296th post

Now that we are full of words, there is no “essay period” in schools anymore.

No one asks us: How did you spend your summer vacation?

No one wants us to describe the autumn for them.

Back then, we would force ourselves to write five or six large, spaced-out lines just to get a grade.

Now, we carry scrolls of untold words — yet there is no ear willing to listen.

No one asks: Which is better, knowledge or wealth?

Perhaps it would have been better if they had taught us: Which is better, connections or rules?

No one wants to know what we have become.

No one talks about “Human beings are members of one another” anymore.

Poor Saadi the poet, himself could not have known that his poem would only serve elementary schoolchildren, or perhaps as a tragic, false show engraved above the United Nations’ entrance…

No one in the real world says “He who has knowledge is powerful” anymore.

And truly, what use were all those essays we wrote, trembling with fear, reading them aloud with notebook in hand before the blackboard?

We are full of words…

But …