Sitting Down
Last year I had a short conversation over lunch with an RPI girl. She was telling me how suffocated she felt:
I want to go on a safari. I want to go to a party and play games. I want to go to an art museum. I want to go shopping. I don't feel like I'm living, but always sitting down.I was conflicted — it makes me glad to see passionate people, but the desire to go should be balanced with a contentness. I just now found a note I wrote to myself later that day:
That "real life" is "somewhere else" is an illusion... The desire for the unknown is echoed, but there is a failure to recognize the beauty of the present... We must live the present as if we are already in a far off land — because we are!This joy of contentness coupled with hope is something I wish I could explain better. If I was given a few wishes, I would ask for the best way to explain this.
Update: a reminder from Emerson: "Art is not to be found by touring to Egypt, China, or Peru; if you cannot find it at your own door, you will never find it."
4 comments:
Re: this and "Arboreal Proliferation," it should be noted that humans also have much surface area (like trees), which should also be used for soaking up life.
But we don't suck up life. Why?
It's very interesting that you bring this up today, since I was thinking of this EXACT thing yesterday, around 3 or 4. (Which only goes to solidify my thinking that people in close spatial and temporal proximity seem to have the same delusions. Never did get that one.) My response to that was to take an hour or two and sit outside in the velvet breeze (and the icy pinpricks of rain, which came not long after) and just enjoy it. I wrote a small story about it too (the joy of keeping a small journal with you at all moments should cannot be overstated).
I think your friend's problem isn't that she wants to go away, or that she lacks the ability to go anywhere, but that she's focusing on finding those 35 digits of PI, regardless of the fact that they'll be obsoleted in a century. Surely a man's accomplishments are but a small fraction of his life, and it is a disproportionately large fraction in our society.
"It was for ambition, I slew..." myself.
My problem is the opposite: I'm so content with life in the moment that I neglect that sometimes we must go. Here isn't home, so we shouldn't make it so.
"...used for soaking up life." Exactly why I tagged the entry "sociology" :)
"interesting that you bring this up today" By the way, the tree thoughts are from spring and the conversation from fall last year (I was digging through sketchbooks last night).
I don't think she was looking for an accomplishment, just an experience. Of course, "Raw experience is empty, just as empty as the forecastle of a whaler, as in the chamber of a counting-house, it is not what one does, but in a manifold sense, what one realizes." (from the diary of Lewis Mumford). I love her passion, but feel like it should be balanced with a deeper reflection.
Oh, and I was praising van Ceulen for those 35 digits :)
"I'm so content with life..." Being totally content with the present isn't a problem unless it distracts you from hope for the future. In which case, there is a wonderful solution: dream! "The dreamers are always homeless..." (Severyanin)
It's good to hear someone else has been trying to understand life too :)
"By the way, the tree thoughts are from spring and the conversation from fall last year (I was digging through sketchbooks last night)." Which ties back into what I said earlier today, about how everything I discover needs to be rediscovered almost exactly a year later.
"I don't think she was looking for an accomplishment, just an experience.... 'it is not what one does, but in a manifold sense, what one realizes.'" Is there much of a distinction between accomplishment and experience? If, for example, you take the purpose of art to be to discover the world around you in new ways, then, realization and accomplishment are linked in every piece of art created. (Of course, this is a specific case. Maybe it isn't universally true, in either direction.) Perhaps I was twisting your point into something that's been on my mind a lot lately, so I start to see things turn into other things... like those Warner Brothers cartoons with the two sailors on a desert island, and one looks at another and he turns into a hot dog or something.
"Oh, and I was praising van Ceulen for those 35 digits :)" I know. :) I would have to study his life more to know exactly how he approached it, but I am making a (likely very flawed) assumption that it ate his sleeping hours for years. Because that would be stupid, unless he got inherent pleasure (or perhaps, some sense of purpose?) from trying to solve it.
"It's good to hear someone else has been trying to understand life too :)" The more time goes on, I wonder if I get closer or further from my goal. At the very least, the journey recorded makes for some very interesting reading.
"and one looks at another and he turns into a hot dog or something." A wonderful image :) I specified "experience" instead of "accomplishment" because "accomplishment" can have self-serving pride-motivated connotations, while "experience" has more of a wisdom-seeking curiosity-motivated connotation.
I think van Ceulen was working out an "experience" as well. I'm sure you know how it is when a certain algorithm eludes you; going through possibilities like mad, with each little realization seeming like "the answer". As you converge on a solution, it feels like you're discovering the true nature of the problem, and maybe something more fundamental about the nature of reality itself. Again, from Mumford (in the same diary entry): "It is the artist, the knower, the sayer, who realizes human experience, who takes the raw lump of ore we find in nature, smelts it, refines it, assays it, and stamps it into coins that can pass from hand to hand and make every man who touches them richer." While the experience itself was for van Ceulen alone, I think those 35 digits and the story behind them are his coins for everyone else. Like I suggest in the title of that post: engraved. His experience of the infinite, engraved into coins for others, and on his tombstone in death as on his heart in life — a passion reciprocated by the Infinite only in Christianity, "I have engraved you on the palms of my hands" (Isaiah 49:16) a symbol made manifest with the deepest inscription there is (John 20:25).
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