Only Education Can Save You!

That’s what I used to hear a lot at home when I was little.

My parents were simple people who didn’t have much education. My mother had been sent by her parents to a school to learn a trade, even though she had been a very good student; my father had been abandoned by his parents when he was 3-4 years old, when the Second World War was ending and a large part of the population was poor.
They both regretted not being able to go to school much and tried to instill in us children a certain ardor to learn.

The child then understood that it was good to go to school, to study all your life, to read from many fields, to go to the opera, to the theatre, to concerts. It was important to go a different way. There weren’t many options back then: you studied hard to go to the university you wanted to be at, or you became a worker. At least that’s how I perceived the options I had. So I chose the first path, the one that, even as a child, gave me access to other worlds, the worlds of stories in novels, in theatre, in the shows I attended. My mind was in search of a different world from the physical one.
I realized late in life that, in fact, our mind is like a house under construction. It can stay with one room, one in which everything happens, just as when we live in a studio apartment, we eat, sleep, cook, iron clothes, receive guests, read, watch TV, in the same place. How much can you fit in a room? There’s limited space, there’s limited movement. We can decorate, but we have many restrictions.
But we can expand this house and build another room and another room and another room and so on, until it’s like a palace decorated with paintings from different eras, fine furniture, precious books. When you get tired of sitting in one room, you can go to another and another.

I had a recurring dream for years: I was in a huge palace, with many rooms, decorated in the Baroque style, going from one room to another, opening huge, heavy doors, and going through all the rooms filled with the finest chocolate. I’d take some of each, then move on. I’m not going to psychoanalyze the dream now, I’m only stopping here at the surface, at the metaphor of the rooms.

There are people who live in one room of the mind. An educated individual is like a house with many rooms. His existence is more varied, rich, rewarding, loneliness haunts him less often, but solitude is welcome.
Perhaps in these times, when changes and challenges are so great, it is education and culture that can keep us company, help us to keep our unhappiness at the door, to find meaning, to seek our own Grail.