Welcome to our Poetry Slow Down, KRXA 504AM, Think for Yourself Radio, produced by Sara Hughes, I’m your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, all because of the life of Senator William Fulbright: How is it that in going away, from all we know, we learn what we really do know; how experiencing ourselves as strange and foreign, learning that we who are know it alls–that’s why we got to go, after all–, don’t know it all, at all, and become both worldly in our newfound humbling experience of awkwardness, of being alive, and new to ourselves, in Tennyson’s words, open to the world as a bringer of new things? The Fulbright program’s purpose is to give scholars and leaders the opportunity to go to another country and be ourselves there; in the process, of sharing our being, what we know and do, we change, we transform, or rather, perhaps, we become our truer selves, in Eliot’s words, returning home to know the place for the first time. When the familiar suddenly is unfamiliar, that is when we see what It is the transforming magic of going away, of being fish out of water—they say if you want to know about water don’t ask a fish, yet who better to ask—than the creature who lives its life, feeds and needs and breeds in water—but the fish doesn’t even know water exists, waterty, waterness, until we take it out of water, THEN, then, it can tell us all about water and what it means to be a fish, so we, in going away, experiencing ourselves as other, learning about one’s strange and perhaps more interesting self, humbler certainly, unsettled, out of water, our
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