The world is beautiful. We are mindful about the challenges we face and hopeful that with our education we can make it better. That is the Northstar Way.
In truth lies beauty and in beauty lies truth.
Now read it again.
In truth *lies* beauty and in beauty *lies* truth.
What is truth and what is lies?
Schools, like architecture and buildings, have a Telos, a mad rushing towards an end. And that end, in one way, is ruin. The teleology of a building is ruin. While we waltz and parade toward our imminent destination, we would do well to perceive and marvel at the hellish beauty of our world. The transitoriness inherent in all beautiful things compels us to allay our march, put the parade in abeyance. And in this abeyance, we recognise the "ultimate dubiety immanent in all soaring flights of the intellect."
And where will I find beauty? In the insane rage of Philip Dick's Exegesis or perhaps in the quite and sublime terror invoked by Borges when he says a that in a certain Chinese encyclopaedia it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’.
My memory is like the epistemic-other of Funes the Memorious. I exist to forget, but not before the immanent beauty in the madness of the world leaves a stain, a patina or a perhaps a veneer of momentary solace.