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01/18/02 04:31 PM: Finals?
Next week is a “finals week” sort of thing at my school. I don’t have any, so I get a week off. It’s kind of silly. Nobody actually has any finals during finals week. If you do have to take a final or midterm or some such thing, it’s often done in class the Thursday and Friday before “finals week,” as was the case with my economics class. We had nine questions yesterday and six today. Short answer style. A paragraph or so per question. Interestingly, one question appeared on both days, in the same exact form. Anyway, I will now wallow in my laziness. We have this break right after Christmas break. Then we get another week off in February. Not a bad deal.
I went by the library yesterday as I was dropping a friend off after school, which I do every day. It had been quite some time since I had seen the library from the inside, so I stopped in afterward. I figured I was due for a bit of enlightenment. I checked out Aldous Huxley’s The Genius and the Goddess. I had never heard of it before, but it struck me since it consists entirely of a conversation between two old men. Upon further reading, it does seem that one is doing most of the talking. The other is more of a scribe. It’s not much on plot or characters, and its prose is, if not quite bad, certainly not good. But that’s not really the point of it, I think. It seems to be a sort of philosophical debate. It’s almost like an essay in the form of a story, though its form allows it to be more confusing and roundabout than an essay. At any rate, I found this passage interesting:
“How impossibly crude our language is! If you don’t mention the physiological correlates of emotion, you’re being false to the given facts. But if you do mention them, it sounds as though you were trying to be gross and cynical. Whether it’s passion or the desire of the moth for the star, whether it’s tenderness or adoration or romantic yearning—love is always accompanied by events in the nerve endings, the skin, the mucous membranes, the glandular and erectile tissues. Those who don’t say so are liars. Those who do are labeled as pornographers. It’s the fault, of course, of our philosphy of life; and our philosphy of life is the inevitable by-product of a language that separates in idea what in actual fact is always inseparable.”
In translating things and thoughts and ideas—reality—into words, they become something else. Their essence is lost. What is a “person?” Flesh, bone, blood? Proteins, carbohydrates, and fats? Mind and body? No combination of words, however extensive, can convey what it is to be a “person,” to be “alive.”
Okay, enough of that “deep” stuff. I scare myself whenever I get to thinking about such things. That’s why I stick to watching cartoons for the most part.
