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Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Update

I'm at an educational technology conference this week, and then on vacation after that, which is why I haven't posted much and won't be posting actively again until after July 8th. I'm also reading the "Game of Thrones" series, and am short on reflections at the moment, although I might make some comments later. Keep reading!

Monday, June 18, 2012

Self-Reliance (Pt. 2)


More Emerson quotes with my analysis/ramblings:

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in the solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

This quote summed up well a passage in which Emerson encouraged his reader to have a flexible mind, and to always look at reality, truth, what actually is, and to evaluate things in that light. That even if one has made up one's mind about something, to be prepared to accept new evidence and change one's mind, if reality and truth demand it. It's great advice, "Make the best decision based on the information you have. Know what you think and believe. And be willing to listen to new truths as you encounter them and incorporate them into your understanding." This is the essence of intellectual growth.

"To be great is to be misunderstood."

"The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming."

"These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence."

"I must be myself. I cannot break myself any loner for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier."

"Insist on yourself; never imitate.... Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession."

This brings to mind a quote from Pythagoras: "No one is free who is not master of himself." I love what Emerson has to say here at the end about how much we can do with our own gifts and how little we can do with the gifts of others. How often have we see people who seek to imitate a gift that they do not truly possess to meet someone else's expectations or please someone? The outcome is always the same: their efforts are mediocre at best, because their hearts aren't in it, because it's not true to themselves. They are betraying their own gifts, talents, uniquenesses to meet some external expectation.

But contrast that with seeing someone who presents his own unique gift at every moment "with the cumulative force" of his whole life's cultivation. We have all seen these people: the musician who comes alive on stage interacting with his or her instrument, making beautiful music; the teacher who loves learning and can share it with his or her students in creative ways; the writer who creates text that engages people, and moves them beyond themselves, etc. There are few things more inspiring than watching someone embrace his or her true gift and share it with the world. When one embraces one's own uniqueness, that is the beginning of greatness.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Self-Reliance (Pt. 1)

I recently re-read Emerson's short essay, "Self-Reliance", and thought I'd share some my favorite quotes with some commentary (as usual).

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius."

"Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs."

Self-reliance is averse to conformity. Conformity, by definition is the moulding of oneself to the shape or expectations of others (often a collective). I particularly like the last sentence of this quote. Societies love names and customs. Society loves to name things, because there is a sense of ownership and control in the act of naming. It can also give the false impression of having created the thing. How often have I heard students say something like, "Who created the circle?" As if any single person could claim to have created that majestic, infinite concept. Perhaps we can speak of the person who "discovered" it, and certainly someone gave it the name "circle" (and before him someone else called it something else, etc.). And in the naming it is easy to forget that we are mere puffs of smoke, who happen to grasp the ideal of a circle momentarily before being blown away, dispersed into oblivion, by the winds of time.

On the other hand, Emerson says that self-reliance loves reality and creators. The difference between the creator and the namer is vast. It's the distance between God and man. And while we Christians believe that God became man for our salvation, we must also hold simultaneously the awe-someness, the magnificence, the grandeur of God, never forgetting how far beyond our understanding God truly is.

"No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature."

"Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none."

"I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony."

Brilliant. Modern society is rife with this idea that I should evaluate myself in the light of the opinions of others. Emerson says, "I am. And that is enough. I care not what others think or say about me. For they are not me." See the next quote as well for more supporting text.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Final Thoughts on Hamlet

A few more wise words from Shakespeare's "Hamlet":


"Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works."

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions."


"Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger."

This is worth contemplation in our modern society. One of the situations we often see in school is the high-achieving student who is over-scheduled and over-involved. We see students who have every moment of their lives scheduled: as soon as the school day ends they have sports practice for three hours, then they have twenty minutes to get across town to their dance/piano/underwater basket weaving lessons, before going to play practice from 7-10. Somewhere in there they grab some fast food, and then they get home at 10 and start their homework and don't get to bed before midnight or 1 AM. Then we wonder why they're exhausted in school and why they don't start projects and papers until the night before.

Under their living conditions they don't have time to slow down and consider things or plan for the future. They just triage, and go from one event to the next, never stopping to think, wonder, consider, explore, daydream, etc. One of the very unfortunate consequences of the rapidly accelerating pace of life in 21st century US is what some of my colleagues and I call "The Over-Scheduled Student": students who are involved in so many activities that they have no down time, no free time, no opportunities for surprise. Einstein once said, "Creativity is the residue of time wasted." Many young people need more "wasted time" in their lives.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

11/22/63 (Stephen King)

I recently finished Stephen King's new novel "11/22/63". While it probably doesn't qualify as one of the "great books" of Western literature, it was a very enjoyable and well written novel. The first few chapters setup the gist of the story pretty well. I actually skipped to the end and read the last few chapters to see how it turned out. The ending wasn't very surprising, but it did spark my curiosity as to how King got from beginning to end. It was compelling enough to get me to go back and read the middle. While there were a few points at which I felt as if the plot dragged, it seemed somehow appropriate to the situation of a man caught in a waiting game with the past.

Ultimately, this novel is about human relationships (friendship, family, marriage, love, hate, abuse, the human capacity for caring and kindness) and sacrifice. The characters are very deep and well written; the dialogue is great. Many of the situations the characters found themselves in were well constructed, believable, and hit home for me as a reader. Ultimately, I think it's worth the read. In the rest of this post, I'm going to write about specifics of the book. If you don't want to know what happens in the book, stop reading now.

One piece of the novel that felt contrived (and unnecessary) to me was toward the end when Jake/George gets attacked by the bookie and is laid up in the hospital for the months leading up to the assassination of Kennedy with amnesia, causing him to have difficulty remembering the specifics of his mission, forcing him to enlist Sadie and Deke into his mission to help him, and dragging the story out. I understand that this is meant to be further evidence of the "obdurate past" trying to prevent history from being changed, and as mentioned above, this provides some extra urgency and suspense leading up to the final moments of the assassination attempt. It also sets up the death of Sadie, which gives Jake/George further motive to reset the past (although his brief glimpse of the future he created should have been enough to do that, Sadie dead or alive).

But imagine for a moment that whole section of the book had been done away with. Imagine instead that Clayton's attack of Sadie happened in the summer of '63, and Jake spent the months leading up to the assassination attempt caring for Sadie instead of having amnesia. Then on the day of the assassination, he leaves Sadie behind and goes through all the same trials and tribulations with the same outcome on the 6th floor of the book depository, except that Sadie isn't killed. Then, after the FBI releases him, he picks up Sadie and takes her back to the future with him. They see how bad things are, and then go back to 1958 together to reset things, and then go back again into the future together to live out their lives. Tied up a little too neatly? What if Sadie, for some reason that could be invented by the Green Card Man, couldn't go through the time portal, and Jake/George had to leave her behind, and then the ending stays in tact as well... All of this is merely a long-winded way of saying that I don't think all the stuff with Jake/George getting beat up by the bookie and everything that follows that sub-plot was really necessary. I think the book would be just as good (maybe better) without it. And it would certainly be a good 75ish pages lighter.

On the whole however, I did enjoy the book, and while this wasn't really a sci-fi novel (I think it was a book about human relationships that happened to involve time travel), I did enjoy watching King try to set and adjust the boundaries of his fictional world in which time travel was possible. I also appreciate that he didn't go to great lengths to try to explain every detail of how or why it worked. A little mystery is a good thing. The idea of the "harmonies" of the past was a clever foil, and he avoided over-use of that little tool, which had the potential to become annoying. Setting up the idea of the "obdurate past" was clever as well, because it really shifts the story from George vs. Oswald to George vs. History. And we get a sense of how formidable an opponent history can be.