"You must never feel badly about making mistakes," explained
Reason quietly, "as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For
you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do
by being right for the wrong reasons."
"But there's so much to learn," he said, with a thoughtful
frown.
"Yes, that's true," admitted Rhyme; "but it's not just learning
things that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn
and learning why you learn things at all that matters."
"That's just what I mean," explained Milo, as Tock and the exhausted
Bug drifted quietly off to sleep. "Many of the things I'm supposed to know
seem so useless that I can't see the purpose in learning them at all."
"You may not see it now," said the Princess of Pure Reason, looking
knowingly at Milo's puzzled face, "but whatever we learn has a purpose
and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the
tiniest way. Why, when a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes round
the world; when a speck of dust falls to the ground, the entire planet
weighs a little more; and when you stamp your foot, the earth moves slightly
off it's course. Whenever you laugh, gladness spreads like the ripples in
a pond; and whenever you're sad, no one anywhere can be really happy.
And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn
something new, the whole world becomes that much richer."
"And remember also," added the Princess of Sweet Rhyme "that
many places you would like to see are just off the map and many things
you want to know are just out of sight or a little beyond your reach. But
someday you'll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all,
will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow
Excerpt from
The Phantom Tollbooth
by
Norman Juster
Illustration above
by
Jules Feiffer