#and the fact that the scott quote kind of formed my worldview is crazy

[siouiseaweed]

ruminating on learning and death

[hopefully not as morbid as the title presents! i just had a Thought today and i want to document it in a form that is more polished than a journal entry but less polished than an essay]

"the day we stop learning is the day we die."

i read a book series when I was younger about nicholas flamel by the author michael scott (real guy, not the office character) and in one of the six or so books, scott wrote the quote above. i fell in love with it and quoted it all the time (my parents hated it and thought it was too morbid for me to be saying as a fourth grader). it was the first time that i can remember being impacted by something someone else said. for better or for worse, i think this quote is what led me to place value in my identity as a student.

anyway, i searched the quote today because i was curious if i'd been getting it right. it turns out i have been right–i haven't misremembered a single word. it also turns out though that the author wasn't necessarily the first one to say those words. apparently, einstein is attributed to having said something very similar. his quote was:

"when you stop learning you start dying."

full disclaimer: i have no clue if einstein actually said that. what is interesting to me is not the fact that it's something einstein said, but the fact that it's my favorite quote parading around in someone else's mouth. it's the essence of the thing i've been thinking about for most of my remembered life, and it turns out that what i've been quoting is someone's regurgitation of a particular sentiment about learning and living.

i can't help but feel a little bit devastated because "when you stop learning you start dying" has similar diction, syntax and meaning to "the day we stop learning is the day we die," but is not the same thing. i had always interpreted the scott quote in a very literal sense, thinking of it as an idea that being human is learning, and that the only thing that can prevent you from learning something new is death itself. "you learn something new everyday" was the idea i'd paired this with. i thought it was impossible to exist in a day and not learn some sort of lesson. good or bad, you are forced through a lesson via the things that happen to you and the things you take in. even on my worst days, unable to do more than lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, i would learn something. maybe not something about how the world works or how other people work, but something about myself, about my thought processes, about how exhausting living can be, about what is worth leaving bed for on bad days and what isn't. even if i couldn't/wouldn't specifically articulate what i'd learned, i had still learned something.

but i don't think that this sentiment can be found within the einstein quote. the einstein quote implies that learning is an intentional action, is something you set out to do, is something that you take an active part in. it implies that you choose to learn, that gaining information is not an act that washes over you like a wave, but something you need to equip yourself with scuba gear and fins to plunge yourself into. it's the idea that not trying to learn something is the first true step towards death.

it's a really ominous change in wording to me. i can't help but read it and think that it is possible to die long before the final push of air from your lungs. it feels hopeless to me, it feels as though it's possible to be alive and not be fully human (i think the scott quote gives me the impression that learning is what makes us human, so it makes me think that the einstein quote implies some sort of less-than-human aspect to being alive and not learning). i read the einstein quote, and i am less afraid of death and more afraid of watching myself die.

all the same, it's possible that this is a reading you can have of the first quote. had i read that first quote today, would i react to it in the same way i reacted to the einstein quote just now? is there actually a difference in the meaning of these two quotes, or am i seeing a difference in meaning where there is actually just a difference in my worldview at the time of my readings?