Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? Page #3

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It shouldn't be.

What's the point of being

better than someone else?

And where was this school?

Right outside the city limits

of Philadelphia.

It was in a... kind of

an open countryside.

So, you know, by the time

I was old enough to,

my best friend and I

would spend Saturday

riding our bikes

all over the countryside.

Did you kept friend from this age

all during your life?

We sort of separated

by high school, you know,

went our separate ways.

Well, you spent a lot of time

on your own.

With my father by the time

I was 10 or 11 or so,

every Friday night, for example,

we would read Hebrew classics,

you know,

19th-century literature, essays.

It was just part of the routine.

And incorporating the emerging,

reviving Hebrew culture,

that was all of their lives.

I mean, that's what they were

devoted to:

the revival of the language,

the culture,

the Palestinian community,

this Hebraic revival that...

Did you say Palestinian community?

Well, you know, it was pre-Israel,

so it's a Jewish community

in Palestine.

Okay, okay.

I suppose by now, my father

would be called an anti-Zionist.

He was then

a deeply committed Zionist,

but for him, it was

a cultural revival, basically,

not particularly interested

in a Jewish state.

Mm-hmm.

Do you remember

if you had an ambition

for your future as a child?

A lot of crazy ambitions.

I remember once telling my mother

that I had decided

that when I grew up,

I wanted to be a taxidermist.

Don't ask me why.

I guess I liked the word.

I was about eight years old.

So since I'm ignorant, I got

the luck to discover Descartes.

I mean, I knew who Descartes was,

but I read him after I read you,

and I noticed he give you the tools

to doubt what he's saying.

It's like the opposite

of dogmatism.

I mean, that, you know, ought to be

the ideal of teaching anyway.

Whether it's children

or graduate students,

they should be taught

to challenge and to question.

Images that come from

the enlightenment about this

say that teaching should not be

like pouring water into a vessel.

It should be

like laying out a string

along which the student travels

in his or her own way

and maybe even questioning

whether the strings

in the right place.

And, you know, after all,

that's how modern science started.

For thousands of years,

it was accepted by scientists

that objects move

to their natural place.

So a ball goes to the ground,

and steam goes to the sky.

These things are kind of

like common sense,

and they were taken for granted

for literally thousands

of years, from Aristotle.

And it wasn't until Galileo

and the modern

scientific revolution

that scientists decided to be

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