In my Commonplace...

"Sun setting over Lake," Turner 1840

"Traditional societies personally transmit and personally use knowledge. It doesn't exist in books that can be shelved; songs are not recorded on CDs that can be played at will. Knowledge exists only because one person gave it to another, and it is kept alive only by repeated use and personal transmission. How one learns something and uses that knowledge is important in traditional societies, more than in ours. We seem to feel that whatever is to be learned exists independently from the way it is transmitted. If, for example, one person learns one thing from a parent, another from a teacher, a third from a computer, we like to assume that they all know the same thing. You simply know as a fact that the earth revolves around the sun, whether you absorbed that fact in early childhood, learned it in adulthood, figured it out on your own, had to reject religious belief to get there or learned it in English or in some other language. No matter how you learned it, it's a fact, and in our culture facts are seen as solid little building blocks, unchanged by how they are acquired or used."  -Malcolm Margolan