The Awakening of Miss Prim

by Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera

It was a small community comprising an industrious group of farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, and professionals, a retiring, select circle of academics and the sober brotherhood of monks who lived at the abbey of San Ireneo. Their interlocking lives formed an entire world. They were the

This was where she discovered that intelligence, this wonderful gift, grows in silence, not in noise. It was here too that she learned that a human mind, a truly human mind, is nurtured over time, with hard work and discipline.”

Ten thousand women marched through the streets of London saying: “We will not be dictated to,” and then went off to become stenographers.I

You can’t build yourself a world made to measure, but you can build a village.

if you were convinced that the world had forgotten how to think and teach, if you believed it had discarded the beauty of art and literature, if you thought it had crushed the power of the truth, would you let that world educate your children?”

Routine is like the steppe: it’s not a monster, it’s nourishment. If you can get something to grow there you can be sure that it will be real and strong.

“Wherever there’s a group of human beings there’s news. What constitutes news and the criteria you use to establish that is another matter.

You must not aspire to finding a husband who’s your equal, but one who’s absolutely and completely better than you.”

Young people today extend childhood well beyond the chronologically allotted time. They’re immature and irresponsible at an age when they should no longer be so.

Those children have grown up unfamiliar with the great ideals that have shaped people for generations and made them strong. They’ve been taught to view them with contempt and, in their place, to substitute something cloying and sentimental that even they quickly find unsatisfying and even repellent. They lose the most valuable thing—I’d say the only truly valuable thing—that youth possesses and maturity does

“It’s the yearning. Plainly and simply, it’s the yearning.” “Yearning? For what?” The old lady hesitated almost imperceptibly before continuing and, when she did, it seemed as if she would never fall silent again. “The yearning you all display to prove your worth, to show that you know this and that, to ensure that you can have it all. The yearning to succeed and, even more, the yearning not to fail; the yearning not to be seen as inferior, but instead even as superior, simply for being exactly what you believe you are, or rather what you’ve been made to believe you are. The inexplicable yearning for the world to give you credit simply for being women.

“You say you’re looking for beauty, but this isn’t the way to achieve it, my dear friend. You won’t find it while you look to yourself, as if everything revolved around you. Don’t you see? It’s exactly the other way around, precisely the other way around. You mustn’t be careful, you must get hurt. What I’m trying to explain, child, is that unless you allow the beauty you seek to hurt you, to break you and knock you down, you’ll never find it.”