Personal Narratives

The blog Findings, written by a fellow former Wesnothian, had a post today about narrative which ties in nicely with something I’ve been thinking about myself: perhaps, just as that post implies that we are each trying to write our own narratives, we could say that the world is a grand story composed of the multitude of personal narratives we are all crafting, and which cannot be reduced to a simpler form, and it is impossible to understand the world entirely, because we can never fully understand another person…

Of course, this isn’t a fully thought out idea, but I want to post that link before I forget about it. Perhaps I’ll come back to this when I have a fuller description of what I mean. Incidentally, this is a thought I had after reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; if I end up able to draw a coherent concept out of this mess, I’ll have to revise my opinion of that book upwards.

Book Review: The Brothers Karamazov

So, this last week and a half (starting basically when I no longer had to do a bunch of work for Junior Poet) I sat down and read The Brothers Karamazov.

Verdict: It’s amazing, but I just don’t get it.

That is all.

Difference and Indifference

I’ve become aware of an interesting phenomenon over the past month or so regarding the reading of argumentative non-fiction. It’s probably because of the JPo project, in which we read a bunch of literary criticism about our focal poet, but I’ve experienced it regarding other subjects as well, including philosophy and politics.

What I’m talking about without naming is essentially an experience that I’ve had multiple times, in different forms: I read a book. I disagree with the argument of the book, and “officially” declare that to be my response to the book. I go about my life. Days, weeks, or months later, I encounter something related in some way to the argument the book made. I then approach the new situation in the light of the book I previously read, whether explicitly or implicitly, and treat it as providing me a unique insight into the new situation, regardless of the fact that I completely disagree with the book when I originally read it.

I have a theory as to why this happens. Essentially, I think, when I read something, I’ve invested several hours, perhaps days, into reading and thinking about what it is I’ve read; that time spent has created an emotional bond with the material. I may disagree with what it says, but I disagree with it; I don’t just vaguely not like that way of approaching the subject, I have grappled with a particular person’s argument and formed an emotional bond with it – perhaps negative, but still, an emotional.

After writing that last sentence, it occured to me that this seems related to something I’ve written before, I don’t remember where, about interpersonal relationships. To dislike someone is still to have an emotional connection to someone. To actively dislike someone – rather than simply ignoring them – is to have a closer bond with someone than to just vaguely not mind their being around.

Also, I think, a strong enmity is more likely to turn into a strong friendship than into nothing at all; and, in fact, I think it is more likely to turn into a strong friendship than is a weak friendship, by which I mean one where the two people are not good friends not because they don’t know each other well, but because they just don’t particularly like each other, even if they don’t particularly dislike each other. The former case, after all, is just one of changing the type of emotion felt; the latter is one of changing the intensity of emotion, a more difficult proposition.

Moving In (September)

So I’ve spent the last four days moving into my new apartment, buying books for the next semester, etc. The week before that I spent procuring furniture for said apartment. Hence my recent lack of postage. (It seems like a lot of the bloggers I subscribe to have been moving in the last few weeks – makes reading my RSS feed much less fun. Guess I’m doing the same to however few people subscribe to me.)

Anyway, this new semester has another interesting feature, aside from what I’ve talked about several times before, with it being the third year I’ve been at the same school, something that hasn’t happened since 5th grade. Namely, for the last year the class of 2011 has been divided in three – the Fall Romers, the Spring Romers, and the people who didn’t go. Now basically everyone is back. It will be fascinating to see how the different social circles meld and break up. If I make any good observations about social behavior I’ll post about it.

And for those interested, my list of classes: Junior Poet (I’m doing Gerard Manley Hopkins), Medieval Literature, Linear Algebra, Analysis I, Intermediate German I. I’ll also probably sign up to audit The Russian Novel.

Discovering Gene Wolfe

One of my favorite authors is Gene Wolfe, but most people have never heard of him. The only people I know personally who have read anything by him are people whom I told to do so.

So how did I come to read Wolfe in the first place? The article that brought his work to my attention appeared on the website of First Things, a monthly journal focusing on religion, culture, and the arts. It was called The Distant Suns of Gene Wolfe. It’ll do a better job of convincing you to read Wolfe than I ever could.

Summer Has Begun

So, I had my last two exams today (err, yesterday, it being 2 AM and all), and I am now entering summer vacation.

It’s kind of a strange feeling; I’ve now been at UD for as long as I was at any school since 5th grade, and when next semester starts it’ll have been longer. And I’m not sure what next semester will be like. I’m in a student apartment with a friend of mine and two people I don’t really know, and all of us are considered “intelligent”; it’ll be an interesting experience. Also, one of my closest friends is transferring to a school where she can be a music major; it will be strange not having her here. All in all next semester will almost certainly be more exciting than this one.

Anyway, these are my plans for the coming three months, in no particular order:

• Re-read the collected works of Gerard Manley Hopkins in preparation for my Junior Poet class
• Read Camus’ The Stranger, for no particular reason
• Read assorted books from Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, again for no particular reason
• Re-read Shakespeare’s four major tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth)
• Watch seasons 4-7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I’ve seen 1-3 this semester)
• Somehow obtain Battlestar Galactica Seasons 1-4 and watch them
• Finish my Wild Era Orbivm campaign, decide if I want to start another one or if I’m done writing campaigns for Wesnoth
• Finish at least the prologue and first chapter of the book I’ve started writing, and perhaps complete another short story (I’m finally getting serious about this writing thing)
• Take Calculus III so I don’t have to take it during the school year

So, this is what will occupy my time, for the most part. (Perhaps) noticeably absent from this list is, getting a job. It’s not that I would mind getting a job and making money; I just don’t expect it to happen. I really have no marketable skills. I like talking about literature and philosophy and mathematics. If anyone wants to hire me to do that, I’m in. Otherwise…

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Coming up next: something about copyright and the Pirate Bay trial.

Empathic Aspies

A radical new autism theory

This is a fascinating article, for me at least. I have a brother with Asperger’s Syndrome (a mild form of autism), and this explanation makes a lot of sense to me based on my observations of his behavior.

Anyway, it’s currently finals week, so no long rants about life, the universe, and everything; I’ll get back to our regularly scheduled programming at some point after Wednesday night.

I Feel That

People should stop using the phrase “I feel that”/”I feel like” to mean “I think that”.

This is something I’ve noticed more and more over the last few months; people seem to think that making assertions about their beliefs and opinions is somehow offensive, but making assertions about their emotions is not. The idea being, I suppose, that we have control over our beliefs, and so if we think something that runs contrary to someone else’s beliefs, we are intentionally contradicting them, while we don’t have control over our emotions to nearly the same degree, so if we feel something differently from someone else, it’s not your fault and you’re not casting judgement on the other person anyway, you just feel differently.

In other words, it’s a kind of sickly relativism. And it really bugs me, because it signifies a larger shift away from rational debate. As soon as we start taking differences of opinion as personal insults, we lose the ability to reason with the opposition, and it all turns into a question of who’s more emotionally persuasive.

Ah well.

Polite Dishonesty

I’ve noticed something interesting about people recently. It seems obvious, once you think about it, but it’s worth thinking consciously about, even if it is obvious. That thing is: people are more comfortable being dishonest when it means they’re being polite, even when the person they’re talking to is begging them to be honest.

I’ll give an example to show what I mean: A friend of mine recently got the DVDs of a BBC Sherlock Holmes series. We had been planning to hang out on a certain night, and he proposed to me and one other person that we should watch an episode of this show that night while hanging out. Neither of us thought this was a good idea, but… we didn’t say so. We said stuff like, “well, maybe”, “I don’t know”, “perhaps”, etc. Even when the friend said something (I don’t remember exactly what) along the lines of “really, guys, tell me the truth, I don’t care either way”, we continued to hedge, instead of just saying “no, not tonight”.

Now, both me and this particular friend are not very polite people, in fact we the opposite, but the fact that someone was asking us a direct question to which we knew what answer he wanted was enough to make us really hesitant to answer it contrary to his desires. What this says about humanity is obvious. Put simply, we don’t want to disappoint people.

Now for what this too-obvious-to-state-clearly fact, stated clearly, reveals: It’s cruel and usually fruitless to ask people their “honest opinion” when it is clear what answer you want. Cruel, because it puts them in an uncomfortable situation – if the answer was “yes” (say it’s a y/n question and “yes” is the answer you wanted), they would have said something like that anyway, and if it was “no”, it forces them to find a way to say it so that it won’t upset you while still being “honest”. Fruitless, because if they answer “yes”, you’ll have no way of knowing they’re actually being honest, and if they answer “no”, well, the fact that you were asking for an “honest opinion” means you suspected their answer was “no” in the first place, and so you were probably going to act as if the answer was “no” regardless.

The reason we make such demands for honesty, I think, is that we have a desire for omniscience. In certain situations, we tell ourselves we would rather know the answer, even if it’s “no” when we want “yes”, than go forward with our lives without knowing. The problem is merely demanding certainty does not provide it for us, and we have to live our lives anyway.

Now, the DVD-watching example was a fairly trivial one, but I’m sure you can think of more serious ones. They’ll probably have to do with romantic entanglements of some kind or another. Those are one of the things people take most seriously in their lives and demand the most certainty about, even though those are the very situations where it is most impossible, I suspect, to have that certainty; at least, certainty is possible, but if you’re in a situation where you feel the need to demand it, it’s probably not possible in that situation.

The Bard in the Mead-Hall

A few friends and I recently had an interesting discussion – what would our ideal earthly existence be like? It can’t be Heaven, but you can pick the landscape, the political nature of your city/town/whatever, your own occupation and political and social role, the architecture you want, even modify the laws of physics to some extent… so, what would I do with this opportunity?

After some discussion, it came out that my ideal existence could be summarized as being the bard in the mead-hall…

I’ll start with the landscape and weather. There’d be stark mountains, plains, a mysterious forest, and an ocean (but no beaches – just sheer cliffs of varying height everywhere). It would generally be cold, varying between a bit below freezing and, at the warmest, maybe 60 or 70 degrees. Mostly overcast, sometimes raining or snowing, rarely sunny (though not never). A northern climate. (Which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s read what I have to say about heat vs. cold.)

On to the city itself. I’d pick a small community, just a few thousand, where I can know a sizable portion of the population and talk to whoever I wanted, but not really be obligated to talk to anyone. We’d all live in separate small, simple houses, kind of like the huts you’d see in medieval towns, but with indoor plumbing, and congregate in the communal feasting hall, one of the two large buildings in the town. The other, bigger one would be the library-cathedral, done in the Gothic style.

As to the political structure of this town; it’d be basically feudalistic, I guess, but the main feature is that it is in constant war with a neighboring and extremely evil city, or perhaps monster (which would make this even more like Heorot Hall from Beowulf). Why do we need to be fighting? Because otherwise life would get boring. Remember, this is not Heaven. Eternal existence in an earthly paradise with nothing to try to accomplish, but with mankind still fallen, would, I think, not be very paradisaical. We need something to struggle for – what better way than to have an undeniably evil enemy to fight against? The stories of the war would be told in the feasting hall, everyone would fight and so have some experience of something grander than themselves… but the war would always stay distant enough not to threaten the town itself.

But what would I do in this town? I certainly wouldn’t want to be the king or a warrior or anything like that. I considered being just one of the intellectual class (which there would be – even if everyone is educated, not everyone is equally intelligent), but I realized that wouldn’t really satisfy me. It’d be too boring; again, there’d be nothing to fight for, or rather nothing to really try to accomplish. I’d rather be a bard, composing and singing tales in the mead-hall. Then I could have a goal – write something great. Much more interesting.

This hypothetical paradise is supposed to include other personal stuff, so I guess I’ll include that too; I’d be married, I guess, to someone much nicer and more social than I am (that’s almost necessarily true for me, of course), and probably have kids too. Oh, and there’d be a bunch of pet wolves in this town, and I’d have at least one. I considered taking a super-power like flying or something, but then realized that actually sounds kind of boring. I’d rather have basically what I describe above.

This is an interesting exercise because it gives the audience a view into both your personality, and your world-view – and shows how much the two are intertwined. I’d choose to be the bard in the mead-hall because that’s what suits my personality the best – but it suits me the best because of my views on the nature and significance of literature.

Try it yourself – it might help you figure something out. I didn’t realize that my town needed to be at war with something evil until constructing it with the assumption that it would be at peace and realizing that it wouldn’t work.