The presence on national television of the people here criticized is a response to the presence on national television of people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. It is not a measured and helpful response, but it is a necessary and profitable one. Rhetoric for rhetoric, spite for spite, polemic for polemic. The world turns on, the fight keeps going, and the dollars roll in for the media middle men who bring it into your homes.
Stop giving the impression that Dawkins'/Harris' retarded scare-mongering is beneficial or necessary and your media institutions will stop trying to make money by stirring the pot. Until then, maybe atheists can experience, in some small way, the aggravation and disgust that religious people have felt as the media have drooled over those two gentlemen for the last few months.
It's also worth noting that Paula Zahn had scheduled Prof. Dawkins for an interview by way of response, but it was postponed due to the ongoing Anna Nicole Smith coverage. That is itself another sort of horror, but there it is.
Quote from Sibtiger »
And I live in what is basically the bible belt of Ontario.
Describe "the 'Bible Belt' of Ontario."
Quote from Mad Mat »
In my school, which is a catholic school, even several of the teachers are atheist or agnostic.
Isn't that a disgrace rather than a good thing? How would you feel if you had enrolled your child in an academy of the sciences, only to have her come home and tell you that her teachers were young-earth creationists , flat-earthers and scientologists?
I think you'd be scandalized, and with good cause. And you'd likely react with incredulous horror to a person who would have the gall to declare this a good thing.
Quote from Solace »
What really surprises me (and I have heard this before) is the extremely low number of atheists.
There are actually more than the numbers suggest. Many of them present a problem for the identification process, however, because they function on apathy rather than conviction and subsequently do not seek the limelight. Many of them are even nominally religious, and as such are lost forever to the studious eye of the census taker.
I guess what I am saying is that reality wouldn't be synthetical if there weren't distinct entities to be synthesized in the first place. Basically, I see traditional monism as a claim that reality is analystical (reductionistic rather than holistic), which I think is wrong. I'm not feeling too sharp at the moment, though, so I'm not sure if that came across correctly.
No, it came across just fine, and I think that there's some merit to it. An analogy might be the manner in which we define things like a nation, or a community, or a group. There's an intermeshing plurality there, by necessity, even when each of the constituent parts is an individual. Or call it a jigsaw puzzle, maybe.
Anyway, you've made your case well. I'll have to think about it some more.
Probably. There is likely some great variety among artists and the like. It may be that simple, "mundane" folk experience more inner peace in the long run because they interface with reality more directly, face to face, in a physical way, rather than seeing it through many lenses. It could also be the lack of internal conflict that comes with immaturity and closedness - and in fact I think it will be both or either depending on the person. Certainly, "enlightened" folk are not necessarily more likely to particularly aware, despite the implication otherwise. However, very aware people may be more likely to have both inner conflict and inner peace in turn; it's a process. So I doubt it'd be easy to tell.
Yes, there are complicating factors. I know that I've met some lower-class types who almost certainly would have been tortured aesthetes if only they'd had the time and money to languish. Instead they're just jerks.
Yes; and this, as well, is relative to the matter of identity. Would Nick still be Nick if he didn't write? Perhaps, but not exactly the same Nick. Is there more than one Nick? Assuredly, and they don't necessarily exist in disharmony. Are blue roses and red roses both roses?
I am legion, as that unhappy gentleman once said.
This is why I see relatively small entities as humans to be incomprehensibly expansive, ecosystems unto themselves.
It's a good approach.
Yes, I agree. Letting your mind manifest itself through the intercourse between characters and events is not unlike from learning your own mind through talking with others; you could even call it intercourse with oneself.
Exactly! And it's much less creepy than walking around arguing with yourself out loud. I've done this, and it is poorly received.
I'm a little surprised that you like Rasputina, but now that it occurs to me, I shouldn't be. This is another of those groups I listened to by proxy because I know people who did.
Well, proxy listening isn't so bad, unless you're just trying to suck up or barn or whatever the hip slang is.
I like this sound of this, a lot.
Well, download away. You won't be sorry.
Oh, very much so! Tragic, as well. A lot of good can come from tears, and yet people seem to be preternaturally afraid of them. Or they assume dishonesty and manipulation in shedding them, which is really vicious and paranoid. I do find that emotions tend to be frightening for folks; and this is condign, really, but it's much better just to face them head on, and embrace them, claim them. Usually, they never go away until one has done this (at least, that is what I find).
That's quite right. The literature on the disastrous results of repressing emotions is extensive and, I fear, quite accurate. I used to do this, but I won't anymore. This has led to complaints of me being too intense, but to hell with 'em. In Europe and the Middle East (and, really, every else but here), they are "intense" as a matter of course. Loud, vicious arguments are conducted to the amusement and intrigue of slowly-assembling crowds, only to have the arguers go off to have a drink together no matter the result. We can't have that here. It frightens us. It's sad.
I feel that putting shame upon crying, fear, trembling, weakness, and other less than pleasant aspects of being human is criminal, and is no doubt responsible for at least some of the evil that pervades a society.
Agreed. Nietzsche would agree too, in fact.
It is my belief that it is very important for a person to come to understand others. This may or may not include learning anything about psychology; one can be a brilliant student of psychology and still have little to no insight into either herself, or other people. Many of us try to function without having a clue as to what we are messing with, and we can cause damage that is sometimes close to irreconciliable. There is a certain to simply paying attention, humbly and watchfully, and taking heed of what is before you. Many times we get these ideas into our heads about the way things are - and it's no wonder we are more concerned with this than with what is plain to see, because most of us are not skilled in seeing what is plain.
I think we have modern literary and academic trends to blame for this, in part. Successive generations have now been trained to look for the theory (typically malicious) behind anything that is said or done, and to read a book with demands for "psychological realism" at the forefront. We balk at an inconsistent character in a book, though he is the most natural thing of all. Borges was very much against this, as an aside, and is worth reading on the subject.
Ah, I'm the same. I find that I like to engage in activities that require me to be receptive; I seem to be suited for these. Reading, watching, listening, are all surprisingly deep pleasures. Drawing is a bit different; much like you, I drew lot as a child but abandoned it. Recently I'm trying to start again, and I'm playing to my strengths by mimicking the styles of accomplished artists and teaching myself this way.
That latter skill is something I really wish I could manage. I saw an image recently on DeviantArt in which a gentleman had decided to reproduce Blake's "The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun," but as if it were done by Gustave Dore. It blew my mind. If I could do things like that (specifically in the styles of Dore, Mucha and Chesterton [who was also an accomplished artist in addition to all of the other things he was awesome at]), you'd best believe I would.
Nick, there is much more you have said to which I would like to respond, but I will need to return later and finish this. In any case, it's a delight to see you back.
Thanks, Mamelon. It's good to be back. Sorry, once again, for the delays.
And there's more!
Oh, I'm the same. It's like a compulsion. I often narrate my life to myself. A while back, when I was really into D&D, I couldn't stop making up characters. Heck, I still can't, for any medium.
Maybe it keeps the mind sharp.
It may, but then, it might also be a dulling sort of thing, if one falls into a rut. This is why I've started putting my work on paper again, at long last. Now I'll stop being distracted, and I'll actually have something to show for it (most recent work available here).
I love a good conversation. Some of my friends and I have been known to go on for hours, even to the point of imprudence. I'm an introvert by nature, but I often crave the company of others.
This may explain, in part, why our post exchange is so very long.
Small groups of intimates are able to have the most fun, I feel.
I agree with this statement in most every venue, with the exception of religion.
I loved that you said this. I have always seen Russia as akin to some far off magical kingdom. I once worked with a Russian girl, and she tried to teach me something of the language. I have a bit of a perseveration with language, but Russian is the one tongue I have had the most trouble familiarizing myself with. I greatly hope someday to visit the place.
I used to want to visit the place myself, but now I worry that it would simply be an enormous disappointment. I've heard some real horror stories about what it's like there, now, and I don't think I could stand it.
And yes, Russian people are wonderful, for the most part. I've known a few, and they have always been quite rowdily genial.
It can often be more identifiable, anyway. The truth of it is, though, that I tend to like when joy and sorrow meet and blend together into something new and stunning. This is something I've always sought to understand, to reconcile myself with, and yet it eludes me.
I feel precisely the same. The best I've been able to do as far as describing the feeling is to say that it's what you feel when someone dies heroically. A geeky and maybe childish example (though I don't think so) is the climactic moment near the conclusion of Iron Giant, if you're familiar with that film.
I want you to know that I totally get this. I am frequently wondering if everyone else is in on some conspirational understanding, and I'm completely out of the loop.
If I may suppose, however, I often find that this is an indication that you do understand things, but beause you are so attentive, you are on the look-out for something escaping your notice.
That could certainly be true, though I doubt it will stop me worrying, unfortunately.
I believe that this is a lot more normal and natural than you may fear. Most people I have known are aware that others have independent existence on an intellectual level; but in terms of their motivations, how their recognition of others registers emotionally, they don't see them as real people, but as mobile images, characters. It wasn't until a few years ago that I was struck with insight that I was (as if all of a sudden) looking at other people in the same way I view myself: as something real. It's part of the maturational process, I believe, to come to personify others in this way, and is probably the first major step toward being a genuinely charitable person. This is also why I think that "subjectivity training" is important, since it lends itself to this personification phenomenon more than academic learning or adapting analytical skills tend to.
I'm glad to see I'm not alone in this, then. I worry about the merits of teaching people about this, though. They told me any number of times and ways in school that other people have hopes and dreams and feelings and that I ought to respect or at least not antagonize them, but it never actually seemed to me to be anything beyond rhetoric until it just clicked in my head of its own accord.
I love how you put this, and I think I know just what you mean. As for humility and charity - I feel that a spirit such as you describe, forged in the juxtaposition between fire and water, and at least superficialy vainglorious, is ultimately more suited to being humble and charitable than someone who is proper, yet impersonal and indifferent. To treasure one's desires is to eventually understand desire, and thus, those who have them. To treasure oneself is to eventually treasure all personhood, wherever it lurks.
Quite so. The great pagans of yesteryear had it right when they predicated their philosophy on the command to first know thyself. Polonius had it right too, and died for his troubles (well, not exactly; I just liked how that sounded).
The way you think is delightful.
You're not bad yourself.
I've never been able to truly manage apathy, though I've tried. The closest I seem to get is anhedonia, though I don't know if it's the same at all. I have loose heartstrings that are too easily pulled, and wind around any stray thing. In any case, I don't think it's much of a failure. Apathy is probably among the most ugly things imaginable, and yet entirely understandable and human. If my observations are correct, it seems to be bred into us at some point.
Well, it's almost a modern necessity. We live in a world where there is more information than ever before, but our capacity to process this information has not grown to meet it. We are therefore forced to shut a great many things out, and the more this becomes necessary, the less able we are to discern exactly what we ought to be shutting out and exactly what we ought to be letting in. This is a dubious skill, but as you say, it is essentially bred into us. We have no choice.
For my own part, I am a naturally curious person (not in the disgusting modern sexual sense of the word, though), so my need to shut things out has become less and less as the years have progressed. And yet, as we saw before, I have locked entire continents and fields of endeavour behind a tidy little door, perhaps never to be opened. I have to work on that.
I'm considering taking a year off to teach English in Japan between my MA and my PhD. That should go a long way towards rounding me out.
Yes, and inevitable, I should think. Why be here, if one must be perfect? Should I be filled before I eat, and be rested before I sleep? What would be the point?
I think you'd really like Rabelais. This is a very Pantagruel-ean sort of thought.
They should! They're like freaking martial artists, only with mightier discipline.
And they're generally prettier.
This is probably the very essence of my greatest problems with Christendom. I know too many people who are caught up in the fascination for some grand heroism off in the distance, when what is before them is really the more epic challenge. It is not hard to imagine someone being heroic when it is made easy for him; but what about during the everyday, the drear and drudgery? A bit harder, I think, to do what is small, but important, than do what is large and obvious.
Precisely. Men and women are not measured by their reaction to great and terrible circumstances, but by their ability to get through the average day without being ground down to nothing.
I think bureaucracy is a greater threat to the human race than war.
Yes! I should think that humility is achieved when someone sees oneself, no matter how great (perhaps very), as being only a part of an always greater whole, and never forgetting it.
There's some merit to that indeed. This is where I think the Emersonians, and those like them, were on to something with their idea of the Oversoul.
Anyway, before concluding, I have another question for you. You've said some things that indiciate that you have some training in the technical aspects of visual art, even if only as an amateur. Is this the case? Or are you just a fan?
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In other news, it's Saturday night, which means I get to drown my sorrows in rum and Fiddler on the Roof. Wheeee
I prefer Thoreau, myself. By comparison Emerson is such a hypocrite.
Yes, well. Emerson's problems are more varied and vast than Emerson's writings, which are themselves varied and vast to the point of being Impressive. I like the look of the man, though (physically), even if he does seem sometimes to be a polite and reticent proto-Nietzsche (philosophically).
And given Emerson's position in the timeline, he can hardly have influenced earlier American history, which is already quite distinctive, however much he might have influenced the American psyche after he became active.
Of course. This is not to say, however, that he was unable to explain and systematize (if such a thing is even possible in the windy, nebulous world of his prose) that prior psyche.
I mean to say, in any event, that his influence is worth considering.
I think the more diverse the parties are, the more democratic the democracy can be.
If by "democratic" you mean "impotent," then you're right. We have four or five "real" parties in Canada (Liberal, Conservative, New Democrat, Bloc Quebecois and, increasingly, the Greens, though they've never won a seat yet). The theoretical and sentimental result of this is "real democracy." The practical result is that a majority government is becoming increasingly unlikely, a reality that was only real when the Liberals and whatever the Tories were calling themselves were the only games in town. None of the parties are really willing to accomodate one another, and the threat of a non-confidence motion (and an attendant election) hangs heavy over whomever is in power. We've had four federal elections in the last ten years, three of them since 2000. We're likely heading towards another one soon, too. The Conservatives (ruling party) have started running attack ads aimed at new Liberal leader Stephane Dion (the official opposition), which seems to indiciate they know something's on the horizon.
It's not a great system. The more parties you have running, the less likely it is that any one of them will actually win, and the margins by which they win become progressively smaller. Remember the complaints about Ralph Nader "stealing" votes from whomever in the 2000 American election? Imagine that "theft" multiplied exponentially, and being an actual reality. The Bloc Quebecois, who could not muster a majority (or even a minority, realistically) if their lives depended upon it, run only in the province of Qubec, doing very well there, and routinely filling out fifty or so seats in the House that could otherwise be filled by a party likely to accomplish something. How would you like to have a party that could never win, and didn't really want to, but routinely proved to be a frustrating wildcard in your House (occupying a sixth of the seats therein) simply because a certain group of people always elected them, no matter what?
A two-party system unquestionably has grievous faults, but voters can only stand having no stake in their government for so long before they go back to voting for a party that, while not necessarily entirely in line with the voters' desires, has at least a fifty/fifty shot of winning.
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The missing ingredient in a lot of posters' more-or-less accurate formulations of "what makes America different" is the figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), whose wildly popular philosophy ties into almost every aspect of "distinct" American culture so far mentioned. The confidence, the individualism, the distrust of government, the distrust of socialism, the lionization of outlaws... it's all there, if you just look. "Self-reliance" is a good place to start. Check it out.
I'm glad that you see it this way. It's the same observation I've traditionally made, though this sometimes unsettles some of the more rationalistic folk I've known. Reality itself is logical in that it is coherent - and yet it can not readily be called analytical. It's synthetical, wholes made up of smaller wholes. A man I read sometimes once said "the mind perceives things to be logical, or linear. However, reality is actually dialectical, and it is defined by the relationships between apparent opposites."
That's an interesting thought. The idea of reality existing in the heat created when ideas collide... very much reality existing at the margins of creation. It is perhaps worth noting here that things are never closer to one another than at the barrier between them. That liminal realm marks the point at which two distinct entities come up against each other, never to overlap, never to join, never the flow together. Reality is Heloise and Abelard writing to each other.
It is said that feelings run much deeper than thoughts, and that I am so concerned with them (both in myself and in others) may explain why I have often had difficultly explaining them. In any case, this is also why I believe that becoming aware of one's emotional nature and cultivating "good" feelings is more immediately crucial than developing great knowledge or analytical thinking ability. It is what I call "refining subjectivity," which includes the maturation of the conscience.
That, too, is a delightful concept. Do you think there's something in this that might explain the frequency of pleasant demeanours in the plain, hard-working type vs. the the frequency of weird, afflicted demeanours in intellectuals and artists?
Monism has always interested me. Initially, it starts with coherent observations, however I tend to think that the logical conclusion really ends up as more of a pluralism. It's partly my intuition speaking, but I see the theoretical monistic over-entity as being less of an organism than what I call a meta-organism, a being that encompasses and is comprised of smaller beings. A human is a meta-organism in that it is partly composed of smaller life forms (cells, mitochondria, etc), and yet these microoganisms are not somehow non-beings just because they contribute to a larger creature. In a certain sense, even something so ambient as an ecosystem is really much like a very large creature, defined by all the littles creatures that are in it. This doesn't detract, in my mind, from the individual identities of all those smaller beings.
I would wager that the premises of monism more likely suggest that individual consciousnesses are less disconnected that we first imagine, but it does not, however, necessitate that those consciousnesses lack distinctly meaningful identities.
I have yet to really work out all the kinks in my ideas about monism and pluralism, but I could go on about it forever, I think. Like I said, I think a great deal on the concept of identity.
That's more or less how I feel about it. It allows for the reality of nodes while standing sternly against people who would insist that, in a very real sense, I am the cow that I'm eating.
The only philosophical concept that's really been digging at me lately is that of "chains of influence;" that is, understanding the phenomenology of inspiration, or some such vagary.
One of the most urgent and vital lines in all of Dickens can be found in Great Expectations, and it runs something like this: “Think for a moment of the long chain of thorns or flowers that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.” Such an exercise is not difficult, though it is rarely engaged. It is simply the act of tracing back a chain of influences as far as one can to see if there is some singular event upon which one might pin the responsibility for all that has followed. Without going into dreary specifics, I can tell you that I owe much of my current academic success to the idle purchase of a book about the battle of Thermopylae. My creative prose would be non-existant if not for the remake (not the original) of Dawn of the Dead. While it's certainly true that many, many things have gone into the formation of the current me-entity, all of them, in one way or another, are reacting to circumstances already in place, like "having read that book," or, "having seen that movie." One could go further backwards, but not easily. I bought that book (Frank Miller's 300) because I like comics, and I can't remember how that started. I saw that movie (Dawn of the Dead) because I like action/zombie movies, and that is so vague a predilection that I couldn't hope to meaningfully trace it.
It's all very interesting stuff, at least to me. It certainly makes me more appreciative of even the most mundane or arbitrary experiences from day to day.
I do tend to believe that there is more linking us together than we perceive, and this may be one of the reasons I feel that way. I remember, in one of the stories I had written, it was theorized that at very depth of the soul, there was a kind of "place" within at which one's spirit and all other spirits "touched," or made some kind of spiritual contact. The implication of this was not that all souls were homogenous or that identity was illusory, but that even something so personal as feelings and memories could be imprinted from one being onto another (this was used to justify how some people could directly recall the experiences of the ancestors and so on). I believe this phenomenon was called "tau," though at the time I mostly used that word because I liked the sound of it. The "tau" was also called the Cosmic Cauldron, because it was told in stories that it was like the substance from which God had shaped Creation.
It's a good sign when one writes short fiction to illustrate one's philosophy. The creation of a world that exists under your own rules, however alien they may be to commonality, is an excellent tool of understanding even the world as it really exists.
I see that you understand. It is perhaps one of the more appealing aspects to such classical choral music - I especially like what I perceive to be the sound of group chanting.
Yes! The great resonant thrumming of it is simply thrilling. Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is near the top of that game, though I tend to think that Verdi's Requiem Mass is the music the angels would play if they went to war. The "Dies Irae" segments from that piece are like nothing else in the world of music. I recommend them unconditionally, though I'd extend that recommendation to the work as a whole in a heartbeat. The Pavarotti/Horne/Talvela/Sutherland recording, conducted by Sir Georg Solti in Vienna, is super awesome, and is easily obtainable from the bounteous reaches of the Internet.
What are some of the other types of music to which you like to listen?
Because (as you know) I am of an expansive sort, here are twenty-five musical people, groups and other things that I greatly enjoy, some explained more than others (because I'm expansive but not a robot).
1. Giuseppe Verdi - The pinnacle of Italian opera and orchestration. Excellent "places to start" with Verdi are the Requiem Mass, Aida (which is sensational, and not to be confused with the Elton John musical of the same name, which is not), Nabucco, and, incredibly, Giovanna d'Arco, which is exactly what it sounds like. His operatic adaptations of Shakespeare, including Othello and MacBeth, are also quite neat.
2. Neko Case - Former warbler for the New Pornographers, she now uses her vocals for good instead of pretty good. The style is "southern gothic," in the way that it's about twisted things and the countryside. Best albums are Blacklisted and Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a bad track on either of them.
3. Velvet Underground - A strange and bohemian bunch, though their music is just fine. Well, their music is also strange, it is true, but not to the extent that one could not listen to it. The album called Velvet Underground is the most normal of all, with "Venus in Furs," "Femme Fatale," "Sunday Morning" and "Heroin" being stand-out tracks.
4. Bear McCreary - Responsible for the score for the current run of Battlestar Galactica, which is effectively a fusion of Celtic and Indian music, and is simply beautiful. I can't describe it in a way that does it justice, regrettably, so I can only recommend that you try some of it out, when you've the time or inclination. Excellent tracks include "Passacaglia," "Battlestar Operatica" (lame name, good music), "The Shape of Things to Come," "Destiny," "A Promise to Return," and "Kobol's Last Gleaming." There's a lot of them.
5. Arabian Music and Stuff Like It - As a religious man, I can not help but feel that reality comes from a desert. No other style of music has been able to capture so much of Earth and Heaven, though many have made great strides in capturing Heaven on its own. I don't know how to describe this technically beyond suggesting that there's something distinctive about the scales they use that sets them apart.
6. Rasputina - A trio (usually) of goth girls (sometimes one dude on drums) rocks out with the electric cello. Darkly humorous. All of their albums have a lot of so-so stuff with a few gems thrown in (and I don't remember their album names anyway), so look for songs like "Trenchmouth," "Hunter's Kiss" (which is seriously good), "Saline the Salt-Lake Queen," "Gingerbread Coffin," and their covers of Led Zeppelin's "Rock 'n' Roll" and CCR's "Bad Moon Rising." Their one album whose name I do know is A Radical Recital, which is just a live set. It's good from start to finish, more or less, and is a nice introduction to the group. So go for that.
7. Janis Joplin - Though Cameron doesn't like her, she remains nonetheless a powerful musical avatar of Human Imperfection striving for something holy. Albums are various and muddled, so look for tracks like "Kozmic Blues," "Work Me, Lord," "Mercedes Benz" and "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)."
8. Bob Dylan - Little explanation required, hopefully. He's just great. All of his work is at least pretty good, but Highway 61 Revisited is a miracle. "Desolation Row," the ultimate song of that album, is nothing less than a tour de force of everything that makes Dylan awesome.
9. Sigur Ros - High-voiced Icelandic gentleman who like to sing in a made-up language. Recent album Takk is excellent, with "Glossoli," "Hoppipola" and "Milano" standing out. The music video for "Glossoli," readily available on Youtube, is breathtaking.
10. Loreena McKennit - When she's not being weird and "new age," she actually manages to put out some excellent stuff. Her latest, An Ancient Muse, is very nice; particularly "The Gates of Istanbul."
11. Arcade Fire - Canadian kids with an ear for curious music, though they conform to something or other, or so it is said. They've only really got the one album to date, being Funeral, but it's all good there. David Bowie really likes them, if that means anything.
12. Leonard Cohen - Another great Canadian, almost too great in some ways. A ponderous bard. His music has been collected and recollected and anthologized severely, so you need not worry about individual albums. Top-rate tracks include "The Partisan," "First We Take Manhattan (Then We'll Take Berlin)," "So Long Marianne," and "Ain't No Cure for Love."
13. Mash-ups - An utterly varied field, mash-ups are songs created through the forcible synthesis of two or more other songs. It's like remixing, but not entirely. You're not just throwing a techno rhythm on something, though that happens a lot. No, you're making a single track out of the Beatles' "Tax Man," that immortal "Wipe Out" song, and the theme from Batman. It's putting the theme from Cheers into a sort of hip-hop context. It's letting Janis Joplin jam with Beck. All of these experiments, and many more besides, are the work of Luke Enlow, popularly called Lenlow, who provides them for download here. Virtually every one of those tracks is good in some way or another, though "Sweet Child of Ravi" and "U Hide 2" are personal favourites. "Satisfaction Now" is one I particularly enjoy for reasons made clear by #24 below. Lenlow himself is but one of hundreds of different mash-up artists churning out novelties as fast as you can listen to them. Entire albums have been mashed, to great success. Two notable examples of this are The Grey Album (in which the Beatles' White Album was mixed with Jay-Z's Black Album), and Let it Beast, in which the Beastie Boys get to riff with the Beatles. The Beatles, as you may have noticed, are a popular target in this genre, and the reasons for this are too numerous to describe.
14. Ludwig van Beethoven - Self-explanatory, but do consider looking into some of the lesser-known works, like Wellington Sieg and Egmont. The overture from the latter is quite beautiful and intense.
15. Johnny Cash - Needs even less explanation, hopefully. Check out the prison albums (San Quentin is better than Folsom, though Folsom is more well-known), as well as American IV and American V.
16. The Rutles - A parody of the Beatles started by eccentric musician Neil Innes and one of the Monty Python crew, though I don't remember which. Likely Terry Jones. They sound quite a lot like the Beatles, honestly, and plunder their music mercilessly. The song "Shangri-La," a pastiche on "Hey Jude," among others, is actually good music in its own right.
17. Stan Rogers - A Canadian maritime singer who died in a plane crash, if memory serves. He had a wonderfully deep, gutsy voice, and specialized in sea shanties and the like. Live Between the Breaks is a great album to start with, containing both "The Witch of the Westmoreland" and "The Mary-Ellen Carter," two of his best works, as well as lesser classics like "Rolling Down to Old Maui" and "The Flowers of Bermuda."
18. Passion, Peter Gabriel's soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ, and Passion Sources, his collection of sample work that inspired and contributed to it - The former is unorthodox and beautiful, the latter diverse and delightful. People have taken issue with his soundtrack for TLTOC (though that's hardly the most problematic aspect of the film), but, divorced from the film itself, it proves to be a surprisingly satisfying experience. Special mention is warranted for the tracks "The Feeling Begins" and "Troubled." The latter album is more culturally accurate, being sampled from various middle eastern realities rather than Gabriel's approximation thereupon. Good tracks include "Call to Prayer," "Tejbeit," "Wedding Song" and "Shamas ud Doha" (I'm spelling the foreign ones from memory, so they may be slightly off). Definitely worth your time.
19. Andrew WK - Frenetic insanity. Songs like "I Get Wet" and "Girl's Own Juice" are like being punched in the face by the sun. "Get Ready to Die" is the most upbeat, pulse-pounding song ever produced, in spite of both its title and its lyrics.
20. Charles Camille Saint-Saens - Gave us the Carnival of the Animals, which is beautiful and fun, but more importantly there's his marvelous Symphony No. 3, a triumph of organ work. The most famous portion of this symphony (early minutes of the fourth movement, "Maestoso Allegro") was used as the tune for the song Farmer Hoggett sings in Babe. Considering my checkered religious history, I find myself coming back to the first time I ever heard this triumphant organ explosion as the moment, perhaps, when I first believed in God. His "Danse Macabre" is also beautiful, though in a more autumnal, string-based way way.
21. Ofra Haza - She died too young, but when she lived she was the proud and prolific owner of a scientifically-perfect voice. Though she was always experimenting with new stuff, particularly in the World Beat and Dance genres, her Yemenite-Israeli roots ensured that she frequently put out music that was beautiul, reverent, and slow. Whatever you can find of hers, give it a try.
22. "The Great Songs" - Singles by certain famous groups and individuals that I enjoy immensely, though I am wholly (and often happily) ignorant of the rest of their work. These are the sorts of things that make their way onto "best of the DECADE" compilations, and so forth.
23. Piotr Rubik - A contemporary Polish composer who produces works of great orchestral and choral beauty. His masterwork is widely held to be Tu Es Petrus, a beautiful suite to be sure, but I prefer this weird sort of psalm-type thing he did whose name I don't know (because it's in Polish and strange), but which starts out like pleasant chamber music before suddenly developing into all of the horrifying grandeur that a Slavic chorale entitled "Psalm of the Apocalypse" implies.
24. Musicals - They hit me in the same way operas tend to, primarily because I'm an English student. Few other genres allow for such rich narrative and poetic possibilities, particularly in such a long-running and sustainable manner. I mentioned above in the mash-up section that I liked a particular song because of a musical, and this is true. The musical in question is the insane and awesome rock opera version of The War of the Worlds, and the mash-up draws from this work in crafting its own monstrous sound. Apart from that, however, the classics are classic for a reason. Les Miserables really is as good as its popularity would suggest. And - I'm prepared to incur some censure for this, but I don't care - The Phantom of the Opera constitutes a musical Achievement. Think of Andrew Lloyd Weber what you will. Groan at Cats, whine at Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, do what you like. Just lay off the Opera Ghost.
25. Bluegrass - Down home country goodness, and I like it just fine. There's honesty there.
Oh, undoubtedly. Mystery is part of what makes life so compelling at times, I think, and I'm quite fond of it. I recall that in some of my greatest moments of despair or dismay, I felt a profound sense of seeing everything in a drab, shallow light, as if everything ever worth doing or being had already been accomplished (or failed forever). A miserable experience, really.
It is miserable, certainly, but ultimately incorrect. Even in our darkest, most disillusioned moments, we must already remember this: nobody has ever destroyed the world. Maybe that's too dark to brighten one's day, but there it is.
Oh, definitely! As Jung theorizes, one must come to make peace with one's shadow, by which he meant to include one's less familiar faculties. I no longer believe that one's feeling side and one's intellectual side are really at odds, or that itis necessary to rely more on one than another. In fact, my opinion is essentially that a really reasonable and functional person need never ignore or repress his emotions.
Quite right. We are currently in a state of affairs in which a man may laugh with abandon, and frivolously, and with evil, but he may not under any circumstances weep. That's perverse.
I really don't feel that it's unhealthy, though that may be because I tend to be the same way. Part of it is the nature of my job, but I see it as basically a nine-hour daily distraction. I have read, really, that young people who have struggled with school emotionally and in terms of discipline (as I did) usually find greater ease in adjusting and adapting by focusing on their personal pursuits outside of school, thus feeling like their lives were more satisfying. If I remember correctly, my hardest year in high school was my senior year, and it was during that year that I stopped writing, which no doubt contributed to the dysphoria I went through. So I suggest you continue as you are in this manner.
Will do, doc.
What are some of your hobbies and pursuits, specifically? Do you like video games? Drawing? Manga? I've seen you like at least some anime, like Wings of Honneamise (hopefully I spelled that correctly).
Having just produced a lengthy list of music, I'm going to make this one much shorter and less list-like, I think. Sleep beckons.
For the most part, I like to busy myself with media. Reading is a firm favourite, in equal parts theory and pleasure (the one assists in the other, frequently), with movies coming in as a close second. Comic books and graphic novels are right up there, though not as much now, due to time constraints and having read much of the classics, as I used to. Still, New Comic Book Day (Wednesday) is always a nice one, as there are a number of excellent series currently in publication. DC's Vertigo imprint alone boasts Fables, Y: The Last Man, The Other Side, Jack of Fables, DMZ and The Exterminators. From other companies, Powers and Astro City are great, when they actually come out, and The Walking Dead fills that zombie-shaped hole in my life. I also like to spend time looking at static visual art (paintings, drawings, etc.), and thereafter writing about them. Caravaggio and Gustave Dore are particular favourites, and I can't imagine anybody supplanting them.
And then, there's writing. I do it all the time, even when I'm not trying to. I write stories in my head. I try not to, because it's very ditracting, but there's no way to stop it beyond booze, and I can't keep a gentle buzz going twenty-four hours a day no matter how hard I try. When I'm not trying to retard myself, however, I write pretty much anything and everything. Academic work. Short fiction. Poetry. Persuasive pieces. I wrote a libretto for a short opera in the latter half of last year, and the singing rehearsals have only recently begun. It will be performed in April, and I'm pretty excited about it.
Beyond that, I don't do much of anything. I like to sit around talking to (not always with, regrettably) people, but am somewhat hampered in this pursuit by the persistant necessity on the part of other people to do things to occupy themselves. I'd be perfectly happy to just sit in the park for hours, or in a cafe, or a restaurant, or what have you, but most people just don't want to have conversations that long. I suspect some of them can't. They always want to do it in their homes, where they have televisions to turn on when things become onerous, or any number of other distractions. I don't go to people's houses much.
I used to draw, then fell out of practice. I'm currently trying to come roaring back.
That's all I do, as far as hobbies and such go. I don't really have the time or dexterity for video games, though this was not always the case. It is again mostly a case of having fallen out of practice. Having not played them for many years, now, I find that I don't even want to anymore. The prospect of spending hours doing something not especially interesting, and having learned nothing useful by the end, does not sit well with me.
Yes, I, too, have come to really love chai. I suppose I oscillate between wanting a light, fine drink, or a more strongly flavored one. I also grew to like the even more robust Russian black teas, if you've ever had them. I want to start drinking it as the Russians do, by mixing it with jam rather than sugar or honey.
I want to start doing most things like the Russians do, honestly. Or, at least, what I imagine the archetypal Russian does based on their greatest literature. There's lots of manful sadness and wastelands and stoves, and nobody is dull. Ever.
Yes, I suppose that is the way it is, much of the time. Reading about or watching tragedy can be very cathartic, as well. In my case, I think it comes from the fact that I tend to feel so detached from reality and humanity, so out of sorts, that the feeling of identification of others and with the human experience gives me a sense of solidity that I crave.
That detachment is often very difficult to overcome. Do you find that tragedy works better than incidents at the other end of the spectrum, such as humor or joy?
Ah, yes, I follow you, then. Would you say it, then, that you wish there were mundane concerns in life that you'd prefer not to have to deal with, so you can afford to focus on what you'd rather face, and that these concerns hamper you?
In some forms, precisely. Bureaucracy, especially, has been problematic in this way. I simply do not understand why people put up with it, though of course I have no real plan as to how to eliminate it.
But then, with regard to the nuances I mentioned, there are other things. I worry about the bewildering possibility that I'm missing something that's obvious to everyone else. Maybe many such things. Maybe there's something simple that they've all cottoned on to to make their lives better or different. Maybe they all know about something necessary, and I do not.
As I may or may not have mentioned before, it was only relatively recently that I actually consciously realized that other people exist when I'm not around to perceive them or think about them. It is for this reason, or at least in this regard, that I can not picture how other people live their lives or think about things. I guess this occluded perception frightens me.
Yes, that's probably a fair and apt way of putting it. I sometimes fear that the stuff of which I am made is not really suited to be in this world. I wonder if I am just too surreal, too sensitive, too idealistic or naïve. And I wonder if anyone else has that problem. Beginning around the time I was readying to graduate from high school, I feel as though I gave up on life in some way, and remained that way for a good three or four years. It was a number of moving personal experiences - including a brief, painful, but ultimately positive romantic relationship - that awakened me to this state of being. This awareness, combined with the pressures of life, have motivated me to cope with the terrors which I have been so loathe to confront, and to try and make something better out of my life. I do feel as if my emotional constitution has become somewhat hardier over the past year. I tend to see the world as great, overwhelming, and threatening, and that I am but a small, fragile thing that could at any time be crushed under the blind force of its movements. That fear is probably at least partially justified, but certainly there is a better way to live with it than to simply hide away, right?
There are better ways to live, certainly, but they are hard, and depend upon a certain detachment from the world to be useful. The most effective by far is to develop a cult of personality with yourself at the center - a process that can actually, with vigorous and watchful effort, be forced to coexist with the virtues of humility and charity. The point is, if one's life is to be lived under a shadow of something or other, it may as well be the shadow of some looming destiny or great vindication. If the world must fall upon you, let it shatter when it hits. I said before that no one has yet destroyed the world. If you want to cope with a world that threatens to blindly destroy you, well... just keep that thought in escrow until the time comes.
Remember. There were times past when men and women strode the earth waging great and terrible wars, toppling entire nations, choking rivers with blood. They did this as a matter of course, and counted it righteousness to do so. Those times could come again. If you ever find yourself feeling down, just hold on to that thought. Blind senseless forces may reign for now, but there could come a time again, in some distant (or not so distant) age, in which people are themselves vessels of power and glory, wielded like swords by forces enormous and inscrutable, but whose eyes are wide and staring.
We have slain purpose. But resurrections happen.
Alternatively, if that's not your thing, you could view it thus: "I am the villain of this story; a tyrant; I have cruelly enslaved reality with my perceptions, and it's only natural that it should move against me sooner or later. When it does, and when it succeeds - and it will succeed - all of creation will laugh for joy." If you can do that, and mean it, you've been able to combine utter delusion with utter candour, and will thereby have conquered the mundane.
This is all theoretical, mind you, and it is most certainly not for everyone. The most common coping mechanism is apathy and stupor, and its success, while empty, is notable. And of course, the biggest problem with these approaches is that they're just more of the same, only magnified to obscene lengths. The problem is not simply solved but eradicated. We do not fight the blind forces; we simply become one such force ourselves.
In fact:
Yes, and I notice this as well. I think there was a time when I was much more perfectionistic, but as I grew to experience a kind of tender appreciation for the frailties and imperfections in others, I also grew to accept them in myself. Asking too much of oneself is really just cruel, and it demeans the state of being imperfect, which we all share. A writer I've always liked once made a statement like that, claiming that to demean oneself is to approve of demeanment, and to make extravagant demands of the self is to make extravagant demands of the very human vessel. I think the exact saying was something like, "In punishing yourself, you come to merit punishment." Refusing to accept imperfection is certainly along the same lines, I think.
The problem expressed to its very core. The self-consciously imperfect specimen can not move as a god in a world in which he or she is only a visitor, whether it be a god of light or of darkness. Imperfection is undeniable unless one guts the word to such an extent that "perfection" means "whatever is," which is certainly a way that some have gone, but seems to do the word a disservice.
Do you think it means something? I don't generally entertain Freudian-esque interpretations of such things in which every possible symbol has an identifiable and universal meaning - a flower represents a womb, a dolphin represents detachment from reality, or something. However, I do wonder if tendencies like these don't symbolically portray some tidbit about the person in question. My friend always draws squares when she is bored. I once knew someone who always came back to drawing eyes.
I don't know what it means, though I can't imagine it's just a coincidence. A habit, certainly, but why did it begin? I have no idea, regrettably.
One thing I really wish I could do well is dance. I don't know anyone who really dances well, unless you count recreational dances at parties and such. I have this instinctual desire to move in that way. And to help matters, I have an apparently good sense of balance, and am light on my feet. When I was little I sort of wanted to learn ballet - you know, there's that innocent mystique that a ballet dancer has. I imagine I may have received a few odd looks, and I doubt I would have kept with it anyway, as it requires a lot of discipline that I may not have had even then.
Dancing would be nice, too. I honestly wouldn't even know where to begin, though. The worst part, I think, is knowing that I could dance well, and could sing well, if I just put some damn time into it. Like you said, it's a question of both propriety and the application of effort. I don't know that my immortal dignity would be able to take the many hours of truly terrible rehearsals necessary to make these dreams become a reality.
Ballet dancers sort of freak me out, honestly. :0
It's very nice to know someone else looks at it this way. Sometimes I have tried to voice this thought and felt rather snubbed for it, for any sentiment which detracts from the glow cast on missionary work. I have never felt that the height of helping others had to be spreading religious or spiritual teaching to isolated people; rather, some people, myself included, would be much better suited to living in one's own society, hopefully making it better.
It's true! I know certain fundamentalist types whose families and churches basically exist apart from our country - a divorce I envy, some days, but one that is ultimately harmful to them both. They don't care about "the world" unless it's some far-off country where nobody understands you. The danger of that is creating such a country right next door through persistant self-isolation and aloofness. Then where will they be? Nowhere. No one but the Lord shall weep for them, and I can't imagine that even He would be too shook up about it.
So do I. And I think this same attitude is what can be thought of as being "proud of oneself," not necessarily entailing thinking of oneself as being better than or above others.
It's an interesting thing, as I'm sure you've noticed, because the ethics of it depend so very much on how we define and appreciate "self." If we are conscious of our skills being a gift rather than a right, of our goodness being paltry rather than legendary, then to be proud of such a self is no great crime. It is satisfaction; it is contentent. Contentment is arduous, and it is rare. It is getting every once of value out of something that there is to be gotten, whether that thing is an object or a self.
The danger comes with disdain of other selves, with exaltation of the own self beyond all proportion, with this and with that. The coping approaches outlined above, problematic though they were, can be almost forced not to fall prey to these flaws through careful, mind-numbing effort. To have a cult of personality and to remain humble is almost impossible, though I've seen some who have made a good run at it. To be the great tyrant of reality and to refrain from exaggeration is difficult, but again, I've seen some who elevate it to a form of art. They are hunger artists and fiends, but they are sympathetic in their hangdogedness.
The best we can do is push through the muck, hold fast to the good, and cry "viva el Cristo Rey" when they throw us against the wall. All else is vanity.
In fact, yeah, I'm going to go with that. The best way to cope with the great pressing pressures of opressive metaphysick is to say to oneself, "stop being a damn fool," and simply Get On With It.
I've been told I have a Socratic style of conversation and debating, so I'm not sure quite how I feel about this comment. To be totally honest, I'm not absolutely certain what that even entails.
Well, I just don't like being led around by someone who's trying to coax me into answering a question in a certain way. Thankfully this was not the case here, but still, I worry:
EDIT: Before I go, I'm going to recommend the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn to one and all. Read them, particularly A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Here is a man who can write in the greatest tradition of the Russian masters, and, joy of joys, he is still alive. Old, certainly; retired, likely. But alive! Good stuff.
Mamelon, I haven't forgotten to reply. I've been busy with a midterm and I have to put together some precises of Early Church documents, too. In due time, I'll be back. Maybe even later today.
I wasn't really planning on going anywhere else. But I suppose I could ask what sort of evidence exists. Christianity seems self-contradictory to me.
Oh, I beg your pardon. When people make a point of repeating things and trying to coax an answer out of someone, my "Socratic dialogue" deflectors go up and I assume the worst. Sorry about that.
With regard to the evidence, it falls into a number of categories.
1. Historical - what happened
2. Rhetorical - interpreting what happened
3. Theoretical - why what happened happened
4. Concrete personal experience - something happened omg
5. Vaguer spiritual realities - things can happen
Of these, #4 can be the most dramatic, but it's also the most unreliable from a systematic standpoint. An evangelist can argue the other four until the cows come home, and with great success, but it does not fall to him to literally bring God bursting forth from the various seams of the world. Speaking candidly, I can tell you that I have never in my life experienced anything that could be categorized as a definite "spiritual event," though there have been curious things of one type or another that I'm happy enough to chalk up to a pleasant God. Atheists have occasionally attempted to "deprogram" me by trying to make me cast doubt upon the spiritual provenance of the religious experiences of my life, but have met with bitter failure because there's nothing there to subvert.
Moral: Not all Christians are fundamentalist Pentecostals.
So a given Christian does believe that the evidence in favour of Christianity is stronger than anything to the contrary? They reason that Christianity is correct? (I like to be sure of things, hence the repetitiveness.)
Either stronger in sovereign isolation or by dint of cumulative multiplicity, yes.
You know, this would all be much faster if you just stopped playing Socratic games and simply said what you wish to say.
Quote from Senori »
Do tell.
In no particular order, though some will be noticeably more significant than others.
1. Environmental impact - atmospheric: The pollution from auto emissions is both disgusting and unnecessary. So too is the noise that traffic and idiots' stereos create.
2. Environmental impact - terrain: There is not a stretch of land that is not made worse by having a road rammed through it. Roads are not "low-impact" sources of human interference, either; as well as simply destroying whatever they touch, they spray off all sorts of metal and chemical detritus and produce a terrible racket.
3. Environmental impact - wildlife: Is our convenience worth a deer's life? A hundred deer? A thousand? What about all of the other species whose numbers are massacred in the course of us getting from point A to point B faster? To eat an animal is one thing; to kill it with no regard, and for no good reason, is quite another.
4. Sociological impact - idiotic ideas about time/distance: That people are in a damnable rush about things is simply true, and the automobile culture is partly to blame. The stress this causes is indisputable (see #8), and the way it makes people think about how they get places, and where those places are, is skewed. "Ten miles away" means nothing now, and it has made us weak.
5. Sociological impact - "road rage:" It is unacceptable that men should be moved to wrath, madness, and murder by the question of a few seconds or a breach of etiquette. We're better than this. Why feed this mania? Why even allow the environment that foments it to exist?
6. Sociological impact - worst excesses of consumer culture: The trope of the "car-as-*****" is a familiar one, and the inane lengths to which this drives men who might otherwise do something useful with their time and energy are simply unnecessary. For what a car actually does for a person, it is an unacceptably weighty purchase, and the purchases themselves are, more often than not, sources of the freewheeling debt that has caused so many problems both in the past and in the present.
7. Sociological impact - divorce from self-sufficiency: There are certainly men and women who can fix their own cars, but very few who can build one for themselves. In order for people to get to their jobs, for companies to make money off of their products, and for countless other things to happen, ranging from useful to vital, all individuals involved must buy something from a profit-seeking corporation. It is a pernicious and increasing intrusion into the actual freedom of an individual's life.
8. Vital impact - source of anxiety: People who own cars are worried about having them stolen, or wrecked, or damaged in some way. They worry about them going out of style. They worry about filling them with gas. They worry about where to park. They worry about other drivers, who are themselves worrying about all of this as well. Pedestrians worry about being killed - being killed - because someone else's attention lapses for a second, or because a key piece of equipment fails. This is a nightmarish, random and pointless death.
9. Vital impact - human lives lost to automobile accidents: All of the convenience we derive from automobiles, all of the industries we keep going, all of the social power and status we gain from expensive models and enjoyment we gain from driving fast or in interesting places - none of this is worth a single human life. Automobiles generally kill more people in a day than hate crimes do in an entire year, and yet there's only a national hysteria over the latter. That's not just disproportionate; that's a ****ing scandal.
10. Cultural impact - city planning: As if all of this weren't bad enough, the presence of automobiles has an enormous impact on how communities are designed. Entire cities are built around an article of consumer goods. Entire cities are built not with human safety - with our children's lives - in mind, but rather with the efficient throughflow of traffic. Were there are automobiles, there is neither silence, nor peace, nor comfort, nor security. This too is a scandal.
11. Cultural impact - decentralization: The upshot of the city planning changes is that communities are no longer built with the intention - or even the capability - of serving themselves. Commercial, residential and industrial districts are zoned out, and if not for the polluting, noisy, dangerous, expensive pieces of claptrap provided to you by monstrously wealthy corporations, would be so prohibitively arranged as to destroy the possibility of self-sufficiency. We have entire towns spring up that exist only to house an essentially immigrant population, who waste hours every day commuting to another city to work. The place in which they actually live could not support them even if it had to. A result of this is that there is less and less incentive to know and trust one's neighbours
None of this needs to happen, and every day that it does is an international disgrace. I would place automobiles (cars, trucks, the lot of them) just behind the machine gun and the atom bomb as the most awful-yet-ineradicable inventions ever to wrench forth from the mind to man.
This may have been a more impassioned response than was necessary, but that's too bad. I'm drunk (buzzed, anyway), I'm sublimely sad from Children of Men (again), and I don't care anymore. Or, maybe, I care more than ever. Either could explain it.
Does a given Christian believe that the evidence for Christianity is greater than the evidence against?
Either that, or he believes that the evidence in its favour is of a more concrete nature than that against. I know this sounds like hair-splitting, so let me map it out.
Case A: Christian believes that there are six points in his religion's favour and four against. These six points are typically matters of history or rhetoric.
Case B: Christian believes that there is one point in his religion's favour, but the nine against it are uncertain, while the one for it is wrought in steel. This one point is typically a matter of personal experience.
I'm generally like this myself, and I don't really know how to change.
I tend to deal with it by making my idle activities things that will have a positive impact on my working life. So I read literary theory and criticism for fun, etc.
You're defining faith so as to make it what I call reason, I think; again, the name itself doesn't particularly matter. To clarify the concept, can you answer my question?
Which question? Also, sorry for the delay; I thought yesterday was Saturday so I didn't do anything, but it turns out it wasn't :0
Quote from SorryGuy »
Seeing as we are having a theological discussion I have always been a little curious where people find their beliefs from, particularly those who have as much conviction as many of you do. Were they "inherited" from your parents? Did you find them on your own? Did you switch beliefs as some point?
This is by means meant to factor into the discussion going on right now. I am merely curious.
Well, for my own part, it's a tricky story. The reason for my Christianity is not a single thing, or even a unified field, but the progression looks more or less like this:
1. Youthful (like, fifth grade) infatuation with Satanism, fostered by sixth grader I thought was cool. Neither of us knew what we were talking about. Even at that young age, however, I came to see a sort of foolishness in trusting the Judeo-Christian account of things only so far as they established My Hero, but no further, so I quickly abandoned it (though not before doing several idiotic things that I do not intend to discuss).
2. In my father's vast comic book collection were two with an explicitly evangelistic (not necessary Evangelical, though; more on that in a moment), specifically "Hansi: The Girl Who Loved the Swastika," and "Scarface." The former was about a girl who joined the Hitler Youth only to be betrayed and sent to the camps, where she discovered the mercy of Christ. The latter has nothing to do with either the Paul Muni or Al Pacino characters, but is rather about a corrupt African politician with lots of scars on his face from when he had been whipped by a white devil as a child. With the help of two American evangelists, however, he becomes a good man in some way or another. If I remember the provenance of these comic books correctly, I am moved to conclude, incredibly, that Jack Chick was responsible for me saying my first prayer.
3. As I grew older, I flailed desperately for some way in which to rebel against my parents, who were both ex-hippies, both more or less atheists (my mother most certainly; my father was more of a Buddhist/Druid/Thing), and both perfectly pleasant and reasonable people who treated me as a being far more mature and relevant than I actually was. I found an ally in Christianity, the one thing against which they both seemed to hold anguished and equal opinions, and began my research at once. What began as an act of youthful spite soon blossomed into an obsession, even if only a weirdly fundamentalist one.
4. Thereafter I found myself spoiling for a fight, and began arguing in favour of Christianity on Internet message boards (including this one). In doing so, I discovered a variety of excellent web resources, through which I rapidly and ravenously read, discovering that things were not nearly so simple and - frankly - depressing as Jack Chick and those like him had made them out to be. It was news to me that I could listen to Led Zeppelin without worrying about my salvation, or that the Papists ever did anything right. I credit these sorts of websites with making me realize just how vital history is to the proper understanding of the present and the plotting out of the future, thereby opening up a world of literature and thought of which I had previously been wholly ignorant.
5. All of this, then, found me in university, a sparsely-practicing "mere Christian," after the fashion (but not the execution) of C.S. Lewis. I drifted into some Christian clubs, all of them protestant (one had to go to the Catholic King's campus to find otherwise, and I never did), and found myself having the same sad-sack reaction to them that I did to the original form of Christianity I had taken from the fundamentalists. These Evangelicals were very nice people, but they were almost too nice. The whole thing seemed like a very obvious veneer over a very pronounced strata of darkness, to one degree or another. The intense focus on the importance of mission work (discussed below with Mamelon) was highly off-putting, as was the weird obsession with "worship" in the form of soft-rock ballads, sung earnestly enough, I suppose, but not leading me in any way to the conclusion that God was actually being worshiped.
6. It was at this point that my work on G.K. Chesterton began, and with it my interest in medieval Europe, orthodox views of history (rather than post-modern), and what they call Popery. This heritage having been established and examined, I found myself unable to resist it. Here I am today.
In short, to put a waggish spin on it, Jack Chick is responsible for the enormous Vatican flag on the wall behind me, the rosary on my bedstand, and the fact that I'm listening to a Requiem Mass as I type this.
Her image, or her as a larger entity (behavior, demeanor, voice, etc)? In any case, she's quite lovely. Incidentally, I don't much care for the experience of envy.
Image and entity. She was the Platonic "Form of Classiness."
I typically would describe myself as someone who "thinks in feelings," for lack of a better expression, but it sounds so contradictory that I left it out.
Probably one of my more consistent problems in life, really, has been attempting to translate what goes on in my head to an expressable form. Which has been especially frustrating, as I have this impetus to write as I do, and also partially explains my occasionaly extravagant verbosity as some overcompensation.
I think in one way or another, however, it has expanded my mind somewhat because I have been forced to expand my communcation skills. Deficiencies are funny that way.
I think it's telling that science-fiction stories having to do with the understanding of dreams tend to rely on the conceit of a machine that lets us record them. The internal workings of the human mind do not lend themselves well to rational debate, however paradoxical that might seem (it isn't, really, but it is to the sort of people who insist on a rational, materialist Humanity), primarily because we can't really translate them into any sort of quantifiable or identifiable context. "Thinking in feelings," for example, is a phrase ripe with meaning, yet is ultimately meaningless if we are to attempt to make any sense of it.
This is yet another barrier (insurmountable, incidentally) that exists between one person and the next. Sorry, monism!
If I may, I would suppose that your thinking is poetic rather than prosaic. Which seems similar to my experience in some ways. If I understand it well enough to say, it is a remarkable way of perceiving the world. No doubt partly responsible for the passion you feel for your area of study.
I recall lines from songs or read-aloud poems that have always stuck with me because of their concise beauty and rhythm, that seem to have profound meaning to me even when the words themselves don't carry much significance. I'm not certain if it's exactly the same as your experience, however.
That's about right, yes. It's like something bleeds through from Elsewhere, creating moments of intense passion and significance using the raw materials of brilliant men and women. I used to think people could do it on their own, but I don't anymore.
Have you ever felt a resonance with language on its own, even if you don't understand it? I find that I have this love for listening to music sung in a language which I do not speak (like Japanese and Russian, both of which are languages which I love and yet do not understand), simply for the sensory pleasure of it. It does, however, cut off part of what makes language so delightful, which is the meaning it transits.
Oh, absolutely. One of my favourite things at the moment is the music of Piotr Rubik, a Polish composer who produces excellent choral and orchestral work. I don't understand a word of it (beyond some of the titles, which use Polishized versions of words I know; "Psalm apokaliptyczny," for example, is straightforward enough), but the overall effect is simply majestic and wonderful.
This is pretty much the case with most "classical" music. I can muddle through most of the Latin works, and some of the French and Italian besides, but if it comes to material from elsewhere in Europe I have to simply take it for what it sounds like rather than for what it means. Not that I mind, particularly, for even then the music is beautiful.
In summary, yes, I sympathize.
I have had times, though, when I found a particular song to be breathtaking, and when I read an English transcription of the lyrics, witnessed them to be surprisingly disenchanting.
Heh. I was reading an article yesterday about the "narco corridos," which are traditional (and musically beautiful) Mexican folk songs, except that they're about drug runners and border-jumpers. The music is popular both south and north of the border, though for varying reasons. I imagine there are many hip, diverse white folk who love that authentic Latin-American sound but have no idea that they're listening to the epic tale of "Lightning" Gomez and the time he got twenty kilos past the National Guard.
Sometimes a little mystery is a good thing.
Seems I had it right, then. I fancied writing books to be a similar pursuit. As grueling as writing can sometimes be, it's so rewarding ultimately that I'd want to do it anyway. The trouble seems to be acquiring a place in the field, and living up to it.
Well, the best way to get published is to already have been published, unfortunately. Academia goes a long way towards making this happen, thankfully, as any reasonably astute journeyman can be assured of having a minor article on some obscure matter published somewhere, somehow, along the road from BA to PhD. I'm currently working on just such a piece, examining the issue of early Australian Judaism as it pertains to a single play by a writer few have ever heard of. It's dreadfully interesting, but only to me. That's how you know it will be a good article.
Well, that isn't truly unusual, I don't think, nor a bad thing. I generally find myself to be biased more toward the "feeling" side of the spectrum, but as I grow older I feel the two faculties become closer and closer fused. I have put a lot of effort into developing my more rational capabilities, perhaps to keep up with my friends and family. And what has somewhat surprised me is that this website's Debate forum has been quite a helping hand there.
I'd imagine the maturing process does a great detail towards breaking down the frankly juvenile wall that is often placed between reason and feeling. As to your latter point, about the Debate forum, Dr. Johnson had this to say:
"To fix the thoughts by writing, and subject them to frequent examinations and reviews, is the best method of enabling the mind to detect its own sophisms, and keep it on guard against the fallacies which it practises on others: in conversation we naturally diffuse our thoughts, and in writing we contract them; method is the excellence of writing, and unconstraint the grace of conversation."
Reading those words for the first time actually changed the way I approached my whole life, so I'm pretty happy with 'em.
Oh, ack, so do I. I've come to realize that the time I spend in the evenings on my personal interests and activities is very important to getting through the week. I need that refreshment for my mind, that escape from the demands of time, to regain the composure I will need for the next day.
For my own part, the personal interests and activities are my real life. Everything else just gets in the way. Maybe this is an unhealthy way to look at things, particularly with another six or seven years of rigorous research staring me down, but I can't really help it.
For a few years I have not drunk much in the way of black tea, as I grew to love other types. I might almost say I am in love with green tea, for it's exceedingly delicate flavor and simplicity, but rarer white tea and tea with floral elements have grown to appeal to me. I am now favoring different kinds of spiced tea (like chai tea), or those with flavors like citrus zest. However, as I found today, there is a distinct pleasure to be found in a good black tea.
I've always found green tea to be too delicate, honestly. If I wanted a cup of hot water, I'd have some. I like my foods to be as larger-than-life as my literary heroes. Chai, on the other hand, is another story altogether. It's too distinctive to really be called delicate, and I like it just fine. Particularly with a bit of cinnamon or nutmeg.
However, I do see what you mean. I think that the feeling of being to understand someone else, to see yourself in them and them in you, and to feel connected to the reality around you (as opposed to simply in you) is comforting. Sometimes I have grand ideas about the troubles I go through being extraordinary, and when I listen to the lady sitting beside me make light of her decidely pressing issues (mortgages and children's needs and so forth), I realize how extravagant and conceited I am actually being. It helps to ground me, I think, which is something for which I have been looking.
I often have similar problems with issues of context. I mean, I don't imagine that I have it very bad, or that my life actually sucks (when I'm feeling down). I'm only willing to go as far as admitting that I think these things are true, and, this having been done, it's easier to see how absurd the idea actually is. In some ways, reading tragic literature, watching tragic films, and listening to tragic music actually brightens my mood. "Here," says I, "is real suffering. Here is real tribulation. Get back to work, douchebag."
Not really comforting, but deucedly effective.
I beheld the most glorious sky Wednesday morning. There were clouds, as dark as a river, wrapped all around the horizon, a tinge of renegade gold peering above the rim. In the foreground, a smaller, paler stream of clouds molded into odd shapes against the greyness. With the ice so colorless around me, as I gazed up at it I felt the sensation of being indoors, overshadowed by this looming vault. I think it defined the rest of the day for me.
That's a great image. Thank you for that.
Such is writing, as I see you understand. Within myself I take joy in it, but as I tend to feel guarded around others I have mixed feelings about it when it comes to writing something someone else will read.
It's a familiar feeling, though I've become more mercenary about my art lately.
Ha! So he is the one who said that? I have heard that before and I have always liked it. I haven't always felt as much, surely, but once I began to understand it, my attitudes began to change.
He has said most things that are true.
Anyhow, the context, if you're interested:
"A cosmos one day being rebuked by a pessimist replied, 'How can you who revile me consent to speak by my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness and then we will discuss the matter.'
Moral. You should not look a gift universe in the mouth."
That does sound atypical (not to say abnormal, though), but in truth it could be for any number of reasons. I hate playing psychologist, and always advise against it, but I hope I am not playing as I say that this seems consistent with everything else you've told me about yourself. I don't mean to conjecture anything, but I do feel empathetic for you.
Thank you for your kind feeling.
I've had more fights than I care to remember. They always trouble me, and I have this rather embarrassing tendency towards tearfulness and hurt feelings that makes it difficult. However, after all of it comes out in the open, after passionate words are exclaimed, then apologies given, the sense of release, resolution, and closure is wonderful - even if one is left feeling a little vulnerable and abashed.
Oh, well, uh, I've had plenty of arguments with people, though not to the extent of starting an immortal feud. What I meant was that I have never had to physically fight anybody, which seems very weird. Nobody ever tried. Nobody even picked on me, "brainer" though I manifestly and irredeemably was, either in elementary or high school. Nobody even came close.
I just can't understand it, and almost feel as though I've missed out on something.
Insofar as I understand you, I relate to this so well that I doubt I could express it. Fear is sometimes exquisite, but of all emotions I find I like it least.
Perhaps what is frightening to realize is that one's will, one's dedication and desire, is probably most responsible for happiness, for sucessful achievement of the dream. Anyone can succeed at an easy task, but to succeed at what one wants to most of all takes effort. It takes heart. This is sometimes terrifying to think about when most tasks seem to be easy tasks, and those that are not feel repulsive.
I am often left to wonder if I really have "what it takes," perhaps as you do. When it comes to the mundanity of everyday life, the gruel and grind of doing work not suited to me, the burden of boredom, the demands of being in charge of my own actions . . . I admit I fear that maybe I'm too delicate or inept a creature to really fare well in this world of ours. Does that sound familiar?
Somewhat. I don't fear delicacy so much as I fear that I'm being tough in the wrong ways. It's a question of missing nuances that I otherwise might not, and those nuances being vital. I've already missed out on all sorts of scholarship and grant opportunities in one way or another, and bureaucracy continues to be something of a blind spot for me. It's going to be hard going.
The sense I get from you, generally, is that you'd like to just live without hassle. Is that more or less accurate? If so, I can certainly sympathize.
I don't presume to pity you, but I do feel for you. Cooking is not for everyone, but I find it to be so relaxing and pleasant an activity that I sometimes get carried away. Even though my skills are far from top-notch, it's the kind of thing I wouldn't mind doing for a living, even only as a second- or third-best cook somewhere.
Well, it's good to be able to candidly aspire to the rank of second- or third-best of something. It shows humility and a proper sense of proportion. I know too many people who will pursue a goal only so long as they can be the greatest there has ever been in achieving it; anything else would be pointless to them, and produces gloom, despair or hatred. It's a toxic sort of life, but one that becomes more and more popular as the occasionally American philosophies of arch-individualism and self-reliance percolate into the wider world.
I think I'm in the same boat, there. I've always wanted to learn to drive simply for practical application, and yet I've never been able to manipulate so much as a basic buggy. I don't see myself mastering a vehicle any time in the near future.
I just don't have the attention span for it, myself, and I get by alright without it.
I also have some moral objections to automobiles, but that's another story altogether.
I'm similar in this regard, as well. I enjoy some rudimentary, finite math that I use for some mechanical activity or another, but on the whole mathematics are above me.
You know, I've heard most people have more trouble with subtraction and division than multiplication and addition, because most people tend to think more in terms of positivity (something being there) than negativity (something not being there).
That makes sense. I mean, given the brouhaha surrounding even the concept of zero, it doesn't surprise me at all.
Sports, cars, most sciences, and technology (especially the last) are rather outside my sphere, as well. Plants, however, I tend to enjoy at least aesthetically speaking. When I draw recreationally I tend to doodle various shapes, and I've noticed that the shapes I draw most often (and unconsciously) are plant or flower shapes and the heart-shape. I don't know why.
I like to draw triangle constructs, weird iterations on graph paper, and zombies.
I'm also interested in oriental cultures, and most foreign cultures in general.
Well, you live in a far wider world than I do, then.
But Nick (if I may presume to speak to you so), I encourage you not to feel too badly about this. You are eminently gifted, expressive, insightful, with deep passions, and if you feel you lack diligence, then the fact that you are aware of this deficiency is a testament to a quality of character which you are perhaps too quick to deny.
You may speak as much, and I thank you for your reassurance. I should point out that I don't actually feel bad about not caring about those latter things. Only my mathematical and culinary shortcomings bother me.
That, and I wish I were a better singer.
Where I live, many churches seem to see anyone and everyone as being charged with missionary work. However, I myself have only met two or three people who have seemed truly up to it. One is my father, who can do anything. Another is my closest friend, who is a nurse (like my father, perhaps not coincidentally) and travels all around the world anyway.
I noticed this mostly with regard to the Evangelicals with whom I once associated. The biggest Christian club at the school, a branch of the more generalized Campus Crusade for Christ (with whom I will now have little to do, if I can help it), could hardly go a week without having some mission director come in to speak at our meeting and make us all feel guilty for liking our lives as they were, thank you, and not wanting to go perform some dubious service for people who have no idea what we're saying and likely couldn't care less so long as we keep building stuff for them.
It's like they can't even see the growing spiritual vacuity of the west, or if they do see it they don't care. This is why we're getting stories now of Christian missionaries coming from places in Africa and South America to evangelize western countries. At first I thought such stories simply delightful, and I still do, to a degree, but there's an urgent note to them, too, that I think may have been too long ignored.
I think you are correct, really. Sometimes making a fine point of being modest and humble is more arrogant than not, and not really always constructive.
That's quite likely. I know that C.S. Lewis described humility as being able to build the finest cathedral in all Christendom, but being just as happy with it as if it had been built by someone else. Not, then, to denigrate one's own doubtless skills, but to revel rather in their result than in their use. I think there may be something to that.
Maybe had I dropped out of the race, even had the subsequent winner deserved it (which would have been Stan, and I do believe he rightly did deserve it), he might still have felt as if he were getting a kind of hand-me-down, which I wouldn't have at all wanted to inflict on him.
I'm sure Stan is cool with it. He simply changed his custom tag to "Official Member 2005" when he didn't win it during the first contest, so I think he'd just be his usual resourceful, pragmatic self.
Aww, my brother revealed it anyway in the thread about my birthday on Wednesday. Anyway, realize that when I said this, I was still thinking of myself as a twenty-two year old. I had a whole year to grow accustomed to it.
I still think I'm 19 sometimes. It's surprisingly easy to forget about.
Sometimes I do feel like I am old, though not necessarily for vain reasons (even though I certainly am vain), but more because I have long felt this intense pressure for my life to be in a certain state by now, and with each year that passes, I feel like I'm running out of time. What happens when I run out? What if I can't do anything with what I have left?
I worry about this too, but it's mostly a phantom worry based on reading too many books. When I look to the great men of the past, many of whom have been in positions of prominence by the time they reached my age, I'm looking at a different system of counting. They got to where they were because more was expected of them at a much younger age, and the lifespan was shorter into the bargain. As I can fully expect to live to be like 80, it doesn't seem as urgent as all that, in the end.
This is what I was trying to communicate, though I've felt my ability to make clear arguments has been weak for a while. As some say, "Debate Mamelon" has not seemed very interested in coming out of her shell as of late.
Anyway, I suppose some kind of faith could be described as faith without reason, but I don't think the kind of faith that is typically intended in a religious context is adequately encapsulated by that summation at all.
No indeed.
Quote from T2 »
I'm seeing Pan's Labyrinth today with several friends in Boston. It has garnered a 99% "Fresh" rating on RottenTomatoes.com, which is encouraging.
I'm looking forward to seeing it myself, when it comes around. I saw Children of Men last night, and I'm going to go see it again tonight. As I was saying to Ethan, it's not every film that's effective enough to make me - me, of all people! -, when confronted with the image of angry Muslims marching through a shattered street with AK's and green flags in the air as they bellow "Allahu Akbar," want to salute them as they go. That's not just good film-making. That's a freaking miracle.
You're leading me to think that a given Christian believes that the evidence for Christianity is greater than the evidence against; is this what you mean, or am I misconstruing you?
I'm not trying to lead you to think anything beyond that faith isn't some simultaneously blind and doe-eyed sense of conviction. The usefulness of faith, as it actually exists as a real Christian concept and not as whatever non-Christians foolishly persist in saying it is, is a matter for you to decide upon for yourself.
Alas no. Where is a linguist when you need him? You're equating faith and rationality. Reread my last quote.
I guess what I'm saying is that the reason you're having a problem with this is because your definition of faith is (still) not the Christian definition of faith, and is, as such, useless in the context of trying to prove the Christian faith wrong. The definition to which I directed you, by contrast, is indeed such a definition, and is not in any way useless. The point of it is that "faith" is not some mystic nonsense. It's a pretty plain and everyday sort of thing, closely related to the necessary approach we take to almost anything.
Additionally, your treatment of this issue still assumes an implicit "blindness" that simply isn't there. Please stop.
Stan once explained this with one of his awesome graphics, but I don't have it on me, unfortunately.
Oh. I wonder why they decided to call it "Magic Realism"?
Oh, well, that's where it's all leading. There's a progression through Gothic to the Fantastic to the Neo-Fantastic to Fantasy to Magic Realism. It's a notoriously difficult genre to pin down, as it covers so much and is fluid. I'd say more ink has been spilled over the subject in the 20th century than on any other genre of literature.
For a second I almost believed that you were being taught actual magic. As in, spells (not sleight of hand).
No such luck, I'm afraid.
*gasp* That sounds exactly like my sort of thing. Beautiful? Thought-provoking? Delicate? Don't exist? All of my favorite descriptors for a thing or person!
I think one reason I have an affinity for graphic novels is because I get this sensory satisfaction from looking at hand-drawn art . . . especially of human beings, faces and hands and so on. Have you ever found something that was just unusually fulfilling and relaxing in an almost sensual way?
Grace Kelly.
I am not joking. Also, John Singer Sargent's Triumph of Religion, and virtually anything by Caravaggio, Bernini or Dore.
I just respond that way to images. And anything written or drawn by hand . . . for instance, I consider a note written by hand (as opposed to typed) to be quite intimate and personal . . . In addition, I typically think in images or colors rather than sentences, so maybe it's more "my language," despite my general love of writing.
I know people like you. My father, actually, is one of them. He was surprised recently to learn that not everyone was like this, in fact, so he has since become more sympathetic with those who don't follow his meaning as quickly as he might like them to.
Being able to imbue a simple blotch of mental colour with relevant meaning and memory is a wonderful ability to have.
For my own part, I think in tropes, if you can imagine such a thing. I guess more accurately it could be described in phrases or concepts. I remember lines from poems or books or songs and relate them to things that are important. Yeats' majestic phrase, "a terrible beauty is born" has always had great significance to me for reasons I can not adequately express, and Tennyson has been a gold mine of mnemonic emotionalizers. "Then once by man and angels to be seen, in roaring he shall rise and on the surface die." Just thinking that line - just thinking it to myself - makes me feel better when things are rough. Or Browning's conclusion to "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came."
I often find myself running over these lines in my head, over and over again, as a sort of unconscious background to thinking about other things. It's like white noise.
Well you pose some material already . . . I've been trying to get myself back into fictional prose, because that is what I like to write, but I like non-fantastic ("mundane") work as well . . .
Here are ten books you should look into (that is, into which you should look; why lower the tone, right?):
1. Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory
2. Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons
3. Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary
4. G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday
5. C.S. Forester's Brown on Resolution and/or Death to the French
6. Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel
7. Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
8. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
9. Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson
10. Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels
I could also recommend at least ten collections of essays on all topics under the sun, but I think this will start you off well.
Well, see, I think it's a pretty admirable goal. My mother used to always tell me I should be a professor, and I always assumed she was teasing. However, it sounds like it'd a killer job.
Oh, for sure. In some regards it would be like a scam. I'd be getting paid, basically, to do paperwork. Everything else is stuff I'd do for free.
I don't know much about you in depth, but I know a few things about both English and about instruction, and you seem to be just the sort of fellow who'd thrive at that. Not that you didn't already realize this.
Why thank you. I sure hope the inevitable batch of horrified first-year students feels the same way. I actually alternate between pitying my future students and wishing I was them.
If you had to make a distinction, would you say that you are predominantly a "thinker" (your chief style of processing ideas is rationalistic) or "feeler" (style is oriented toward values and interpersonal experience)? I couldn't tell.
I imagine making use of both such faculties would be good for teaching.
I honestly don't know. While I am pretty adamant that how I feel about things has no bearing on their reality, I am certainly not going to exalt reason to heights she can't bear. I try to synthesize the two as best I can, but as to which of them dominates, I just couldn't say.
I especially like the sound of Flannery O'Connor . . . I have a roommate who might love that.
Well, be sure to check her out. She's one of the grand dames of Southern Gothic, along with Eudora Welty, among others. I may have misspelled Welty, but I don't care.
I object to mornings a lot less than I once did . . . usually it the first few hours of work during which I am most uncomfortable with being alive. My favorite time of day, conversely, is when I am lying in bed and waiting for sleep to take me. Sometimes it takes a while, but I know it will come and in the meantime, I am perfectly safe. To me, that's peace.
The runner-up would probably be the moment I get home from work.
Those are good times too, though I really hate coming home late and realizing that I have little to no time for idleness.
Tea. All kinds of tea.
That's the spirit! I'm a Darjeeling man myself.
I sit amongst about a dozen people nearby me at work . . . we often sit and chat during the idle times of day. I will usually listen to the ladies around me talking about their lives, including their children, their financial problems, their grievances and their pleasures, and I feel strangely as if it's all worth it. It's maybe a little inappropriate, because many times they don't talk about positive things, and smiling at that seems uncondign . . . but I like knowing things about other people. Not dirt or secrets, really, but simple, ordinary things.
It grants the feeling of understanding them, if only slightly and superficially, and it's a pretty thorough way to sort of "live through them," though not in any malicious sense. However, I often worry that, when I do the sort of thing you describe, I'm essentially treating those around me as walking fictions.
I've also come to appreciate sunlight. Being of fair complexion I used to avoid it, but now I find it very welcome. Plus, when it's out the sky becomes my favorite shade of blue.
I'm beginning to appreciate more things I typically take for granted, such as the family members I see every day. Cooking (and act which I love). Various scents, of which I have wide access thanks to this little website that sells scented oils. And the sensations of blankets, sheets, and new clothes.
I like a good granite sky, myself, with a most fulsome menace bearing down. It's beautiful.
And - this may strike you as perverse - the pain of everyday life. Sometimes one witnesses oneself as if from outside, and you see all the links you have between all those others that pass by quite vividly . . . at least at first, we see others as objects, as things that float around before our senses but that don't touch us. On occasion, one connects subject and object. You might see a poor soul whom you pity or someone grand whom you admire . . . it always feels, to me, like it eventually goes deeper than that. Without making qualifying judgments, there's just something simple and entrancing about these imperfect, small, ugly, and beautiful people. Maybe they're closer than it looks? Maybe not? Sometimes I see myself as I see them, or I see them as I see myself, and everything makes sense for a while.
That's not perverse. The man of genius as far back as Plato has recognized the value of the tragic, and the tragic of the mundane can often be the most powerful thing of all. I am myself grossly addicted to epic tragedy, however, and most any and all cathartic experience. I often wonder if this is morbid, in some way, to delight so in seeing heroes die, but then I think to myself that, were I such a man as I had seen go down in a hail of bullets or beneath a traitor's sword or at the heart of an atom bomb (or whatever), the very least I would have wanted in return would be for someone to look on with tears in their eyes and say, "that was freaking awesome."
I'm not sure what I'm really saying anymore. I think I get a little incoherent as the night deepens . . . hopefully you get the idea.
What about you?
I do get the idea, and I also get incoherent as the night deepens, though in my case this means it's time to start writing rather than stop, at least if I'm working creatively. I tend to "go nuts," at that point, and take stuff in directions I might otherwise have neglected.
Oh, I agree. To me, I often feel like like if I were to admit that suicide were appropriate for me, in an oblique way I'd be approving of others ending their lives because they'll never be just right. That's slightly . . . political, I guess, but that's how it feels. I dislike that. I think everyone both deserves and needs to make use of the lives they have, and appreciate themselves for real (as oposed to appreciating simple self-image). Including me.
I think that's a pretty fair way to look at it. Life is nothing else if not an extravagant present, and it does not do to be such a selfish bastard as to toss it away because it does not suit every one of your minute fancies. Chesterton once suggested that we should not look a gift universe in the mouth, and it would seem to be useful advice.
I often feel that when I am angry, it's like I'm wearing a shade over my eyes, and when I start to see the person again, my anger weakens. It's hard to explain. It's gotten harder and harder to hold any kind of grudge as time goes on. I'm not complaining, to be sure.
When others are angry at me . . . I find it difficult not to take that extremely seriously. Maybe it frightens me in a way. Maybe I don't want to be seen through a shade?
It's hard to say, or, at least, hard for me to say. Real, manifested anger is not something with which I have much experience beyond a few isolated occasions. I often worry that I care too little about things that ought, rather, to enrage me, in fact. I don't get angry with people so much as I get very tired, and when I get very tired I just don't want to deal with them. This happens so rarely, however, that I never know how to deal with it usefully when it crops up, and find myself wallowing in indecision and frustration. I'd like to say that things are different when the tables are turned, but I can not recall any examples of people being angry at me in recent memory. This, too, worries me, for I feel as though I'm not being "real" enough. I've never gotten into a fight with anyone, either, though not for a lack of fortitude. It's just never come up. This unsettles me, somehow.
You know, that's a really good way of putting it. I can relate to this so well I almost want to laugh. It seems like discovering this should be a simple matter. Apparently, it isn't, because I'm still sitting here, too.
What has been easier for me has been to decide what I need. In other words, what's good for me. What's pressing. External stress forces action, I suppose. There's still that big, overhanging ambiguity . . . I often feel like I'm just taking the paths of least resistance.
I worry about that too, in fact, and the "unqualified success" that my endeavours have met scares the crap out of me. What if I'm destined to follow this path all the way up to the door of what I want, but no further? What if there is no pot of gold for me? What if I'm forced to retreat forever, unskilled, unneeded, unfocused? That's a terrifying thought. I would surely die.
I remember one guy said it's like learning to swim. You have to give up some control.
Incidentally, swimming isn't quite so scary once you get the feel for it. Maybe life is similar.
Oh, very likely. I vacillate between wanting it in its own right, and being scared away from the alternative by the examples of people like Nietzsche and Sartre.
Well. I can understand your ealier comment, then. That ought to be one hell of a thesis.
Well, maybe. I have to focus on something smaller, so I'm demonstrating the manner in which Chesterton predates and is sympathetic to both post-colonial theory and certain aspects of cultural theory by a matter of over fifty years. Should be popular, if it's plausible. I think it is, but we'll see.
See, I've always believed that writers can make a big imprint in others' lives. Maybe this is why I have so long wanted to be one?
It's possible. I certainly think they make a bigger imprint in people's lives than painters, for example, who occasionally explode with majesty but are often just mundane. This sad state of affairs is not true of everyone (like Caravaggio, who brought a monstrous glory to everything he touched), but it's true enough of most of them. Nothing sticks in the craw like a good turn of phrase, though.
It is. It's something like a . . . well, I don't know how to describe it. I have known many people who have been profoundly intelligent, sensitive, and insightful, and yet have in many ways also been quite oblivious about some things because they are strongly pulled in some direction or another. I consider myself to be likewise oblivious (and strongly pulled, I guess), except maybe now my interests are beginning to broaden somewhat.
Perhaps I should say it this way: someone who sees a great depth into one or some thing also sacrifices some overall breadth.
That is ever and always the case, tragically. For my own part, I am basically useless at all sorts of important things. Unlike you, I can not cook, and take no joy in doing it when I have to. I can not drive, and neve will, for I have neither the desire nor the attention. I can barely do math, even of the most rudimentary sort. Addition and multiplication I can handle, but subtraction sometimes gives me trouble and I am simply unable to divide, anything, ever, unless the answer is abundantly obvious. Beyond this basic level, there is nothing for me in mathematics. I simply can not comprehend it. This is a nightmare world.
Other areas that are utterly foreign and uninteresting to me include plants, oriental countries, automobiles, essentially all of sports, how technology works, science in general, "native" cultures, and so on.
Yes, anymore I feel less "privileged" because I am reaching that point in my life at which I really have to employ more effort than I ever had to before . . .
I don't typically see myself to be nearly as smart or savvy as others make me out to be. Apparently some people think I'm good at debating, but I know someone else deserved that recognition better than I did. It never occured to me to cede, probably because I liked the idea of public appreciation (positive attention). Selfish, to be sure. Generally, I see myself as naïve, awkward, diffident, and rambling. And yet I get positive attention for it anyway.
Still, I like making friends, even if it's "only" online, so I keep at it.
Some frauds are better to maintain, though it sounds like a remarkable unChristian thing to say. In any event, to demolish such as you describe profits no one, ever. The rationalization I have for this, if indeed it is a rationalization and not just a reason, is that I can do more good for people as the man they think I am than as the man that, perhaps, I really am. In much the same way I have decided to forever forgo missionary work. What can I bring to some Guatemalan tribe that could not be brought by a functional illiterate with a better soul than I? If I go there, who will stay to fire the hearts of the men and women of my own culture? Who could do it?
It is at this point that the rationalization becomes excessively prideful and I attempt to adjust it accordingly, but it doesn't always work. My point is that I can do more for people who know and admire me than I can for people who think nothing whatever of me at all. There you go. I think you can do that too, and, for that reason, you should play to whatever strengths the world seems to think you have
Wow, well congratulations. That is a lot of work, but . . . you have that hope to ease the way, yes? I pray you do well.
As a side note, I think we're roughly the same age.
It is not polite to ask a lady her age, so I will simply take your word for it.
Ah, well . . . I see your point there. Is it possible that you judge yourself more sternly than is appropriate?
It's possible. But then, it's better to be safe than sorry. I wouldn't want someone who really should work hard to think it would be okay to just hide under some coats and that, somehow, everything would work out. Maybe it worked for me; that's no excuse.
Quote from Bardo »
Greetings all. I just wanted to say "hi!"
BAAAAAAAAARDOOOOOOOOOO
Quote from Einsteinmonkey »
This is not the way "faith" is used in reference to religion;
[. . .]
As I said, belief which is not grounded in reason.
I did mean romantic with a little "r," as in having romantic qualities.
Oh, well. Then, "yes," but not primarily.
Borges, eh? Never heard the name, I'll have to look it up now. I love all kinds of fantasy/fantasy-like literature.
Yes, you do have to look it up. His short stories and essays are the best of his work, and are conveniently collected in a nice, cheap volume called Labyrinths. One of his specialties is writing beautiful, thought-provoking, delicate essays on books and people that don't exist.
If that sounds like your sort of thing, by all means, go for it.
I haven't read a good work of fictional prose in a long time, though. It's kind of sad. It used to be that I was never without two or three books to carry around. Now it's mostly visual stuff like graphic novels and art books. I wonder where that shift came about.
It's hard to say. One day I just "turned on" to comic books and graphic novels again after a gap of like fifteen years. Now there are few things I like better.
If necessary, I would be happy to provide a concise list of recommended prose.
In any case, I hope you enjoy it. You're an English major? Are you aiming for any specific vocation, or would I be right to assume that English is just your strongest academic interest?
I intend to be an English professor, though with an eye more to teaching than to strictly research. I only began taking English courses because I found them easy, but I soon discovered that I found them easy because I loved them, and, so, here we are. I'm eminently qualified for the job, in any event, so I don't foresee any problems making it work. It's just going to be a long road to get there, is all. Ideally I would specialize in the moderns, like Chesterton, Shaw, Wells, Belloc, Beerbohm, Wilde, etc., but I also have a deep and abiding love for the English nobs of the 18th century. I've written many a happy paper on the likes of Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, but I just don't know if I'd be as good at teaching them as I would the others.
Ooooh. What kinds of writers are they?
Christine de Pizan was the first professional woman writer (if you don't count Sappho, which I don't, because she's too mysterious and weird), producing stories, poetry, and scholarly treatises in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Her best-known work is The City of Ladies, in which she goes to bat against misogyny by demonstrating the many superior qualities of her sex. She writes beautifully and thoughtfully, and to read her is to wonder just what tragedy occurred to make a tradition that began with her end up with the likes of Germaine Greer.
Flannery O'Connor, by contrast, was an eccentric and serious-minded woman who produced a good number of short stories, two novels, and a great deal of correspondence, lectures and speeches during her short life (39 years). Her field was the American South, where she herself lived all her life, and her subject was what we could call "Dark Grace," in which hideous instances of the grotesque work their magic upon awful people, hopefully for the better. There are no nice characters in her stories, and those that are the "nicest" are also the most likely to meet terrible ends. The style could be called "Southern Gothic," and they're simply wonderful. Check out the collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge for a good sampling of what she's about. "The Enduring Chill," one of the stories therein, nearly broke me.
Oh . . . I don't know. I have this thing with listeing to peoples' voices, including listening to speech.
Oh, well, of course. I guess I just feel like I'm missing something if I'm not watching a movie as well as listening to it. I've never been able to get into lectures or books on tape, either, which is kind of odd. And it's a shame, because that would be very convenient.
The first I'd anticipated, the second, perhaps not. It's good to be surprised about people, though, I think.
It's hard to pin down what I like into tidy categories, unfortunately. The second one was just something I came up with after really thinking about it, and is not even entirely accurate. Oh well.
I wish I'd read half of those authors. You have quite a library under your belt.
Too many, honestly. My room is so full of books that I'm running out of space for other things.
Hmmm. Sounds about right. It's interesting seeing someone else say all this, as I usually am called negative for voicing it. For most of my life, I have felt that hope and anticipation have been the only constant "goods." However, I've been going through some changes recently, one of which entails an apparent tendency to find surprising joy in small, insignificant details in life. It doesn't mean I still don't dread each new morning just a little bit.
The time spent lying in bed after the alarm goes off is some of the most satisfying of the day. I purposefully wake up two hours earlier than I need to, every single day, just to do this. It's worth it.
I don't know if I'd say I dread the mornings, but I'm never happy to discover that I'm tired enough to go to sleep.
What sort of things have you found joy in recently?
Funny you should mention that. I decided against all that about a year or so ago . . . sometimes I question that choice, as I imagine many do, but so far it's turned out alright.
It's always better the alternative. Life has too much to offer for it to deserve such scorn as a suicide heaps upon it.
The idea that we can't absolutely know someone can seem disheartening . . . but after a certain fashion, I'd almost say it's a good thing. There's always more to people to keep finding. There's never a want for more uncharted territory (not to say that a person is something so simple as a landscape). People are never really boring.
And, as you say, we usually don't even really know ourselves. I can attest to that. A while back I decided, a person is not a mere object, but a real, multi-dimensional, and infinitely rich microcosmic world.
Yeah, I kinda like people.
That's a good approach. How does this play into the matter when people are pissing you off, however? It can't feel good to have an entire world making you angry (apart, that is, from the actual world).
Well, you know, I can relate to that problem. Ambivalence between wanting solitude and not wanting loneliness, at least in my case.
Let's be frank, here. It's not just a question of ambivalence, but rather of perpetual, devastating ignorance. I have no frakking clue what it is that I want. I mean, I know that I "want" certain feelings and theories, but I have no idea what sort of physicalities are necessary to bring them into reality.
This, above all, is the most distressing thing in my life. I can't form any plans. I can't make any goals. It's like charging into fog, knowing only that beyond the fog there's something better, but not where "beyond" actually is, if it's even anywhere.
I am often sharply aware that few people understand me, and yet it's my own doing because I don't let people come to be in a position in which they could understand me. One time, I saw that it was a desire for all the things one can gain from letting oneself be vulnerable, and yet not wishing to actually risk it.
That sounds about right. It's actually disgraceful, honestly.
I suppose that after all is said and done, there is a certain beauty in simply letting life have its way with you.
That is one of the facets of Christian humility.
I doubt you're alone in that. Who's Chesterton, by the way?
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was one of the most gifted and beloved writers of his times, and yet is now almost entirely neglected by everyone. He wrote about a hundred books, contributed to a hundred more, produced several hundred poems and over four thousand essays, all of them dealing with every topic you could possibly imagine, with wit, elegance, clarity and passion. He wrote what T.S. Eliot and noted biblophile Peter Ackroyd have called the finest biography of Dickens ever produced. His biography of Thomas Aquinas won similar praise from Etienne Gilson, the foremost Thomistic scholar of his time. His treatment of Robert Browning revolutionized both Browning studies and the field of literary biography. The list goes on and on. Michael Collins carried a copy of Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill around with him in his pocket during his strivings for Irish freedom. Gandhi cites one of Chesterton's essays as inspiration for his decision to resist the English. C.S. Lewis claimed that Chesterton's history of the world, The Everlasting Man, was one of the most profound influences on his road to becoming the Christian he was.
He debated Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow (and won). He interviewed Mussolini. He argued with Thomas Hardy about pessimism in a publisher's waiting room. He once lived next door to Henry James. He had an audience with Pope Pius XI, who later conferred upon him the title of "Fidei Defensor," usually reserved for monarchs. He was best friends with H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw (whom he first met, it is said, in Rodin's studio), disagreeing with them violently on essentially every issue about which they could reasonably debate, and yet being the first in their affections regardless. He produced travelogues of his voyages to the Holy Land, and to Poland, and to Ireland, and to America, and to Italy. His Father Brown stories are some of the most beloved in all of detective fiction. He wore a cape and a big floppy hat and carried a swordstick around with him in 1920's England.
And so on and so on. And, because he was neither a socialist nor an atheist, he is basically ignored; passed over by his friends Shaw and Wells. He wrote more and better than either of them, but one wouldn't know it to see a typical University curriculum. I could have graduated from this school under the impression that the man never existed were it not for some strokes of luck and a lot of snooping around.
That, in brief, is who Chesterton is, was, and forever more shall be. If you ever have several years to kill, a substantial number of his works are available online here. I recommend this short, spritely essay as an introduction to his style.
Incidentally, it is on the subject of Chesterton that I shall be writing my Masters Thesis.
This is a gift, though. I have an easier time retaining concepts and relationships rather than raw facts like names and dates. I always have an easier time understanding something if it interests me, in which case one exposure usually lasts. I understand your meaning.
That's precisely the problem. I just don't think about stuff that doesn't interest me, and I may as well have been doing nothing for all the good some of my previous courses have done me. I took courses in Physics and Political Science and (regrettably) German (regretable because it's my one truly terrible grade in University), but I don't remember anything about any of it, now.
It's a gift, as you say, but it is occasionally difficult and frustrating.
I like the way you put this, and I find it identifiable. I remember feeling like an imposter during most of my school years. Probably because I, too, am chronically lazy despite apparent aptitude. We're more similar than I had thought.
It's like you were saying to that other guy about how people are the same etc.
Also, throughout High School I felt very badly about the people who got marks just slightly lower than mine but only got them because they were trying really, really hard. I don't anymore, because those bastards are out to get my grant money, but back then it seemed highly unfair.
Incidentally, how long have you been attending university?
I am currently in my fourth and final year of an Honours BA. If all goes according to plan, I'll have my MA by the time I'm 23, and my PhD by the time I'm 28. (I am 21 at the moment).
Well . . . bad examples can sometimes be among the most educational.
True, but only if they're cautionary. Mine is not. I've screwed the pooch for the last eight years and what do I have to show for it? Unqualified success, the lauds of my superiors and the adulation of my peers. That's not exactly something you can just emulate.
Quote from Einsteinmonkey »
Somebody was talking about a specific person pulling arguments out of a hat.
Stop giving the impression that Dawkins'/Harris' retarded scare-mongering is beneficial or necessary and your media institutions will stop trying to make money by stirring the pot. Until then, maybe atheists can experience, in some small way, the aggravation and disgust that religious people have felt as the media have drooled over those two gentlemen for the last few months.
It's also worth noting that Paula Zahn had scheduled Prof. Dawkins for an interview by way of response, but it was postponed due to the ongoing Anna Nicole Smith coverage. That is itself another sort of horror, but there it is.
Describe "the 'Bible Belt' of Ontario."
Isn't that a disgrace rather than a good thing? How would you feel if you had enrolled your child in an academy of the sciences, only to have her come home and tell you that her teachers were young-earth creationists , flat-earthers and scientologists?
I think you'd be scandalized, and with good cause. And you'd likely react with incredulous horror to a person who would have the gall to declare this a good thing.
There are actually more than the numbers suggest. Many of them present a problem for the identification process, however, because they function on apathy rather than conviction and subsequently do not seek the limelight. Many of them are even nominally religious, and as such are lost forever to the studious eye of the census taker.
No, it came across just fine, and I think that there's some merit to it. An analogy might be the manner in which we define things like a nation, or a community, or a group. There's an intermeshing plurality there, by necessity, even when each of the constituent parts is an individual. Or call it a jigsaw puzzle, maybe.
Anyway, you've made your case well. I'll have to think about it some more.
Yes, there are complicating factors. I know that I've met some lower-class types who almost certainly would have been tortured aesthetes if only they'd had the time and money to languish. Instead they're just jerks.
I am legion, as that unhappy gentleman once said.
It's a good approach.
Exactly! And it's much less creepy than walking around arguing with yourself out loud. I've done this, and it is poorly received.
Well, proxy listening isn't so bad, unless you're just trying to suck up or barn or whatever the hip slang is.
Well, download away. You won't be sorry.
That's quite right. The literature on the disastrous results of repressing emotions is extensive and, I fear, quite accurate. I used to do this, but I won't anymore. This has led to complaints of me being too intense, but to hell with 'em. In Europe and the Middle East (and, really, every else but here), they are "intense" as a matter of course. Loud, vicious arguments are conducted to the amusement and intrigue of slowly-assembling crowds, only to have the arguers go off to have a drink together no matter the result. We can't have that here. It frightens us. It's sad.
Agreed. Nietzsche would agree too, in fact.
I think we have modern literary and academic trends to blame for this, in part. Successive generations have now been trained to look for the theory (typically malicious) behind anything that is said or done, and to read a book with demands for "psychological realism" at the forefront. We balk at an inconsistent character in a book, though he is the most natural thing of all. Borges was very much against this, as an aside, and is worth reading on the subject.
That latter skill is something I really wish I could manage. I saw an image recently on DeviantArt in which a gentleman had decided to reproduce Blake's "The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun," but as if it were done by Gustave Dore. It blew my mind. If I could do things like that (specifically in the styles of Dore, Mucha and Chesterton [who was also an accomplished artist in addition to all of the other things he was awesome at]), you'd best believe I would.
Thanks, Mamelon. It's good to be back. Sorry, once again, for the delays.
And there's more!
It may, but then, it might also be a dulling sort of thing, if one falls into a rut. This is why I've started putting my work on paper again, at long last. Now I'll stop being distracted, and I'll actually have something to show for it (most recent work available here).
This may explain, in part, why our post exchange is so very long.
I agree with this statement in most every venue, with the exception of religion.
I used to want to visit the place myself, but now I worry that it would simply be an enormous disappointment. I've heard some real horror stories about what it's like there, now, and I don't think I could stand it.
And yes, Russian people are wonderful, for the most part. I've known a few, and they have always been quite rowdily genial.
I feel precisely the same. The best I've been able to do as far as describing the feeling is to say that it's what you feel when someone dies heroically. A geeky and maybe childish example (though I don't think so) is the climactic moment near the conclusion of Iron Giant, if you're familiar with that film.
That could certainly be true, though I doubt it will stop me worrying, unfortunately.
I'm glad to see I'm not alone in this, then. I worry about the merits of teaching people about this, though. They told me any number of times and ways in school that other people have hopes and dreams and feelings and that I ought to respect or at least not antagonize them, but it never actually seemed to me to be anything beyond rhetoric until it just clicked in my head of its own accord.
Quite so. The great pagans of yesteryear had it right when they predicated their philosophy on the command to first know thyself. Polonius had it right too, and died for his troubles (well, not exactly; I just liked how that sounded).
You're not bad yourself.
Well, it's almost a modern necessity. We live in a world where there is more information than ever before, but our capacity to process this information has not grown to meet it. We are therefore forced to shut a great many things out, and the more this becomes necessary, the less able we are to discern exactly what we ought to be shutting out and exactly what we ought to be letting in. This is a dubious skill, but as you say, it is essentially bred into us. We have no choice.
For my own part, I am a naturally curious person (not in the disgusting modern sexual sense of the word, though), so my need to shut things out has become less and less as the years have progressed. And yet, as we saw before, I have locked entire continents and fields of endeavour behind a tidy little door, perhaps never to be opened. I have to work on that.
I'm considering taking a year off to teach English in Japan between my MA and my PhD. That should go a long way towards rounding me out.
I think you'd really like Rabelais. This is a very Pantagruel-ean sort of thought.
And they're generally prettier.
Precisely. Men and women are not measured by their reaction to great and terrible circumstances, but by their ability to get through the average day without being ground down to nothing.
I think bureaucracy is a greater threat to the human race than war.
There's some merit to that indeed. This is where I think the Emersonians, and those like them, were on to something with their idea of the Oversoul.
Anyway, before concluding, I have another question for you. You've said some things that indiciate that you have some training in the technical aspects of visual art, even if only as an amateur. Is this the case? Or are you just a fan?
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In other news, it's Saturday night, which means I get to drown my sorrows in rum and Fiddler on the Roof. Wheeee
Yes, well. Emerson's problems are more varied and vast than Emerson's writings, which are themselves varied and vast to the point of being Impressive. I like the look of the man, though (physically), even if he does seem sometimes to be a polite and reticent proto-Nietzsche (philosophically).
Of course. This is not to say, however, that he was unable to explain and systematize (if such a thing is even possible in the windy, nebulous world of his prose) that prior psyche.
I mean to say, in any event, that his influence is worth considering.
Middling fair. Yourself?
If by "democratic" you mean "impotent," then you're right. We have four or five "real" parties in Canada (Liberal, Conservative, New Democrat, Bloc Quebecois and, increasingly, the Greens, though they've never won a seat yet). The theoretical and sentimental result of this is "real democracy." The practical result is that a majority government is becoming increasingly unlikely, a reality that was only real when the Liberals and whatever the Tories were calling themselves were the only games in town. None of the parties are really willing to accomodate one another, and the threat of a non-confidence motion (and an attendant election) hangs heavy over whomever is in power. We've had four federal elections in the last ten years, three of them since 2000. We're likely heading towards another one soon, too. The Conservatives (ruling party) have started running attack ads aimed at new Liberal leader Stephane Dion (the official opposition), which seems to indiciate they know something's on the horizon.
It's not a great system. The more parties you have running, the less likely it is that any one of them will actually win, and the margins by which they win become progressively smaller. Remember the complaints about Ralph Nader "stealing" votes from whomever in the 2000 American election? Imagine that "theft" multiplied exponentially, and being an actual reality. The Bloc Quebecois, who could not muster a majority (or even a minority, realistically) if their lives depended upon it, run only in the province of Qubec, doing very well there, and routinely filling out fifty or so seats in the House that could otherwise be filled by a party likely to accomplish something. How would you like to have a party that could never win, and didn't really want to, but routinely proved to be a frustrating wildcard in your House (occupying a sixth of the seats therein) simply because a certain group of people always elected them, no matter what?
A two-party system unquestionably has grievous faults, but voters can only stand having no stake in their government for so long before they go back to voting for a party that, while not necessarily entirely in line with the voters' desires, has at least a fifty/fifty shot of winning.
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The missing ingredient in a lot of posters' more-or-less accurate formulations of "what makes America different" is the figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), whose wildly popular philosophy ties into almost every aspect of "distinct" American culture so far mentioned. The confidence, the individualism, the distrust of government, the distrust of socialism, the lionization of outlaws... it's all there, if you just look. "Self-reliance" is a good place to start. Check it out.
Also, hey everyone
That's an interesting thought. The idea of reality existing in the heat created when ideas collide... very much reality existing at the margins of creation. It is perhaps worth noting here that things are never closer to one another than at the barrier between them. That liminal realm marks the point at which two distinct entities come up against each other, never to overlap, never to join, never the flow together. Reality is Heloise and Abelard writing to each other.
That, too, is a delightful concept. Do you think there's something in this that might explain the frequency of pleasant demeanours in the plain, hard-working type vs. the the frequency of weird, afflicted demeanours in intellectuals and artists?
That's more or less how I feel about it. It allows for the reality of nodes while standing sternly against people who would insist that, in a very real sense, I am the cow that I'm eating.
The only philosophical concept that's really been digging at me lately is that of "chains of influence;" that is, understanding the phenomenology of inspiration, or some such vagary.
One of the most urgent and vital lines in all of Dickens can be found in Great Expectations, and it runs something like this: “Think for a moment of the long chain of thorns or flowers that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.” Such an exercise is not difficult, though it is rarely engaged. It is simply the act of tracing back a chain of influences as far as one can to see if there is some singular event upon which one might pin the responsibility for all that has followed. Without going into dreary specifics, I can tell you that I owe much of my current academic success to the idle purchase of a book about the battle of Thermopylae. My creative prose would be non-existant if not for the remake (not the original) of Dawn of the Dead. While it's certainly true that many, many things have gone into the formation of the current me-entity, all of them, in one way or another, are reacting to circumstances already in place, like "having read that book," or, "having seen that movie." One could go further backwards, but not easily. I bought that book (Frank Miller's 300) because I like comics, and I can't remember how that started. I saw that movie (Dawn of the Dead) because I like action/zombie movies, and that is so vague a predilection that I couldn't hope to meaningfully trace it.
It's all very interesting stuff, at least to me. It certainly makes me more appreciative of even the most mundane or arbitrary experiences from day to day.
It's a good sign when one writes short fiction to illustrate one's philosophy. The creation of a world that exists under your own rules, however alien they may be to commonality, is an excellent tool of understanding even the world as it really exists.
Yes! The great resonant thrumming of it is simply thrilling. Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is near the top of that game, though I tend to think that Verdi's Requiem Mass is the music the angels would play if they went to war. The "Dies Irae" segments from that piece are like nothing else in the world of music. I recommend them unconditionally, though I'd extend that recommendation to the work as a whole in a heartbeat. The Pavarotti/Horne/Talvela/Sutherland recording, conducted by Sir Georg Solti in Vienna, is super awesome, and is easily obtainable from the bounteous reaches of the Internet.
Because (as you know) I am of an expansive sort, here are twenty-five musical people, groups and other things that I greatly enjoy, some explained more than others (because I'm expansive but not a robot).
1. Giuseppe Verdi - The pinnacle of Italian opera and orchestration. Excellent "places to start" with Verdi are the Requiem Mass, Aida (which is sensational, and not to be confused with the Elton John musical of the same name, which is not), Nabucco, and, incredibly, Giovanna d'Arco, which is exactly what it sounds like. His operatic adaptations of Shakespeare, including Othello and MacBeth, are also quite neat.
2. Neko Case - Former warbler for the New Pornographers, she now uses her vocals for good instead of pretty good. The style is "southern gothic," in the way that it's about twisted things and the countryside. Best albums are Blacklisted and Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a bad track on either of them.
3. Velvet Underground - A strange and bohemian bunch, though their music is just fine. Well, their music is also strange, it is true, but not to the extent that one could not listen to it. The album called Velvet Underground is the most normal of all, with "Venus in Furs," "Femme Fatale," "Sunday Morning" and "Heroin" being stand-out tracks.
4. Bear McCreary - Responsible for the score for the current run of Battlestar Galactica, which is effectively a fusion of Celtic and Indian music, and is simply beautiful. I can't describe it in a way that does it justice, regrettably, so I can only recommend that you try some of it out, when you've the time or inclination. Excellent tracks include "Passacaglia," "Battlestar Operatica" (lame name, good music), "The Shape of Things to Come," "Destiny," "A Promise to Return," and "Kobol's Last Gleaming." There's a lot of them.
5. Arabian Music and Stuff Like It - As a religious man, I can not help but feel that reality comes from a desert. No other style of music has been able to capture so much of Earth and Heaven, though many have made great strides in capturing Heaven on its own. I don't know how to describe this technically beyond suggesting that there's something distinctive about the scales they use that sets them apart.
6. Rasputina - A trio (usually) of goth girls (sometimes one dude on drums) rocks out with the electric cello. Darkly humorous. All of their albums have a lot of so-so stuff with a few gems thrown in (and I don't remember their album names anyway), so look for songs like "Trenchmouth," "Hunter's Kiss" (which is seriously good), "Saline the Salt-Lake Queen," "Gingerbread Coffin," and their covers of Led Zeppelin's "Rock 'n' Roll" and CCR's "Bad Moon Rising." Their one album whose name I do know is A Radical Recital, which is just a live set. It's good from start to finish, more or less, and is a nice introduction to the group. So go for that.
7. Janis Joplin - Though Cameron doesn't like her, she remains nonetheless a powerful musical avatar of Human Imperfection striving for something holy. Albums are various and muddled, so look for tracks like "Kozmic Blues," "Work Me, Lord," "Mercedes Benz" and "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)."
8. Bob Dylan - Little explanation required, hopefully. He's just great. All of his work is at least pretty good, but Highway 61 Revisited is a miracle. "Desolation Row," the ultimate song of that album, is nothing less than a tour de force of everything that makes Dylan awesome.
9. Sigur Ros - High-voiced Icelandic gentleman who like to sing in a made-up language. Recent album Takk is excellent, with "Glossoli," "Hoppipola" and "Milano" standing out. The music video for "Glossoli," readily available on Youtube, is breathtaking.
10. Loreena McKennit - When she's not being weird and "new age," she actually manages to put out some excellent stuff. Her latest, An Ancient Muse, is very nice; particularly "The Gates of Istanbul."
11. Arcade Fire - Canadian kids with an ear for curious music, though they conform to something or other, or so it is said. They've only really got the one album to date, being Funeral, but it's all good there. David Bowie really likes them, if that means anything.
12. Leonard Cohen - Another great Canadian, almost too great in some ways. A ponderous bard. His music has been collected and recollected and anthologized severely, so you need not worry about individual albums. Top-rate tracks include "The Partisan," "First We Take Manhattan (Then We'll Take Berlin)," "So Long Marianne," and "Ain't No Cure for Love."
13. Mash-ups - An utterly varied field, mash-ups are songs created through the forcible synthesis of two or more other songs. It's like remixing, but not entirely. You're not just throwing a techno rhythm on something, though that happens a lot. No, you're making a single track out of the Beatles' "Tax Man," that immortal "Wipe Out" song, and the theme from Batman. It's putting the theme from Cheers into a sort of hip-hop context. It's letting Janis Joplin jam with Beck. All of these experiments, and many more besides, are the work of Luke Enlow, popularly called Lenlow, who provides them for download here. Virtually every one of those tracks is good in some way or another, though "Sweet Child of Ravi" and "U Hide 2" are personal favourites. "Satisfaction Now" is one I particularly enjoy for reasons made clear by #24 below. Lenlow himself is but one of hundreds of different mash-up artists churning out novelties as fast as you can listen to them. Entire albums have been mashed, to great success. Two notable examples of this are The Grey Album (in which the Beatles' White Album was mixed with Jay-Z's Black Album), and Let it Beast, in which the Beastie Boys get to riff with the Beatles. The Beatles, as you may have noticed, are a popular target in this genre, and the reasons for this are too numerous to describe.
14. Ludwig van Beethoven - Self-explanatory, but do consider looking into some of the lesser-known works, like Wellington Sieg and Egmont. The overture from the latter is quite beautiful and intense.
15. Johnny Cash - Needs even less explanation, hopefully. Check out the prison albums (San Quentin is better than Folsom, though Folsom is more well-known), as well as American IV and American V.
16. The Rutles - A parody of the Beatles started by eccentric musician Neil Innes and one of the Monty Python crew, though I don't remember which. Likely Terry Jones. They sound quite a lot like the Beatles, honestly, and plunder their music mercilessly. The song "Shangri-La," a pastiche on "Hey Jude," among others, is actually good music in its own right.
17. Stan Rogers - A Canadian maritime singer who died in a plane crash, if memory serves. He had a wonderfully deep, gutsy voice, and specialized in sea shanties and the like. Live Between the Breaks is a great album to start with, containing both "The Witch of the Westmoreland" and "The Mary-Ellen Carter," two of his best works, as well as lesser classics like "Rolling Down to Old Maui" and "The Flowers of Bermuda."
18. Passion, Peter Gabriel's soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ, and Passion Sources, his collection of sample work that inspired and contributed to it - The former is unorthodox and beautiful, the latter diverse and delightful. People have taken issue with his soundtrack for TLTOC (though that's hardly the most problematic aspect of the film), but, divorced from the film itself, it proves to be a surprisingly satisfying experience. Special mention is warranted for the tracks "The Feeling Begins" and "Troubled." The latter album is more culturally accurate, being sampled from various middle eastern realities rather than Gabriel's approximation thereupon. Good tracks include "Call to Prayer," "Tejbeit," "Wedding Song" and "Shamas ud Doha" (I'm spelling the foreign ones from memory, so they may be slightly off). Definitely worth your time.
19. Andrew WK - Frenetic insanity. Songs like "I Get Wet" and "Girl's Own Juice" are like being punched in the face by the sun. "Get Ready to Die" is the most upbeat, pulse-pounding song ever produced, in spite of both its title and its lyrics.
20. Charles Camille Saint-Saens - Gave us the Carnival of the Animals, which is beautiful and fun, but more importantly there's his marvelous Symphony No. 3, a triumph of organ work. The most famous portion of this symphony (early minutes of the fourth movement, "Maestoso Allegro") was used as the tune for the song Farmer Hoggett sings in Babe. Considering my checkered religious history, I find myself coming back to the first time I ever heard this triumphant organ explosion as the moment, perhaps, when I first believed in God. His "Danse Macabre" is also beautiful, though in a more autumnal, string-based way way.
21. Ofra Haza - She died too young, but when she lived she was the proud and prolific owner of a scientifically-perfect voice. Though she was always experimenting with new stuff, particularly in the World Beat and Dance genres, her Yemenite-Israeli roots ensured that she frequently put out music that was beautiul, reverent, and slow. Whatever you can find of hers, give it a try.
22. "The Great Songs" - Singles by certain famous groups and individuals that I enjoy immensely, though I am wholly (and often happily) ignorant of the rest of their work. These are the sorts of things that make their way onto "best of the DECADE" compilations, and so forth.
23. Piotr Rubik - A contemporary Polish composer who produces works of great orchestral and choral beauty. His masterwork is widely held to be Tu Es Petrus, a beautiful suite to be sure, but I prefer this weird sort of psalm-type thing he did whose name I don't know (because it's in Polish and strange), but which starts out like pleasant chamber music before suddenly developing into all of the horrifying grandeur that a Slavic chorale entitled "Psalm of the Apocalypse" implies.
24. Musicals - They hit me in the same way operas tend to, primarily because I'm an English student. Few other genres allow for such rich narrative and poetic possibilities, particularly in such a long-running and sustainable manner. I mentioned above in the mash-up section that I liked a particular song because of a musical, and this is true. The musical in question is the insane and awesome rock opera version of The War of the Worlds, and the mash-up draws from this work in crafting its own monstrous sound. Apart from that, however, the classics are classic for a reason. Les Miserables really is as good as its popularity would suggest. And - I'm prepared to incur some censure for this, but I don't care - The Phantom of the Opera constitutes a musical Achievement. Think of Andrew Lloyd Weber what you will. Groan at Cats, whine at Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, do what you like. Just lay off the Opera Ghost.
25. Bluegrass - Down home country goodness, and I like it just fine. There's honesty there.
It is miserable, certainly, but ultimately incorrect. Even in our darkest, most disillusioned moments, we must already remember this: nobody has ever destroyed the world. Maybe that's too dark to brighten one's day, but there it is.
Quite right. We are currently in a state of affairs in which a man may laugh with abandon, and frivolously, and with evil, but he may not under any circumstances weep. That's perverse.
Will do, doc.
Having just produced a lengthy list of music, I'm going to make this one much shorter and less list-like, I think. Sleep beckons.
For the most part, I like to busy myself with media. Reading is a firm favourite, in equal parts theory and pleasure (the one assists in the other, frequently), with movies coming in as a close second. Comic books and graphic novels are right up there, though not as much now, due to time constraints and having read much of the classics, as I used to. Still, New Comic Book Day (Wednesday) is always a nice one, as there are a number of excellent series currently in publication. DC's Vertigo imprint alone boasts Fables, Y: The Last Man, The Other Side, Jack of Fables, DMZ and The Exterminators. From other companies, Powers and Astro City are great, when they actually come out, and The Walking Dead fills that zombie-shaped hole in my life. I also like to spend time looking at static visual art (paintings, drawings, etc.), and thereafter writing about them. Caravaggio and Gustave Dore are particular favourites, and I can't imagine anybody supplanting them.
And then, there's writing. I do it all the time, even when I'm not trying to. I write stories in my head. I try not to, because it's very ditracting, but there's no way to stop it beyond booze, and I can't keep a gentle buzz going twenty-four hours a day no matter how hard I try. When I'm not trying to retard myself, however, I write pretty much anything and everything. Academic work. Short fiction. Poetry. Persuasive pieces. I wrote a libretto for a short opera in the latter half of last year, and the singing rehearsals have only recently begun. It will be performed in April, and I'm pretty excited about it.
Beyond that, I don't do much of anything. I like to sit around talking to (not always with, regrettably) people, but am somewhat hampered in this pursuit by the persistant necessity on the part of other people to do things to occupy themselves. I'd be perfectly happy to just sit in the park for hours, or in a cafe, or a restaurant, or what have you, but most people just don't want to have conversations that long. I suspect some of them can't. They always want to do it in their homes, where they have televisions to turn on when things become onerous, or any number of other distractions. I don't go to people's houses much.
I used to draw, then fell out of practice. I'm currently trying to come roaring back.
That's all I do, as far as hobbies and such go. I don't really have the time or dexterity for video games, though this was not always the case. It is again mostly a case of having fallen out of practice. Having not played them for many years, now, I find that I don't even want to anymore. The prospect of spending hours doing something not especially interesting, and having learned nothing useful by the end, does not sit well with me.
I want to start doing most things like the Russians do, honestly. Or, at least, what I imagine the archetypal Russian does based on their greatest literature. There's lots of manful sadness and wastelands and stoves, and nobody is dull. Ever.
That detachment is often very difficult to overcome. Do you find that tragedy works better than incidents at the other end of the spectrum, such as humor or joy?
In some forms, precisely. Bureaucracy, especially, has been problematic in this way. I simply do not understand why people put up with it, though of course I have no real plan as to how to eliminate it.
But then, with regard to the nuances I mentioned, there are other things. I worry about the bewildering possibility that I'm missing something that's obvious to everyone else. Maybe many such things. Maybe there's something simple that they've all cottoned on to to make their lives better or different. Maybe they all know about something necessary, and I do not.
As I may or may not have mentioned before, it was only relatively recently that I actually consciously realized that other people exist when I'm not around to perceive them or think about them. It is for this reason, or at least in this regard, that I can not picture how other people live their lives or think about things. I guess this occluded perception frightens me.
There are better ways to live, certainly, but they are hard, and depend upon a certain detachment from the world to be useful. The most effective by far is to develop a cult of personality with yourself at the center - a process that can actually, with vigorous and watchful effort, be forced to coexist with the virtues of humility and charity. The point is, if one's life is to be lived under a shadow of something or other, it may as well be the shadow of some looming destiny or great vindication. If the world must fall upon you, let it shatter when it hits. I said before that no one has yet destroyed the world. If you want to cope with a world that threatens to blindly destroy you, well... just keep that thought in escrow until the time comes.
Remember. There were times past when men and women strode the earth waging great and terrible wars, toppling entire nations, choking rivers with blood. They did this as a matter of course, and counted it righteousness to do so. Those times could come again. If you ever find yourself feeling down, just hold on to that thought. Blind senseless forces may reign for now, but there could come a time again, in some distant (or not so distant) age, in which people are themselves vessels of power and glory, wielded like swords by forces enormous and inscrutable, but whose eyes are wide and staring.
We have slain purpose. But resurrections happen.
Alternatively, if that's not your thing, you could view it thus: "I am the villain of this story; a tyrant; I have cruelly enslaved reality with my perceptions, and it's only natural that it should move against me sooner or later. When it does, and when it succeeds - and it will succeed - all of creation will laugh for joy." If you can do that, and mean it, you've been able to combine utter delusion with utter candour, and will thereby have conquered the mundane.
This is all theoretical, mind you, and it is most certainly not for everyone. The most common coping mechanism is apathy and stupor, and its success, while empty, is notable. And of course, the biggest problem with these approaches is that they're just more of the same, only magnified to obscene lengths. The problem is not simply solved but eradicated. We do not fight the blind forces; we simply become one such force ourselves.
In fact:
The problem expressed to its very core. The self-consciously imperfect specimen can not move as a god in a world in which he or she is only a visitor, whether it be a god of light or of darkness. Imperfection is undeniable unless one guts the word to such an extent that "perfection" means "whatever is," which is certainly a way that some have gone, but seems to do the word a disservice.
I don't know what it means, though I can't imagine it's just a coincidence. A habit, certainly, but why did it begin? I have no idea, regrettably.
Dancing would be nice, too. I honestly wouldn't even know where to begin, though. The worst part, I think, is knowing that I could dance well, and could sing well, if I just put some damn time into it. Like you said, it's a question of both propriety and the application of effort. I don't know that my immortal dignity would be able to take the many hours of truly terrible rehearsals necessary to make these dreams become a reality.
Ballet dancers sort of freak me out, honestly. :0
It's true! I know certain fundamentalist types whose families and churches basically exist apart from our country - a divorce I envy, some days, but one that is ultimately harmful to them both. They don't care about "the world" unless it's some far-off country where nobody understands you. The danger of that is creating such a country right next door through persistant self-isolation and aloofness. Then where will they be? Nowhere. No one but the Lord shall weep for them, and I can't imagine that even He would be too shook up about it.
It's an interesting thing, as I'm sure you've noticed, because the ethics of it depend so very much on how we define and appreciate "self." If we are conscious of our skills being a gift rather than a right, of our goodness being paltry rather than legendary, then to be proud of such a self is no great crime. It is satisfaction; it is contentent. Contentment is arduous, and it is rare. It is getting every once of value out of something that there is to be gotten, whether that thing is an object or a self.
The danger comes with disdain of other selves, with exaltation of the own self beyond all proportion, with this and with that. The coping approaches outlined above, problematic though they were, can be almost forced not to fall prey to these flaws through careful, mind-numbing effort. To have a cult of personality and to remain humble is almost impossible, though I've seen some who have made a good run at it. To be the great tyrant of reality and to refrain from exaggeration is difficult, but again, I've seen some who elevate it to a form of art. They are hunger artists and fiends, but they are sympathetic in their hangdogedness.
The best we can do is push through the muck, hold fast to the good, and cry "viva el Cristo Rey" when they throw us against the wall. All else is vanity.
In fact, yeah, I'm going to go with that. The best way to cope with the great pressing pressures of opressive metaphysick is to say to oneself, "stop being a damn fool," and simply Get On With It.
Well, I just don't like being led around by someone who's trying to coax me into answering a question in a certain way. Thankfully this was not the case here, but still, I worry:
EDIT: Before I go, I'm going to recommend the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn to one and all. Read them, particularly A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Here is a man who can write in the greatest tradition of the Russian masters, and, joy of joys, he is still alive. Old, certainly; retired, likely. But alive! Good stuff.
Oh, I beg your pardon. When people make a point of repeating things and trying to coax an answer out of someone, my "Socratic dialogue" deflectors go up and I assume the worst. Sorry about that.
With regard to the evidence, it falls into a number of categories.
1. Historical - what happened
2. Rhetorical - interpreting what happened
3. Theoretical - why what happened happened
4. Concrete personal experience - something happened omg
5. Vaguer spiritual realities - things can happen
Of these, #4 can be the most dramatic, but it's also the most unreliable from a systematic standpoint. An evangelist can argue the other four until the cows come home, and with great success, but it does not fall to him to literally bring God bursting forth from the various seams of the world. Speaking candidly, I can tell you that I have never in my life experienced anything that could be categorized as a definite "spiritual event," though there have been curious things of one type or another that I'm happy enough to chalk up to a pleasant God. Atheists have occasionally attempted to "deprogram" me by trying to make me cast doubt upon the spiritual provenance of the religious experiences of my life, but have met with bitter failure because there's nothing there to subvert.
Moral: Not all Christians are fundamentalist Pentecostals.
Either stronger in sovereign isolation or by dint of cumulative multiplicity, yes.
You know, this would all be much faster if you just stopped playing Socratic games and simply said what you wish to say.
In no particular order, though some will be noticeably more significant than others.
1. Environmental impact - atmospheric: The pollution from auto emissions is both disgusting and unnecessary. So too is the noise that traffic and idiots' stereos create.
2. Environmental impact - terrain: There is not a stretch of land that is not made worse by having a road rammed through it. Roads are not "low-impact" sources of human interference, either; as well as simply destroying whatever they touch, they spray off all sorts of metal and chemical detritus and produce a terrible racket.
3. Environmental impact - wildlife: Is our convenience worth a deer's life? A hundred deer? A thousand? What about all of the other species whose numbers are massacred in the course of us getting from point A to point B faster? To eat an animal is one thing; to kill it with no regard, and for no good reason, is quite another.
4. Sociological impact - idiotic ideas about time/distance: That people are in a damnable rush about things is simply true, and the automobile culture is partly to blame. The stress this causes is indisputable (see #8), and the way it makes people think about how they get places, and where those places are, is skewed. "Ten miles away" means nothing now, and it has made us weak.
5. Sociological impact - "road rage:" It is unacceptable that men should be moved to wrath, madness, and murder by the question of a few seconds or a breach of etiquette. We're better than this. Why feed this mania? Why even allow the environment that foments it to exist?
6. Sociological impact - worst excesses of consumer culture: The trope of the "car-as-*****" is a familiar one, and the inane lengths to which this drives men who might otherwise do something useful with their time and energy are simply unnecessary. For what a car actually does for a person, it is an unacceptably weighty purchase, and the purchases themselves are, more often than not, sources of the freewheeling debt that has caused so many problems both in the past and in the present.
7. Sociological impact - divorce from self-sufficiency: There are certainly men and women who can fix their own cars, but very few who can build one for themselves. In order for people to get to their jobs, for companies to make money off of their products, and for countless other things to happen, ranging from useful to vital, all individuals involved must buy something from a profit-seeking corporation. It is a pernicious and increasing intrusion into the actual freedom of an individual's life.
8. Vital impact - source of anxiety: People who own cars are worried about having them stolen, or wrecked, or damaged in some way. They worry about them going out of style. They worry about filling them with gas. They worry about where to park. They worry about other drivers, who are themselves worrying about all of this as well. Pedestrians worry about being killed - being killed - because someone else's attention lapses for a second, or because a key piece of equipment fails. This is a nightmarish, random and pointless death.
9. Vital impact - human lives lost to automobile accidents: All of the convenience we derive from automobiles, all of the industries we keep going, all of the social power and status we gain from expensive models and enjoyment we gain from driving fast or in interesting places - none of this is worth a single human life. Automobiles generally kill more people in a day than hate crimes do in an entire year, and yet there's only a national hysteria over the latter. That's not just disproportionate; that's a ****ing scandal.
10. Cultural impact - city planning: As if all of this weren't bad enough, the presence of automobiles has an enormous impact on how communities are designed. Entire cities are built around an article of consumer goods. Entire cities are built not with human safety - with our children's lives - in mind, but rather with the efficient throughflow of traffic. Were there are automobiles, there is neither silence, nor peace, nor comfort, nor security. This too is a scandal.
11. Cultural impact - decentralization: The upshot of the city planning changes is that communities are no longer built with the intention - or even the capability - of serving themselves. Commercial, residential and industrial districts are zoned out, and if not for the polluting, noisy, dangerous, expensive pieces of claptrap provided to you by monstrously wealthy corporations, would be so prohibitively arranged as to destroy the possibility of self-sufficiency. We have entire towns spring up that exist only to house an essentially immigrant population, who waste hours every day commuting to another city to work. The place in which they actually live could not support them even if it had to. A result of this is that there is less and less incentive to know and trust one's neighbours
None of this needs to happen, and every day that it does is an international disgrace. I would place automobiles (cars, trucks, the lot of them) just behind the machine gun and the atom bomb as the most awful-yet-ineradicable inventions ever to wrench forth from the mind to man.
This may have been a more impassioned response than was necessary, but that's too bad. I'm drunk (buzzed, anyway), I'm sublimely sad from Children of Men (again), and I don't care anymore. Or, maybe, I care more than ever. Either could explain it.
Either that, or he believes that the evidence in its favour is of a more concrete nature than that against. I know this sounds like hair-splitting, so let me map it out.
Case A: Christian believes that there are six points in his religion's favour and four against. These six points are typically matters of history or rhetoric.
Case B: Christian believes that there is one point in his religion's favour, but the nine against it are uncertain, while the one for it is wrought in steel. This one point is typically a matter of personal experience.
I tend to deal with it by making my idle activities things that will have a positive impact on my working life. So I read literary theory and criticism for fun, etc.
Which question? Also, sorry for the delay; I thought yesterday was Saturday so I didn't do anything, but it turns out it wasn't :0
Well, for my own part, it's a tricky story. The reason for my Christianity is not a single thing, or even a unified field, but the progression looks more or less like this:
1. Youthful (like, fifth grade) infatuation with Satanism, fostered by sixth grader I thought was cool. Neither of us knew what we were talking about. Even at that young age, however, I came to see a sort of foolishness in trusting the Judeo-Christian account of things only so far as they established My Hero, but no further, so I quickly abandoned it (though not before doing several idiotic things that I do not intend to discuss).
2. In my father's vast comic book collection were two with an explicitly evangelistic (not necessary Evangelical, though; more on that in a moment), specifically "Hansi: The Girl Who Loved the Swastika," and "Scarface." The former was about a girl who joined the Hitler Youth only to be betrayed and sent to the camps, where she discovered the mercy of Christ. The latter has nothing to do with either the Paul Muni or Al Pacino characters, but is rather about a corrupt African politician with lots of scars on his face from when he had been whipped by a white devil as a child. With the help of two American evangelists, however, he becomes a good man in some way or another. If I remember the provenance of these comic books correctly, I am moved to conclude, incredibly, that Jack Chick was responsible for me saying my first prayer.
3. As I grew older, I flailed desperately for some way in which to rebel against my parents, who were both ex-hippies, both more or less atheists (my mother most certainly; my father was more of a Buddhist/Druid/Thing), and both perfectly pleasant and reasonable people who treated me as a being far more mature and relevant than I actually was. I found an ally in Christianity, the one thing against which they both seemed to hold anguished and equal opinions, and began my research at once. What began as an act of youthful spite soon blossomed into an obsession, even if only a weirdly fundamentalist one.
4. Thereafter I found myself spoiling for a fight, and began arguing in favour of Christianity on Internet message boards (including this one). In doing so, I discovered a variety of excellent web resources, through which I rapidly and ravenously read, discovering that things were not nearly so simple and - frankly - depressing as Jack Chick and those like him had made them out to be. It was news to me that I could listen to Led Zeppelin without worrying about my salvation, or that the Papists ever did anything right. I credit these sorts of websites with making me realize just how vital history is to the proper understanding of the present and the plotting out of the future, thereby opening up a world of literature and thought of which I had previously been wholly ignorant.
5. All of this, then, found me in university, a sparsely-practicing "mere Christian," after the fashion (but not the execution) of C.S. Lewis. I drifted into some Christian clubs, all of them protestant (one had to go to the Catholic King's campus to find otherwise, and I never did), and found myself having the same sad-sack reaction to them that I did to the original form of Christianity I had taken from the fundamentalists. These Evangelicals were very nice people, but they were almost too nice. The whole thing seemed like a very obvious veneer over a very pronounced strata of darkness, to one degree or another. The intense focus on the importance of mission work (discussed below with Mamelon) was highly off-putting, as was the weird obsession with "worship" in the form of soft-rock ballads, sung earnestly enough, I suppose, but not leading me in any way to the conclusion that God was actually being worshiped.
6. It was at this point that my work on G.K. Chesterton began, and with it my interest in medieval Europe, orthodox views of history (rather than post-modern), and what they call Popery. This heritage having been established and examined, I found myself unable to resist it. Here I am today.
In short, to put a waggish spin on it, Jack Chick is responsible for the enormous Vatican flag on the wall behind me, the rosary on my bedstand, and the fact that I'm listening to a Requiem Mass as I type this.
lol pwnd
Image and entity. She was the Platonic "Form of Classiness."
I think it's telling that science-fiction stories having to do with the understanding of dreams tend to rely on the conceit of a machine that lets us record them. The internal workings of the human mind do not lend themselves well to rational debate, however paradoxical that might seem (it isn't, really, but it is to the sort of people who insist on a rational, materialist Humanity), primarily because we can't really translate them into any sort of quantifiable or identifiable context. "Thinking in feelings," for example, is a phrase ripe with meaning, yet is ultimately meaningless if we are to attempt to make any sense of it.
This is yet another barrier (insurmountable, incidentally) that exists between one person and the next. Sorry, monism!
That's about right, yes. It's like something bleeds through from Elsewhere, creating moments of intense passion and significance using the raw materials of brilliant men and women. I used to think people could do it on their own, but I don't anymore.
Oh, absolutely. One of my favourite things at the moment is the music of Piotr Rubik, a Polish composer who produces excellent choral and orchestral work. I don't understand a word of it (beyond some of the titles, which use Polishized versions of words I know; "Psalm apokaliptyczny," for example, is straightforward enough), but the overall effect is simply majestic and wonderful.
This is pretty much the case with most "classical" music. I can muddle through most of the Latin works, and some of the French and Italian besides, but if it comes to material from elsewhere in Europe I have to simply take it for what it sounds like rather than for what it means. Not that I mind, particularly, for even then the music is beautiful.
In summary, yes, I sympathize.
Heh. I was reading an article yesterday about the "narco corridos," which are traditional (and musically beautiful) Mexican folk songs, except that they're about drug runners and border-jumpers. The music is popular both south and north of the border, though for varying reasons. I imagine there are many hip, diverse white folk who love that authentic Latin-American sound but have no idea that they're listening to the epic tale of "Lightning" Gomez and the time he got twenty kilos past the National Guard.
Sometimes a little mystery is a good thing.
Well, the best way to get published is to already have been published, unfortunately. Academia goes a long way towards making this happen, thankfully, as any reasonably astute journeyman can be assured of having a minor article on some obscure matter published somewhere, somehow, along the road from BA to PhD. I'm currently working on just such a piece, examining the issue of early Australian Judaism as it pertains to a single play by a writer few have ever heard of. It's dreadfully interesting, but only to me. That's how you know it will be a good article.
I'd imagine the maturing process does a great detail towards breaking down the frankly juvenile wall that is often placed between reason and feeling. As to your latter point, about the Debate forum, Dr. Johnson had this to say:
"To fix the thoughts by writing, and subject them to frequent examinations and reviews, is the best method of enabling the mind to detect its own sophisms, and keep it on guard against the fallacies which it practises on others: in conversation we naturally diffuse our thoughts, and in writing we contract them; method is the excellence of writing, and unconstraint the grace of conversation."
Reading those words for the first time actually changed the way I approached my whole life, so I'm pretty happy with 'em.
For my own part, the personal interests and activities are my real life. Everything else just gets in the way. Maybe this is an unhealthy way to look at things, particularly with another six or seven years of rigorous research staring me down, but I can't really help it.
I've always found green tea to be too delicate, honestly. If I wanted a cup of hot water, I'd have some. I like my foods to be as larger-than-life as my literary heroes. Chai, on the other hand, is another story altogether. It's too distinctive to really be called delicate, and I like it just fine. Particularly with a bit of cinnamon or nutmeg.
I often have similar problems with issues of context. I mean, I don't imagine that I have it very bad, or that my life actually sucks (when I'm feeling down). I'm only willing to go as far as admitting that I think these things are true, and, this having been done, it's easier to see how absurd the idea actually is. In some ways, reading tragic literature, watching tragic films, and listening to tragic music actually brightens my mood. "Here," says I, "is real suffering. Here is real tribulation. Get back to work, douchebag."
Not really comforting, but deucedly effective.
That's a great image. Thank you for that.
It's a familiar feeling, though I've become more mercenary about my art lately.
He has said most things that are true.
Anyhow, the context, if you're interested:
"A cosmos one day being rebuked by a pessimist replied, 'How can you who revile me consent to speak by my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness and then we will discuss the matter.'
Moral. You should not look a gift universe in the mouth."
Thank you for your kind feeling.
Oh, well, uh, I've had plenty of arguments with people, though not to the extent of starting an immortal feud. What I meant was that I have never had to physically fight anybody, which seems very weird. Nobody ever tried. Nobody even picked on me, "brainer" though I manifestly and irredeemably was, either in elementary or high school. Nobody even came close.
I just can't understand it, and almost feel as though I've missed out on something.
Somewhat. I don't fear delicacy so much as I fear that I'm being tough in the wrong ways. It's a question of missing nuances that I otherwise might not, and those nuances being vital. I've already missed out on all sorts of scholarship and grant opportunities in one way or another, and bureaucracy continues to be something of a blind spot for me. It's going to be hard going.
The sense I get from you, generally, is that you'd like to just live without hassle. Is that more or less accurate? If so, I can certainly sympathize.
Well, it's good to be able to candidly aspire to the rank of second- or third-best of something. It shows humility and a proper sense of proportion. I know too many people who will pursue a goal only so long as they can be the greatest there has ever been in achieving it; anything else would be pointless to them, and produces gloom, despair or hatred. It's a toxic sort of life, but one that becomes more and more popular as the occasionally American philosophies of arch-individualism and self-reliance percolate into the wider world.
I just don't have the attention span for it, myself, and I get by alright without it.
I also have some moral objections to automobiles, but that's another story altogether.
That makes sense. I mean, given the brouhaha surrounding even the concept of zero, it doesn't surprise me at all.
I like to draw triangle constructs, weird iterations on graph paper, and zombies.
Well, you live in a far wider world than I do, then.
You may speak as much, and I thank you for your reassurance. I should point out that I don't actually feel bad about not caring about those latter things. Only my mathematical and culinary shortcomings bother me.
That, and I wish I were a better singer.
I noticed this mostly with regard to the Evangelicals with whom I once associated. The biggest Christian club at the school, a branch of the more generalized Campus Crusade for Christ (with whom I will now have little to do, if I can help it), could hardly go a week without having some mission director come in to speak at our meeting and make us all feel guilty for liking our lives as they were, thank you, and not wanting to go perform some dubious service for people who have no idea what we're saying and likely couldn't care less so long as we keep building stuff for them.
It's like they can't even see the growing spiritual vacuity of the west, or if they do see it they don't care. This is why we're getting stories now of Christian missionaries coming from places in Africa and South America to evangelize western countries. At first I thought such stories simply delightful, and I still do, to a degree, but there's an urgent note to them, too, that I think may have been too long ignored.
That's quite likely. I know that C.S. Lewis described humility as being able to build the finest cathedral in all Christendom, but being just as happy with it as if it had been built by someone else. Not, then, to denigrate one's own doubtless skills, but to revel rather in their result than in their use. I think there may be something to that.
I'm sure Stan is cool with it. He simply changed his custom tag to "Official Member 2005" when he didn't win it during the first contest, so I think he'd just be his usual resourceful, pragmatic self.
I still think I'm 19 sometimes. It's surprisingly easy to forget about.
I worry about this too, but it's mostly a phantom worry based on reading too many books. When I look to the great men of the past, many of whom have been in positions of prominence by the time they reached my age, I'm looking at a different system of counting. They got to where they were because more was expected of them at a much younger age, and the lifespan was shorter into the bargain. As I can fully expect to live to be like 80, it doesn't seem as urgent as all that, in the end.
No indeed.
I'm looking forward to seeing it myself, when it comes around. I saw Children of Men last night, and I'm going to go see it again tonight. As I was saying to Ethan, it's not every film that's effective enough to make me - me, of all people! -, when confronted with the image of angry Muslims marching through a shattered street with AK's and green flags in the air as they bellow "Allahu Akbar," want to salute them as they go. That's not just good film-making. That's a freaking miracle.
Go see this movie.
I'm not trying to lead you to think anything beyond that faith isn't some simultaneously blind and doe-eyed sense of conviction. The usefulness of faith, as it actually exists as a real Christian concept and not as whatever non-Christians foolishly persist in saying it is, is a matter for you to decide upon for yourself.
I guess what I'm saying is that the reason you're having a problem with this is because your definition of faith is (still) not the Christian definition of faith, and is, as such, useless in the context of trying to prove the Christian faith wrong. The definition to which I directed you, by contrast, is indeed such a definition, and is not in any way useless. The point of it is that "faith" is not some mystic nonsense. It's a pretty plain and everyday sort of thing, closely related to the necessary approach we take to almost anything.
Additionally, your treatment of this issue still assumes an implicit "blindness" that simply isn't there. Please stop.
Stan once explained this with one of his awesome graphics, but I don't have it on me, unfortunately.
Well, I'm glad you and I can both agree that faith is rational.
Oh, well, that's where it's all leading. There's a progression through Gothic to the Fantastic to the Neo-Fantastic to Fantasy to Magic Realism. It's a notoriously difficult genre to pin down, as it covers so much and is fluid. I'd say more ink has been spilled over the subject in the 20th century than on any other genre of literature.
No such luck, I'm afraid.
Grace Kelly.
I am not joking. Also, John Singer Sargent's Triumph of Religion, and virtually anything by Caravaggio, Bernini or Dore.
I know people like you. My father, actually, is one of them. He was surprised recently to learn that not everyone was like this, in fact, so he has since become more sympathetic with those who don't follow his meaning as quickly as he might like them to.
Being able to imbue a simple blotch of mental colour with relevant meaning and memory is a wonderful ability to have.
For my own part, I think in tropes, if you can imagine such a thing. I guess more accurately it could be described in phrases or concepts. I remember lines from poems or books or songs and relate them to things that are important. Yeats' majestic phrase, "a terrible beauty is born" has always had great significance to me for reasons I can not adequately express, and Tennyson has been a gold mine of mnemonic emotionalizers. "Then once by man and angels to be seen, in roaring he shall rise and on the surface die." Just thinking that line - just thinking it to myself - makes me feel better when things are rough. Or Browning's conclusion to "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came."
I often find myself running over these lines in my head, over and over again, as a sort of unconscious background to thinking about other things. It's like white noise.
Here are ten books you should look into (that is, into which you should look; why lower the tone, right?):
1. Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory
2. Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons
3. Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary
4. G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday
5. C.S. Forester's Brown on Resolution and/or Death to the French
6. Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel
7. Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
8. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
9. Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson
10. Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels
I could also recommend at least ten collections of essays on all topics under the sun, but I think this will start you off well.
Oh, for sure. In some regards it would be like a scam. I'd be getting paid, basically, to do paperwork. Everything else is stuff I'd do for free.
Why thank you. I sure hope the inevitable batch of horrified first-year students feels the same way. I actually alternate between pitying my future students and wishing I was them.
I honestly don't know. While I am pretty adamant that how I feel about things has no bearing on their reality, I am certainly not going to exalt reason to heights she can't bear. I try to synthesize the two as best I can, but as to which of them dominates, I just couldn't say.
Well, be sure to check her out. She's one of the grand dames of Southern Gothic, along with Eudora Welty, among others. I may have misspelled Welty, but I don't care.
Those are good times too, though I really hate coming home late and realizing that I have little to no time for idleness.
That's the spirit! I'm a Darjeeling man myself.
It grants the feeling of understanding them, if only slightly and superficially, and it's a pretty thorough way to sort of "live through them," though not in any malicious sense. However, I often worry that, when I do the sort of thing you describe, I'm essentially treating those around me as walking fictions.
I like a good granite sky, myself, with a most fulsome menace bearing down. It's beautiful.
That's not perverse. The man of genius as far back as Plato has recognized the value of the tragic, and the tragic of the mundane can often be the most powerful thing of all. I am myself grossly addicted to epic tragedy, however, and most any and all cathartic experience. I often wonder if this is morbid, in some way, to delight so in seeing heroes die, but then I think to myself that, were I such a man as I had seen go down in a hail of bullets or beneath a traitor's sword or at the heart of an atom bomb (or whatever), the very least I would have wanted in return would be for someone to look on with tears in their eyes and say, "that was freaking awesome."
I do get the idea, and I also get incoherent as the night deepens, though in my case this means it's time to start writing rather than stop, at least if I'm working creatively. I tend to "go nuts," at that point, and take stuff in directions I might otherwise have neglected.
I think that's a pretty fair way to look at it. Life is nothing else if not an extravagant present, and it does not do to be such a selfish bastard as to toss it away because it does not suit every one of your minute fancies. Chesterton once suggested that we should not look a gift universe in the mouth, and it would seem to be useful advice.
It's hard to say, or, at least, hard for me to say. Real, manifested anger is not something with which I have much experience beyond a few isolated occasions. I often worry that I care too little about things that ought, rather, to enrage me, in fact. I don't get angry with people so much as I get very tired, and when I get very tired I just don't want to deal with them. This happens so rarely, however, that I never know how to deal with it usefully when it crops up, and find myself wallowing in indecision and frustration. I'd like to say that things are different when the tables are turned, but I can not recall any examples of people being angry at me in recent memory. This, too, worries me, for I feel as though I'm not being "real" enough. I've never gotten into a fight with anyone, either, though not for a lack of fortitude. It's just never come up. This unsettles me, somehow.
I worry about that too, in fact, and the "unqualified success" that my endeavours have met scares the crap out of me. What if I'm destined to follow this path all the way up to the door of what I want, but no further? What if there is no pot of gold for me? What if I'm forced to retreat forever, unskilled, unneeded, unfocused? That's a terrifying thought. I would surely die.
Oh, very likely. I vacillate between wanting it in its own right, and being scared away from the alternative by the examples of people like Nietzsche and Sartre.
Well, maybe. I have to focus on something smaller, so I'm demonstrating the manner in which Chesterton predates and is sympathetic to both post-colonial theory and certain aspects of cultural theory by a matter of over fifty years. Should be popular, if it's plausible. I think it is, but we'll see.
It's possible. I certainly think they make a bigger imprint in people's lives than painters, for example, who occasionally explode with majesty but are often just mundane. This sad state of affairs is not true of everyone (like Caravaggio, who brought a monstrous glory to everything he touched), but it's true enough of most of them. Nothing sticks in the craw like a good turn of phrase, though.
That is ever and always the case, tragically. For my own part, I am basically useless at all sorts of important things. Unlike you, I can not cook, and take no joy in doing it when I have to. I can not drive, and neve will, for I have neither the desire nor the attention. I can barely do math, even of the most rudimentary sort. Addition and multiplication I can handle, but subtraction sometimes gives me trouble and I am simply unable to divide, anything, ever, unless the answer is abundantly obvious. Beyond this basic level, there is nothing for me in mathematics. I simply can not comprehend it. This is a nightmare world.
Other areas that are utterly foreign and uninteresting to me include plants, oriental countries, automobiles, essentially all of sports, how technology works, science in general, "native" cultures, and so on.
Some frauds are better to maintain, though it sounds like a remarkable unChristian thing to say. In any event, to demolish such as you describe profits no one, ever. The rationalization I have for this, if indeed it is a rationalization and not just a reason, is that I can do more good for people as the man they think I am than as the man that, perhaps, I really am. In much the same way I have decided to forever forgo missionary work. What can I bring to some Guatemalan tribe that could not be brought by a functional illiterate with a better soul than I? If I go there, who will stay to fire the hearts of the men and women of my own culture? Who could do it?
It is at this point that the rationalization becomes excessively prideful and I attempt to adjust it accordingly, but it doesn't always work. My point is that I can do more for people who know and admire me than I can for people who think nothing whatever of me at all. There you go. I think you can do that too, and, for that reason, you should play to whatever strengths the world seems to think you have
It is not polite to ask a lady her age, so I will simply take your word for it.
It's possible. But then, it's better to be safe than sorry. I wouldn't want someone who really should work hard to think it would be okay to just hide under some coats and that, somehow, everything would work out. Maybe it worked for me; that's no excuse.
BAAAAAAAAARDOOOOOOOOOO
o rly.
Oh, well. Then, "yes," but not primarily.
Yes, you do have to look it up. His short stories and essays are the best of his work, and are conveniently collected in a nice, cheap volume called Labyrinths. One of his specialties is writing beautiful, thought-provoking, delicate essays on books and people that don't exist.
If that sounds like your sort of thing, by all means, go for it.
It's hard to say. One day I just "turned on" to comic books and graphic novels again after a gap of like fifteen years. Now there are few things I like better.
If necessary, I would be happy to provide a concise list of recommended prose.
I intend to be an English professor, though with an eye more to teaching than to strictly research. I only began taking English courses because I found them easy, but I soon discovered that I found them easy because I loved them, and, so, here we are. I'm eminently qualified for the job, in any event, so I don't foresee any problems making it work. It's just going to be a long road to get there, is all. Ideally I would specialize in the moderns, like Chesterton, Shaw, Wells, Belloc, Beerbohm, Wilde, etc., but I also have a deep and abiding love for the English nobs of the 18th century. I've written many a happy paper on the likes of Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, but I just don't know if I'd be as good at teaching them as I would the others.
Christine de Pizan was the first professional woman writer (if you don't count Sappho, which I don't, because she's too mysterious and weird), producing stories, poetry, and scholarly treatises in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Her best-known work is The City of Ladies, in which she goes to bat against misogyny by demonstrating the many superior qualities of her sex. She writes beautifully and thoughtfully, and to read her is to wonder just what tragedy occurred to make a tradition that began with her end up with the likes of Germaine Greer.
Flannery O'Connor, by contrast, was an eccentric and serious-minded woman who produced a good number of short stories, two novels, and a great deal of correspondence, lectures and speeches during her short life (39 years). Her field was the American South, where she herself lived all her life, and her subject was what we could call "Dark Grace," in which hideous instances of the grotesque work their magic upon awful people, hopefully for the better. There are no nice characters in her stories, and those that are the "nicest" are also the most likely to meet terrible ends. The style could be called "Southern Gothic," and they're simply wonderful. Check out the collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge for a good sampling of what she's about. "The Enduring Chill," one of the stories therein, nearly broke me.
Oh, well, of course. I guess I just feel like I'm missing something if I'm not watching a movie as well as listening to it. I've never been able to get into lectures or books on tape, either, which is kind of odd. And it's a shame, because that would be very convenient.
It's hard to pin down what I like into tidy categories, unfortunately. The second one was just something I came up with after really thinking about it, and is not even entirely accurate. Oh well.
Too many, honestly. My room is so full of books that I'm running out of space for other things.
The time spent lying in bed after the alarm goes off is some of the most satisfying of the day. I purposefully wake up two hours earlier than I need to, every single day, just to do this. It's worth it.
I don't know if I'd say I dread the mornings, but I'm never happy to discover that I'm tired enough to go to sleep.
What sort of things have you found joy in recently?
It's always better the alternative. Life has too much to offer for it to deserve such scorn as a suicide heaps upon it.
That's a good approach. How does this play into the matter when people are pissing you off, however? It can't feel good to have an entire world making you angry (apart, that is, from the actual world).
Let's be frank, here. It's not just a question of ambivalence, but rather of perpetual, devastating ignorance. I have no frakking clue what it is that I want. I mean, I know that I "want" certain feelings and theories, but I have no idea what sort of physicalities are necessary to bring them into reality.
This, above all, is the most distressing thing in my life. I can't form any plans. I can't make any goals. It's like charging into fog, knowing only that beyond the fog there's something better, but not where "beyond" actually is, if it's even anywhere.
That sounds about right. It's actually disgraceful, honestly.
That is one of the facets of Christian humility.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was one of the most gifted and beloved writers of his times, and yet is now almost entirely neglected by everyone. He wrote about a hundred books, contributed to a hundred more, produced several hundred poems and over four thousand essays, all of them dealing with every topic you could possibly imagine, with wit, elegance, clarity and passion. He wrote what T.S. Eliot and noted biblophile Peter Ackroyd have called the finest biography of Dickens ever produced. His biography of Thomas Aquinas won similar praise from Etienne Gilson, the foremost Thomistic scholar of his time. His treatment of Robert Browning revolutionized both Browning studies and the field of literary biography. The list goes on and on. Michael Collins carried a copy of Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill around with him in his pocket during his strivings for Irish freedom. Gandhi cites one of Chesterton's essays as inspiration for his decision to resist the English. C.S. Lewis claimed that Chesterton's history of the world, The Everlasting Man, was one of the most profound influences on his road to becoming the Christian he was.
He debated Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow (and won). He interviewed Mussolini. He argued with Thomas Hardy about pessimism in a publisher's waiting room. He once lived next door to Henry James. He had an audience with Pope Pius XI, who later conferred upon him the title of "Fidei Defensor," usually reserved for monarchs. He was best friends with H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw (whom he first met, it is said, in Rodin's studio), disagreeing with them violently on essentially every issue about which they could reasonably debate, and yet being the first in their affections regardless. He produced travelogues of his voyages to the Holy Land, and to Poland, and to Ireland, and to America, and to Italy. His Father Brown stories are some of the most beloved in all of detective fiction. He wore a cape and a big floppy hat and carried a swordstick around with him in 1920's England.
And so on and so on. And, because he was neither a socialist nor an atheist, he is basically ignored; passed over by his friends Shaw and Wells. He wrote more and better than either of them, but one wouldn't know it to see a typical University curriculum. I could have graduated from this school under the impression that the man never existed were it not for some strokes of luck and a lot of snooping around.
That, in brief, is who Chesterton is, was, and forever more shall be. If you ever have several years to kill, a substantial number of his works are available online here. I recommend this short, spritely essay as an introduction to his style.
Incidentally, it is on the subject of Chesterton that I shall be writing my Masters Thesis.
That's precisely the problem. I just don't think about stuff that doesn't interest me, and I may as well have been doing nothing for all the good some of my previous courses have done me. I took courses in Physics and Political Science and (regrettably) German (regretable because it's my one truly terrible grade in University), but I don't remember anything about any of it, now.
It's a gift, as you say, but it is occasionally difficult and frustrating.
It's like you were saying to that other guy about how people are the same etc.
Also, throughout High School I felt very badly about the people who got marks just slightly lower than mine but only got them because they were trying really, really hard. I don't anymore, because those bastards are out to get my grant money, but back then it seemed highly unfair.
I am currently in my fourth and final year of an Honours BA. If all goes according to plan, I'll have my MA by the time I'm 23, and my PhD by the time I'm 28. (I am 21 at the moment).
True, but only if they're cautionary. Mine is not. I've screwed the pooch for the last eight years and what do I have to show for it? Unqualified success, the lauds of my superiors and the adulation of my peers. That's not exactly something you can just emulate.
Oh, right. Grobyc, maybe? Or mikeyG, perhaps.
Did you regret asking that question? I doubt it.
EDIT: oh god it's happening again so looooong :0