I’d forgotten how difficult virtue is. It’s easy to treat people well when they’re interesting and intelligent and you like them and they like you, which has been most people I’ve interacted with in Chicago – but there are few things more difficult than treating one’s siblings and parents well – and I say this as someone who has a ridiculously functional family. It’s really humbling after being so very tolerant and openminded and magnanimous in college to come home and find that you absolutely cannot stand your brother’s taste in music, or that not swearing around younger sisters is a bit more difficult than you remembered, or that your parents still aren’t comfortable with you reading Lolita, and that your virtue has been only a caricature of the real thing. Thank God my relationship with him doesn’t depend on my performance.
So first quarter at University of Chicago went pretty well. Taking Honors Calculus was a mistake which I will attempt to correct next semester, but Physics and Spanish and my Philosophy class were all good. Next quarter I’ll be taking Calculus instead of Honors Calculus and an Intro to Poetry class (awesome) instead of Spanish. Other mundane details, etc. etc...
Yeah, so, important stuff: I am not disciplined. During the quarter I stopped exercising. I barely wrote. I neglected to read the Bible. I spent hours playing videogames, reading webcomics, seeking cheap entertainment. I only see the results now: my mind has warped, no longer translucent to the words falling through a quiet which no longer exists. I can’t find ideas to fit words to. My addiction to cheap story has burned a hole in my mind, and now all I have are the petrified remains of old ideas. Like every other state, this is not permanent. Whether it’s gone when I wake up tomorrow or lingers for weeks (a week is more than enough time for moods to ossify) I don’t know.
I can write. Sprachgefuhl: an innate sense of the linguistically appropriate. I don’t know if I was born with it or if it results from my early voracious reading (Chomsky? any thoughts?) but it’s there. Words are my native element; I can make them do what I want them to – not perfectly, obviously: I’m only eighteen and not quite arrogant enough to blame my failings on the imperfections of any human language – but it seems that they obey me better than they do most people. I doubt it’s any sort of “artistic vision” – that is, I doubt I see things other people do not, or rather, I doubt I see things more than other people – different things, yes, but no two people see the same things – anyway, the difference is I can write these things. Or attempt to. How to translate into words something that has only been known as perhaps only the juxtaposition of the view from an airplane and the cover of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (sci-fi books, by the way, have the best cover art. I’ve taken to cutting the covers off and taping them to my dormroom door.) or, completely different, the night view from an airplane and a cool lake under a summer moon – why does the sky in spring recall nursing homes and kitsch while that of winter means cardboard boxes by the interstate, concrete jungles, and fake palm trees, and that of autumn, and of autumn only, means Icarus? Everything means something else.
For instance: I received from a friend for Christmas a bracelet made entirely of soda-can tabs, three per link. It is very cool. But what does it mean?
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6 comments:
Re: your parents' reservations about Lolita: that's just lame. Surely they know Nabokov's stature as a writer. Enough said.
"Thank God my relationship with him doesn’t depend on my performance." < Noncapitalization of him purposeful? If so, that'd represent an editorial policy change, if I recall your former style correctly.
So one semester of Spanish satisfied your language requirement?
I noticed that you (unintentionally?) tweaked W3's definition of Sprachgefühl, replacing intuitive (which suggests above-average adeptness at speaking or writing, e.g., yours) with the Chomskyan buzzword innate. Because UG stipulates that everyone has, on some level, an innate sense of what is linguistically appropriate, then it might follow from your redefinition that everyone has Sprachgefühl. Do you get where I'm coming from?
All in all, an engrossing (especially the personal reflections), trenchant, thought-provoking post, although (or maybe partly because) the stuff about meaning is, if I've understood it right, completely outside my paradigm.
How do you normally exercise, btw?
Re: my parents' reservations about Lolita: I should have clarified - they're uncomfortable primarily with me reading it around younger siblings, and secondarily with me reading erotic literature in general without a means of releasing sexual urges (i.e., being married). Weird as that sounds, I do understand their point-of-view. I'm still reading Lolita though. It is Nabokov.
Um, re: caps on God. I hate being tagged as overly religious (and then I post long discussions of theology) - I guess I'm just trying not to alienate all you atheist or agnostic types TOO much. Which, if you can read my overtly Christian narratives, probably the capitalization of references to God not gonna do that much. Still. I'ma try not to be religious.
Actually, the placement test plus one semester of Spanish satisfied my language requirement.
I suppose everyone (under Universal Grammar) would have some kind of Sprachgefuhl. I just have more, I guess. On the other hand, "intuitive" is more linguistically appropriate in this context than "innate". That's a point for you.
Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it. What exactly do you mean by the stuff about meaning being outside your paradigm?
Normally, now, I don't exercise. But in the past, I'd run about 2 miles 3 times a week, as well as doing some push-ups and sit-ups. Nothing that impressive, really.
I doubt your siblings will read it until they're mature enough to, though, so no harm done.
"I hate being tagged as overly religious" < Yes, it can't be easy to be serious about Christianity and still be cool in modern teenage culture, which is pretty secular. (Cool might be an oversimplification—you may not be striving to be cool so much as trying to avoid seeming sanctimonious or preachy, attributes often associated with religion.) Nevertheless, some of my friends seem to balance the two goals rather well.
Well, when you say that "[e]verything means something else" and ask yourself, what does it mean?, it sounds to me (correct me if I'm wrong) like you're implying that those meanings are inherent attributes of things themselves (objective meaning—meaning that objectively exists in the universe), as opposed to just being mental constructs that people assign to things (subjective meaning, which is my view).
Re: exercise, good stuff. I "run" a similar distance on the elliptical (the gym in our building is very convenient) and have recently started doing situps, but only when I visit home.
I wonder how much of my motivation (in noncapitalization and other such things) is simply that I want to be perceived as cool. Probably some at least, unfortunately. I think some of the rest of my motivation is that I want to portray Christianity accurately, without so much of the cultural baggage that it's amassed over the years. Ideally, that would be my sole motivation here, and "balancing" truth and cool would not be an issue (I know you didn't mean it this way, but I shouldn't be trying to offset my beliefs with other choices I make. Rather, these beliefs should govern all choices I make, yes?)
Re: meaning. I never can remember where I fall on the Platonic-existential continuum, which sounds funny (it's not really a continuum) - but it appears true to me that things have meaning in themselves AND that we construct meaning. I feel more Platonic today: Could one be a poet without believing that things have meaning in themselves?
Now I exercise. Then sleep.
Well.
Where do I want to start my little rant.
I rant. not post.
I am playing with periods.
How about the beginning.
Not to bring in St. Augustine, but Levi can't have any other virtue without faith.
That was supposed to be the beginning.
I hate him.
I probably have more trouble with my family, but the end result is similar.
This last semester, my mother dated for a month or so, then got married.
What the crap.
Her new husband is hyper conservative and her values are changing (this does NOT mean that they are worse, and I will not directly say so, but it is confusing to me that some of the things she spent 17 years teaching me no longer apply.)
I'm pretty sure sexual urges don't have to have a sexual outlet. That being said, andy is not low on the gay sex spectrum either.
A theological question.
Does your relationship on God depend on your performance?
Im asking about YOUR relationship.
Than "on" was intentional.
Here I deviate from both of you a lot.
I didn't in anything else I've said.
sex included.
Mabye im too honest.
On topic.
I AM ARROGANT ENOUGH TO BLAME MY FAILINGS ON THE IMPERFECTIONS OF A LANGUAGE.
That bitch.
I hate her.
She hated be first.
I had an eighth grade english class with a teacher that would deduct points wherever there was a word that would "make her" pull webster's from the shelf.
I stopped putting forth much of an effort towards that whore of letters. Who will be affected if I say cta instead of cat?
*that's what the transportation system is getting ate*
urgh
Then on everything else.
I'm pretty sure most people consider themselves to not have enough self-decispline (w/e;nto spell-check suggestions) \
that bitch.
In, my junior year I had 12 classes, two part-time jobs, and 20 hours of volunteering a week - and ran 6 miles per day.
I still felt lazy as hell.
But since getting mono last spring, and a swarm of holes in my stomach this fall, it doesn't seem like I had things that bad.
I've never felt Levi was preachy.
But I am a godless heathen.
I'm fine with God and the Bible, we just don't talk to each other anymore.
My biggest couple of problems with religion are that I don't feel like what I have in my hands now is very true to the original, and in practice only about 10% is preached to drag in new people or smite the heathens.
I have a lot of problems with some of the ways religion is implemented.
I am not atheist, I just don't know who to listen to. (forget grammar with me)
I will attempt to say something that at least touches your comment at a tangent, good sir. It is challenging.
Does my relationship with God depend on my performance? The short answer is absolutely not, but I think what you're getting at is does my performance affect how I feel about my relationship with God and the answer is yes. God can still break through that, but if I'm bummed about having wasted another day on the internet, then it's more difficult for me.
Andy, I've wondered how you were able to do so much during highschool, and I think the only answer is that your persona enables you to split yourself into different fragments of consciousness in order to be in different places at the same time.
Dude, the American Church is messed up in so many ways. You are not the only one who has a problem with the way religion is implemented. We've Americanized Christianity a lot more than we realize, I believe. Read the Old Testament sometime and just notice how much of it makes no sense within the typical churchy frameworks in which we tend to think. Job, for instance, or Abraham and Isaac, or basically anything in Genesis. So yeah.
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