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Hey guys, good to hear from y'all. I don't really know what I'm going to do for my thesis (my proposal is due tomorrow). I think I have Senioritis. I've gotten, let's see, an F on my first Lit. Theory paper (I turned in one page), a C- on my first Symbolic Logic test, a C on my first Physics homework . . . and now I have this philosophy proposal thingy, which I haven't really thought about yet . . . . There's a strange kind of freedom you experience when you let go of your fear of getting bad grades . . . . I don't know if I want to go to grad school now. I've thought, briefly, about going into osteopathic medicine (is that the right word? I'm thinking about the eastern-tinged pseudo-spiritual acupuncture massage type doctor). Oh, and I just wrote my first article for our school paper (a concert review) and it was embarrassingly bad. Badbadbad. Sigh. I like yoga, do you guys? I need to find more free yoga classes at Hamilton.

Are you reading anything cool for your classes, Anna? I've been stopped on page 182 (of 209) in Lighthouse for about two weeks (probably another senioritis symptom). I'll post some of my ideas about the book another time -- it would be nice to bounce ideas off each other. Ben, I like the Middlemarch quotes, I'll have to read that eventually. The Borges lectures are fun to listen to: they can be a little boring, but I like the sound of his voice. For now, here's a Woolf quote about Middlemarch:

She was by way of being terrified of him--he was so fearfully clever, and the first night when she had sat by him, and he talked about George Eliot, she had been really frightened, for she had left the third volume of Middlemarch on the train and she never knew what happened at the end; but afterwords she got on perfectly, and made herself out even more ignorant than she was, because he liked telling her she was a fool. (98)

I like the image of a book traveling on when the person gets off the train. I'm not sure what to make of it though. Any thoughts? I'll have to read the Obama speech again, and the last Eliot quote you posted, Ben. And send away with your thesis, though I don't know when I'll actually read it. Best, BP

Chilly Fingers and Toes

It is starting to cool off.  I wore my winter coat this weekend, and there is a new smell in the air.  My friends and I spent dinner rehashing an old discussion of whether or not there is a difference in the meaning of the words crisp and crispy... I take the first to refer to brisk weather whereas the second is about food.

I wrote a post last week, but my computer disconnected from the internet and I lost it.  Ben (P), I started reading "To The Lighthouse" a few years ago, but even though I was enjoying it I never finished.  I am going to pick it up again tonight and I would love to hear your thoughts. Have you thought more about your thesis?  Ben K, can you send yours to me as well?  I never got a chance to read it.

I am excited to listen to those lectures, and I looked at your blog (Ben P.) I am looking forward to going back because I want to spend more time looking at it!  Very cool.  Other Ben, I like the quotes!  Middlemarch is one of my favorites.

 

I hope you are both doing well.  Things here are so busy, especially with the election coming up so soon.  Make sure all of your friends are registered to vote!  This is a critical election and every single vote is going to matter.  

On that note, here is one of my favorite speeches of all time.  Obama gave it on Super Tuesday, and it gives me chills every time I read it.  I put it up on my wall to try and inspire myself.

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time.  We are the ones we've been waiting for.  We are the change that we seek.

We are the hope of those boys who have little; who've been told that they cannot have what they dream; that they cannot be what they imagine.

Yes They Can.

We are the hope of the father who goes to work before dawn and lies awake with doubts that tell him that he cannot give his children the same opportunities that someone gave him.

Yes He Can.

We are the hope of the woman who hears that her city will not be rebuilt; that she cannot reclaim what was swept away in a terrible storm.

Yes She Can.

We are the hope of the future; the answer to the cynics who tell us our house must stand divided; that we cannot come together; that we cannot remake this world as it should be.

Because we know what we have seen and what we believe- that what began as a whisper has now swelled to a chorus that cannot be ignored; that will not be deterred; that will ring out across the nation as a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest- Yes. We. Can."

Yes we can! Miss you both

~Anna

P.S.

Hey Ben,

I'll send you my thesis. It's awfully long though. Just a heads up.

Scattered Leaves

Hey gang,

Those Borges lectures look great, Ben. I'm excited to listen to them all. That sounds like a cool thesis topic, although I'm completely unfamiliar with that sort of philosophy. Didn't Wittgenstein do something with that. I know he did a lot with examining a philosophy of language. I'm trying to read his Blue and Brown books (they're apparently sort of intros into his hard stuff). Critical Theory could also be good for that sort of philosophy, but I haven't read any of that stuff.

I've also got some good quotes from Middlemarch:

"Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse;" (p. 60)

"'Why, my dear, doctors must have opinions,'" said Mrs Vincy, 'What are they there for else?'" - I particularly like that one!

"... for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them." (85)

"He had two selves within him apparently, and they must learn to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments. Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us" (152)

And what is, I think, the most stunningly beautiful passage in the entire novel (at least so far as I have read, which is to say, not so far).

Eliot writes about the banality of a scene she describes and justifies its inclusion in the novel.

"That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like heraring the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity." (194)

Good to hear from you all.

Ben

Sweet Virginia

Hey guys, I'm trying to finish To the Lighthouse this weekend. What a great book! I don't think I appreciated how ridiculously good this was in 12th grade. I'm only on like page 70 now (It's getting dark, Paul and Minta and the gang haven't come back yet, and dinner hasn't started), but hopefully by Monday I'll be done. I'm also fishing for a Thesis topic/question for my Philosophy major. I want to incorporate literature (i.e., great books like To the Lighthouse -- not just philosophy-philosophy like Kant). I've found a couple of books on how literature/novels raise and deal with ethical issues, and some other books about literature raising/dealing with existential issues. These are both interesting topics, but my first thought is to get a topic more broadly about the philosophy/phenomenology of reading, in general . . . Of course, I don't know anything about that, and I don't particularly want to get into neuroscience, like, the science of what the brain is doing when you read . . . So I don't know. But anyway, I'd love to get some help and hear some of your ideas about possible Thesis topics I could do! Anna, I'm particularly interested in hearing your ideas, given your experience with that Lit Theory/Criticism class. Regardless of thesis advice, both of you might check in with a post when you get the chance -- I'd love to hear how you're doing and what you're up to. And by the way: I'd like both of your opinions on the look of my "Idle Perspicacity" blog, which I've renamed "Floating Library" -- as always, feel free to contribute quotes, poems, writing to that blog as well. And Ben: can I read your thesis?

By the way. . .

Anna, I think it's unfair that you are contributing twice, with the same name, to this blog. Are the two contributors different internal aspects of the same overarching psyche we call "Anna"? If this is some multiple personality thing, you could at least call your selves by different names. . . Like "Anna the Just" and "Anna the Cruel"