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What it is to be human: a quick answer.
May. 11th, 2006 10:00 amThe question I have to ask myself:
Will dying my hair bright and improbable colors injure my chances of finding a job? I crave hair-change.
Spokane might be the most beautiful place in the world this spring, just now. Dogwood trees bloom here, and they are ridiculously elegant. And lilacs! I adore lilacs, for their sheer profusity of blossom. You could bury your face in their flowerstalks, and drown in lilac-scent. It looks like a cliche, but there are no other words. It's like... the feeling of having so much of something, that if you had a bowl of it, and fell in the bowl, you could flail about all you wanted and not have to worry about touching the sides. And the tree leaves practically glow green, or softer green, or have flowers, or are that dark reddish purple.
Possibly because Seattle doesn't change in color much over the course of the year, I find this very impressive. Winter was so gray, and autumn was colorful in it's own firestorm way. Spring is just--I can see why people get excited about it.
I will be home tomorrow evening. I want to yell. I think studying economics is not worth it. Maybe I can just guess my way through the test. SLACK OFF!! Still need to call Starbucks, and my mother, but I have to do the first before the second because the second will interrogate on the first, and will be snippy at me anyway for not calling last night or the night before, but... um. I am an imperfect human being, which is always a depressing thought.
Apparently Dr. Marshall's UNLV lecture about "What it is to be human" was nothing more than a discussion of the tension between man's essential aloneness and the desire for community. I'm listening the the podcast of it now, and am rather unimpressed. Interesting illustrations, but nothing very profound. Then again, he spends much of it talking about basketball, which I'm afraid interests me very little.
What is it to be human, then? To be human is simply to be confused, and intuitively aware of an ability to impose order on the world. Then we use that ability to create sense of a very jumbly universe, but remain with the knowledge that its confusion is infinitely more powerful than our ability to imagine reason for it. Community feeling is just another attempt at sense, to check that others similar to oneself perceive similar worlds. Isolation is just the feeling of reason surrounded by the impossible.
No, revise this. To be human is to be at the mercy of everything else, and to be aware of the vulnerability, so that being human becomes a power struggle of bravado, trying to control what is possible to control when it means altering and destroying the more powerful ambient forces, oh science, and to play at the power struggles with other people, and to evaluate and decide and ally in hope of shelter or combined against-the-world strength, because that is community, but knowing that all others need the same thing, and it's entirely a balance of wants and quiet fear of the uncertain world.
Yes? I don't think the tension between isolation and community is really the essence of the matter. It's there, but less central and more simply a result of the actual struggles. Not that I would contradict a poet, a writer, and an English professor with much more literary education than myself or my nineteen immature years. So... it's an internal disagreement.
Blah. Let me be home now.
Will dying my hair bright and improbable colors injure my chances of finding a job? I crave hair-change.
Spokane might be the most beautiful place in the world this spring, just now. Dogwood trees bloom here, and they are ridiculously elegant. And lilacs! I adore lilacs, for their sheer profusity of blossom. You could bury your face in their flowerstalks, and drown in lilac-scent. It looks like a cliche, but there are no other words. It's like... the feeling of having so much of something, that if you had a bowl of it, and fell in the bowl, you could flail about all you wanted and not have to worry about touching the sides. And the tree leaves practically glow green, or softer green, or have flowers, or are that dark reddish purple.
Possibly because Seattle doesn't change in color much over the course of the year, I find this very impressive. Winter was so gray, and autumn was colorful in it's own firestorm way. Spring is just--I can see why people get excited about it.
I will be home tomorrow evening. I want to yell. I think studying economics is not worth it. Maybe I can just guess my way through the test. SLACK OFF!! Still need to call Starbucks, and my mother, but I have to do the first before the second because the second will interrogate on the first, and will be snippy at me anyway for not calling last night or the night before, but... um. I am an imperfect human being, which is always a depressing thought.
Apparently Dr. Marshall's UNLV lecture about "What it is to be human" was nothing more than a discussion of the tension between man's essential aloneness and the desire for community. I'm listening the the podcast of it now, and am rather unimpressed. Interesting illustrations, but nothing very profound. Then again, he spends much of it talking about basketball, which I'm afraid interests me very little.
What is it to be human, then? To be human is simply to be confused, and intuitively aware of an ability to impose order on the world. Then we use that ability to create sense of a very jumbly universe, but remain with the knowledge that its confusion is infinitely more powerful than our ability to imagine reason for it. Community feeling is just another attempt at sense, to check that others similar to oneself perceive similar worlds. Isolation is just the feeling of reason surrounded by the impossible.
No, revise this. To be human is to be at the mercy of everything else, and to be aware of the vulnerability, so that being human becomes a power struggle of bravado, trying to control what is possible to control when it means altering and destroying the more powerful ambient forces, oh science, and to play at the power struggles with other people, and to evaluate and decide and ally in hope of shelter or combined against-the-world strength, because that is community, but knowing that all others need the same thing, and it's entirely a balance of wants and quiet fear of the uncertain world.
Yes? I don't think the tension between isolation and community is really the essence of the matter. It's there, but less central and more simply a result of the actual struggles. Not that I would contradict a poet, a writer, and an English professor with much more literary education than myself or my nineteen immature years. So... it's an internal disagreement.
Blah. Let me be home now.
