Ok, have a seat. This is going to take a little longer than my heavily-edited moderately-stilted prose attempts at wit, wisdom, and condensed life experience. That stuff falls flat more often than not, anyway.
Some things have happened over the past few days that knit themselves into a little ball that I feel the need to tug the strings of. You know that part in a TV show where you know it’s the season finale because you can just feel the writers pulling hard at these strings they’ve strung between characters? I always imagine a sweater, and you have a hold of a few of the pieces and you keep pulling and the fabric is bunching and warping in places. You really see how it is all connected. Ok, this is possibly not edited enough. Starting again…
There is a strong tendency, and I think it is a universal one, to want to say the right thing so that we may give solace in the form of a wise statement to a fellow suffering human. I find this compulsion to be particularly strong when confronting death; I always assumed that this was because death was this common endpoint we all share. This is of course true, but I don’t think that’s why we try for these wise phrases. I think, instead, it is the unknowable nature of death that makes us attempt to say something profound. You want to be that person who sighs, swirls their drink, and says the perfect thing. You want to be that for the sufferer, for yourself, but most importantly, for this reason: to be capable of making a wise statement about death would mean you have somehow put a logic fence around it. That you have it surrounded, reined-in, controlled. That you have somehow made the unknowable into something manageable. That the scintillating spotlight of your human brilliance illuminated the blackness, however briefly.
We’re suspended for a moment on this spinning blue pearl,
here together and alive right now, conscious, though no
one knows why. It is a question of caring. When one of us
considers the experiences of another, all the failings
and the achievements in someone else’s life, we are
seeing from this common place, knowing that it’s all
taking place in doubt and the absolute solitude and
terror of being human, and knowing that it’s all
temporary.
I’ve been thinking about the movie Tree of Life, and I haven’t really gotten anywhere. A nice, attempted partial explication of the themes was written by Matt Zoller Seitz, but take a look at this quote:
I was listening to This American Life’s most recent show “Family Physics”, about the application of physical laws to relationships. I didn’t hear much of the actual episode, but it caused my mind to wander off on a tangent beginning this way: your emotional range increases as you become older, more mature, more experienced. But, earlier in your life, you can not comprehend the depth of pain and joy you’ll experience in the future. So, at any point in your life, you think that your extremes of happiness or sadness are the limits of your emotional capacity. In fact, you think you are plumbing the depths of despair or scraping the ceiling of joy at a variety of discrete points in your life. What is actually happening is an increase in your emotional distance between happiness and sadness. Instead of representing this with physics, why not use math (specifically, y=0.5(x)*sin(x) )? Indeed, in mathematical terms these emotional points are signified by local minima or maxima of your emotional capacities. This idea can’t be new, but I was so excited about it I made a diagram explaining it.
I don’t really have the time to fully parse out “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz at The American Scholar, but holy cow are there some good quotes in there. I’ll follow one of his trains of thought:
This principle is not easy to see in our modern culture,
where success is generally viewed as proportional to the
value and quantity of one’s possessions. Society
percieves the owner of a big house which can hold more
possessions as more successful, when in fact he may be
held in bondage by high house payments, taxes, utilities,
repair costs, and a general lack of freedom. In an
ever-increasing need for protection he acquires security
lights, burglar alarms, double locks, fences, and moves
into a subdivision with a locked gate. He pays large
insurance premiums so he can afford to replace everything
in case all his protection doesn’t work.
When I first started designing as a hobby, I hated
everything I made. I knew it was terrible, and no matter
how hard I tried, I could never make it good enough for
myself. But I didn’t give up, and after a while something
clicked. I started to sort of like my work. But I am
still not satisfied; every day I reach higher, trying to
grasp the level of awesomeness that I can feel but can’t
recreate.
I enjoyed reading Stanley Fish’s argument against attempts to justify studies of the humanities. Fish respectfully points to Anthony Kronman’s idealistic viewpoint that the humanities teach people compassion and give them examples of the different paths a life can take. He acknowledges that this argument makes sense, but ultimately seems to think it’s dishonest. Which is to say: can you stand up in front of a bunch of people and say the humanities make better people when the professors who study them everyday are clearly no better as people than the rest of us? Similarly, a “careerism” argument for the humanities is just as flimsy as it is depressing.
Between my finals in neuroscience, physiology, and prosthodontics, my brain has been working on an interesting, rather troubling exercise: understanding beauty. Lord knows why my mind gets preoccupied with the ideas it does. Nonetheless, here I am: I can’t wrap my head around the concept. I am, in many ways, a prototypical nerd; as such, an unknowable system or domain irks me. Cf. the aforelinked article:
I took a nap on the couch in the bright afternoon sunlight today, which really distills my spring break down to its essential components: sleep, relaxation, warm sun. Troubled dreams still seem to haunt my sleep, a carryover from the stresses of last week.
Though he didn’t sing a single melody, the driver on the 16 this morning had a truly operatic voice — he sounded not like an aspiring amateur, but a world-famous singer. “On top of that, he could easily sit in for James Earl Jones” I thought, as we bumped down University Avenue. Now, perhaps the driver leads a church choir during his evenings and weekends, but I couldn’t help but wonder how many gifts we possess of which we are not aware.
There is more than one way to do it (TIMTOWTDI,
usually pronounced “Tim Toady”) is a Perl motto.
The language was designed with this idea in mind,
so that it “doesn’t try to tell the programmer how to
program.”
Mister Rogers went onstage to accept the award — and there, in front of
all the soap opera stars and talk show sinceratrons, in front of all the
jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small
bow and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have
loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to
think of the people who have helped you become who you are. Ten seconds
of silence.
And then he lifted his wrist, looked at the audience, looked at his
watch, and said, ‘I’ll watch the time.” There was, at first, a small
whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people
realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some
convenient eunuch, but rather a man, an authority figure who actually
expected them to do what he asked. And so they did. One second, two
seconds, seven seconds — and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms
heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered
gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier. And Mister Rogers
finally looked up from his watch and said softly, “May God be with you,”
to all his vanquished children.
Su Song was most famous for his hydraulic-powered astronomical clock
tower, crowned with a mechanically-driven armillary sphere, which was
erected in the capital city of Kaifeng in the year 1088. His
clock tower employed the escapement mechanism two centuries before it
was applied in clocks of Europe; the tower also
featured the earliest known endless power-transmitting chain drive in
the world, as outlined in his horological treatise of 1092.
Gottfried Leibniz. Paul du Bois-Reymond, in a biography about Leibniz:
As is well known, the theory of the maxima and minima of functions was
indebted to [Leibniz] for the greatest progress through the discovery of
the method of tangents. Well, he conceives God in the creation of the
world like a mathematician who is solving a minimum problem, or rather,
in our modern phraseology, a problem in the calculus of variations — the
question being to determine among an infinite number of possible worlds,
that for which the sum of necessary evil is a minimum.