Buona Fortuna (Paradoxical Learning in Bordighera with Steve Jobs)

DAILY ENLIGHTENMENT PROMPT

Bongiorno from Italia! It's school holidays in France and I'm in Bordighera on the Italian riviera this morning with a boy and a dog. I'm writing today's post on the run between cafes and gelatarias.

Monet stayed in Bordighera for a little while and made some beautiful paintings. The first one in the frame below hung on my wall when I was a teenager. I stole it from my mum and thought that I'd very much like to go there one day.

Bordighera, Monet

Now I live an hour away. Life's strange.

When I was at high school in Australia I did poorly in Italian. I chose the subject because I was thirteen and there was the promise of a pizza dinner at the end of the year, which was more than any of the other subjects were offering. My teacher tried to encourage me to make more of an effort.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?” was her lead-in question.

“A journalist?” was my idea at the time.

"Well, perhaps you'll find that one day you're interviewing an Italian lady and the fact that you can speak Italian will help you find out what you need to know?”

It was a good try but I was unconvinced. I lived in Australia, the other end of the Earth from Italy, and as a journalist would I ever need to know a whole language just for the benefit of one interview? It seemed spurious so I made no extra effort, but did get the pizza at the end of the year. Big loss, little reward.

Fast forward 37 years and now I could really use that Italian! You never know where life will lead you. I just managed to order coffee and a Coca Cola and my French is functional for day-to-day things but the French language stops at the border. Here it's bongiorno not bonjour.

Learning is never a waste.

Steve Jobs with a Japanese ukiyo-e drawing copied on an Apple computer

In 1972, Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class at Reed College guided by campus posters he saw after leaving school. The fonts on the posters themselves were artistic enough to get his attention, and he took the class, despite knowing that it wouldn't give him any credit toward a degree.

Later, when he was developing the first Apple computers he remembered those classes and insisted that typography, clear, readable type close to what you might get on a printed page, be an important part of the visual architecture. It would become one of the key selling points of the Mac.