to go about things, to get what we want and to avoid what we do not want? How to live? How to be authors and freer actors of our life instead of mere toys of circumstances and received ideas?
Over the years this "page" is growing into a curious kind of book; a labyrinth of subjects inter-related and deepened in time, as I reflect and learn more.
I will never be able to believe or claim that my journey is more than an incessant beginning or that my findings are wise enough to grant advice for all; of course I will be wrong here and there. My advice is not science but instead a toolbox of common and uncommon sense devices. It evolved over years, in a web of intuition and of thoughts. I also take my sides and follow my values. This wisdom seems verified in my circumstances. Your own wisdom may arise by reaching an opposite conclusion to what I write. The value is certain, not in my conclusions, but in provoking one’s thoughts about these matters. The odyssey is more important than the destination I reached. Do your own journey!
Ioan Tenner
I will never be able to believe or claim that my journey is more than an incessant beginning or that my findings are wise enough to grant advice for all; of course I will be wrong here and there. My advice is not science but instead a toolbox of common and uncommon sense devices. It evolved over years, in a web of intuition and of thoughts. I also take my sides and follow my values. This wisdom seems verified in my circumstances. Your own wisdom may arise by reaching an opposite conclusion to what I write. The value is certain, not in my conclusions, but in provoking one’s thoughts about these matters. The odyssey is more important than the destination I reached. Do your own journey!
Ioan Tenner
"Wisdom, sleeping..." is another quiet place of exchange on Internet where all serious people are invited to contribute with critique (always welcome) and with opinions. We do not own the one right answer.
With this page I also try something traditional in a form less usual: an old-fashioned, intimate intellectual diary in public electronic form. Moreover, the text is ideally meant to be continued and improved by my son... if he will care.
In my youth I lived in denial of the simple truth that parents are with us only for a while; I did not ask all the questions I should have and I was too busy to at least listen to what they learned from life. Later, often, I longed to ask, but they were dead. The well was dry.
I want to leave to my family which will continue, I hope, in the house of tomorrow, the one I cannot visit, that written fountain-head which my parents did not have the leisure to leave for me - a later possibility to come and reconsider more than treacherous memory from how and what I learned and thought, and said. Thus, the next generation may reach higher than I, up from my shoulders, beyond my insights and my errors, instead of repeating the same.
I asked my son, Daniel Tenner, for whom I mainly write, to read the "posts" and comment, now or later. His role is clear: to challenge me from the start, in a dialogue between father and son, as equals. He will riposte to my claims, on-line or in private: “Wait a minute! Why do you say this? I find that reality, my reality, is different. The world is different now! This is how I see things.”
I dream to prove false the eternal complaint of the generational gap so well put in words by Willa Cather: “The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.” Let me dream.
With this page I also try something traditional in a form less usual: an old-fashioned, intimate intellectual diary in public electronic form. Moreover, the text is ideally meant to be continued and improved by my son... if he will care.
In my youth I lived in denial of the simple truth that parents are with us only for a while; I did not ask all the questions I should have and I was too busy to at least listen to what they learned from life. Later, often, I longed to ask, but they were dead. The well was dry.
I want to leave to my family which will continue, I hope, in the house of tomorrow, the one I cannot visit, that written fountain-head which my parents did not have the leisure to leave for me - a later possibility to come and reconsider more than treacherous memory from how and what I learned and thought, and said. Thus, the next generation may reach higher than I, up from my shoulders, beyond my insights and my errors, instead of repeating the same.
I asked my son, Daniel Tenner, for whom I mainly write, to read the "posts" and comment, now or later. His role is clear: to challenge me from the start, in a dialogue between father and son, as equals. He will riposte to my claims, on-line or in private: “Wait a minute! Why do you say this? I find that reality, my reality, is different. The world is different now! This is how I see things.”
I dream to prove false the eternal complaint of the generational gap so well put in words by Willa Cather: “The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.” Let me dream.
These then, the following, are some thoughts about wisdom and some words of wisdom I found to be deep and true in my life, in the times and the world of the Twentieth Century where I lived:
