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J. Owen's avatar

I appreciate Professor Kimmage's emphasis on particular kinds of physical spaces -- gardens, quads, library stacks, and library reading rooms with long tables. These are indeed necessary to the cultivation of silence and hence to education, and I suspect non-Western cultures know this too. I once visited Peking University in Beijing and there, in the middle of a city of 20 million, is a lovely quiet garden with a pond, one that invites slow walking, quiet conversation, and contemplation.

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Drew Trotter's avatar

A fine addition to the essays on the good life already published. The university in my city just recently finished a thorough renovation of it central library and light-filled, high-ceilinged rooms of all types are magnificent places for quiet reading and conversation, as well as silent contemplation of any one of its vast stores of knowledge. I completely agree that both solitary reflection and silence are crucial to the development of the good life, but I do wonder if it also needs to be said that they are also the building blocks of another all-important part of the good life—the sharing of the truths and other benefits gained from these building blocks with friends in conversation. Growth together is critical to the life well-lived.

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