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Conservatory
"A human being is a 'history,' and he makes this 'history' for himself out of his responses to the vicissitudes he encounters. The world he inhabits is composed not of 'things,' but of occurrences, which he is aware of in terms of what they mean to him and to which he must respond in terms of what he understands them to be....In short, he inhabits a wholly human world, not because it contains nothing but human beings and their artifacts, but because everything in it is known to him in terms of what it means to him. A human being is condemned to be a learner because meanings have to be learned. Whatever a man thinks or says or does is unavoidably what he has learned (well or ill) to think, to say or to do. Even a human death is something learned. For a human being, then, learning is a lifelong engagement; the world he inhabits is a place of learning.”
-Michael Oakeshott, A Place of Learning.
La Mappa dell'Inferno
By Sandro Boticelli
By Sandro Boticelli
The Conservatory is our Great Library; a place of exploration. Listen to the voice of history, with which you will meet our human inheritance, enabling you to join in as a participant through your own human performances. Delight in reading, and by “reading” I don’t mean only books and texts, but more generally, as Mortimer Adler puts it, "nature and the world." Reading is instrumental to science as writing is to art. In reading we find the virtues of Humility and Surprise. Instead of readings then, we call these "sources." Find our sources below.