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LXXXIV. What somber tones emit
The crickets tonight. Mourning.
Summer is dying.
LXXXV. Summer's end nears,
As the night rolls into day.
People go to, fro.
LXXXVI. People do not heed
Quiet tragedy moving forward…
'Til it comes to them.
So afraid to open your eyes, hypnotized.
You know you're not the only one
Never understood this life.
And you're right, I don't deserve
But you know I'm not the only one.We're all grieving,
Lost and bleeding.All our lives,
We've been waiting
For someone to call our leader.
All your lies,
I'm not believing.
Heaven shine a light down on me.Don't look down,
Don't look into the eyes of the world beneath you.
Don't look down, you'll fall down,
You'll become their sacrifice.Right or wrong.
Can't hold onto the fear that I'm lost without you.
If I can't feel, I'm not mine,
I'm not real.—A. Lee
There's a lot in this song — it has an almost apocalyptic edge, I think, along the lines of “Whisper,” but it also has a more direct message for “When they all come crashing down, midflight.” To what extent do problems arise when one thinks he or she is “the only one?” To what extent would the problems be solved when realizing others are just as grieved?
It's been a rough couple of weeks. It's a long story I'll save for another time, but I wanted to post something rather than completely disappear from my blog.
The basic result of the last few weeks occurrences is that I have had to rethink some things I have been doing. Sometimes it is time to move on. I don't like moving on from this or that thing that I have been doing for years, but sometimes it is the right thing to do. I had to make the decision to move on from a project I have been involved in for years this week.
I'm looking forward to focusing on new things… some of which I may be able to detail here soon.
My good friend and misguided political pundit Jason used a song from Brandy in his Facebook status yesterday. It was a quip about the impossibility of falling in love overnight. I got a little carried away as part of my response, so I thought I'd use it as a blog post for your concern or amusement.
Objection 1. It seems that love at first sight, or at least the close proximation thereof, is not possible. For love is too deep a thing to occur so quickly.
Objection 2. It should be noted that if the thing were not impossible, past occurrences would at least suggest it unwise.
On the contrary, the thing seems quite possible and is retold throughout literature, for example, Dante's love of Beatrice and the many cases of love (often crossed with mistaken identity) in the works of Shakespeare. These cases resonate with humanity, and only that which is “the mirror up to nature,” as Hamlet says, resonate with the soul.
I answer that the objections confuse the thing's accidents with its substance. That love is complex and deep need not be tied to a particular time frame always, even if it is frequently. Neither should its most close resemblance to its ideal form be taken to imply that it cannot occur less ideally in its material realization.
And, we may add that what wisdom is with concern to this matter is difficult to discern. If it were Romeo's fate to fall in love with Juliet, was it unwise merely because it led to their mutual demise? Or was it ultimately wise since it was in accord with fate? Perhaps Romeo would have killed himself later out of depression when Juliet was betrothed to another had he not fallen in love overnight but rather more slowly. Would there have been a net gain in happiness then? Likely not, for maybe Juliet would have secretly remained an admirer of Romeo and hence would kill herself too. In any case, unrequited love would have unnecessarily been involved then, as both Romeo and Juliet would have mistaken the views of the other, heaping further sadness upon their souls before their untimely deaths. But having already married someone else, Juliet would now lead to two broken hearts rather than one.
Moreover, though the ideal form may take time to develop, the ideal form is not actually achieved even over long periods of time for, as it is written, a curse exists upon love (Gen. 3.16). Therefore, if one only considers romantic love by its ideal form, then it does not exist in the present human condition. But even the objector does not accept this premise, which is indeed flawed.
Reply to Objection 1. As we have seen, this is based upon a confusion of form with its material realization.
Reply to Objection 2. Likewise it has been shown that the wisdom of the occurence is none too easily judged. To assume the accident of unwise decision is the essence of love at first sight is a matter of confusion. It may be proverbially true, but should be taken as something to which possible exceptions can occur.
Well, I do not usually blog when out of town, but for grins here I am. I am in rural Indiana, south of Indianapolis for my grandpa's 89th birthday. It was a tough schedule given what I need to accomplish this week while on “break,” but it was nice to share the day with him (sadly, my last living grandparent).
Tomorrow I head home and back to the grind. Hope all are doing well.
(This message courtesy of the wonders of AT&T 2.5G EDGE service on my iPhone in the middle of farmland… Ironically with a better signal than I get at my house since AT&T messed up my coverage.)
Today would have been my grandpa's ninetieth birthday. March 13 was always a joyous day around our house — few people were more joyous, fun loving and mischievous than my grandpa. Even, Friday the Thirteenth was a lucky day — if anything, that fit with his impish nature.
He taught me much of the art of good natured troublemaking. He taught me a lot more too. He was the quintessential problem solver, never willing to concede defeat, and in all but death, never really defeated. Without even being able to finish high school, he was still easily one of the smartest people I have ever known. He was fiercely loyal and would have given his life to save any of us in his family without a hesitation. He loved my grandma ardently, to the extent that her ailing, more than even the cancer he suffered, was what pulled him apart — perhaps the most beautiful, though heartrending, example of marriage I have witnessed.
He also knew how to slice and present meats like nobody's business.
He in so many ways is the person I wish I was and continue to aspire to be. I still miss him dearly eight and a half years after he died. This is the sort of wound that never full heals, but merely is worked around.
In October 2004, I was given an assignment to write a journal for a literature class on the Death of Ivan Ilych and the parallels with my grandpa's story were strong enough I had to write about him. Click “Read More” if you are interested in it.
Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine.
Here's a meme on a topic near and dear to me. Photography! Feel free to put your answers in the comments.
Digital — I've been all digital for seven years now.
Usually, I'll send them to Walgreen's. But I print very few photos.
I typically use my own photo album that I host, but it is down for the moment. I do post some photos to Facebook, since it helps with sharing them.
Everything, of course. I feel sorry for cameras that only come out on special events.
December 2007 was when I moved up to my current Canon EOS 40D. It has been a great camera so far, with well over 10,000 photos shot on it. I have every intention of seeing how its 100,000 picture shutter rating works out.
Probably the Canon 1Ds Mk III. Why? That's easy. It is one of the most powerful cameras on the market, fully weather sealed and full frame. And, since price wouldn't be an issue in this question, I might as well go for the top, right?
More practically, I'd probably lean towards the Canon 5D Mk II. Like the 1Ds series, it is full frame. But it is lighter weight, smaller, has the new DIGIC 4 processor and has a HD movie mode that really intrigues me. It would be a nice compliment to my 40D with its APS-sized sensor. In many ways, I'd probably use the 5D Mk II far more than I'd ever use the 1Ds Mk III.
One of my news hound friends who sends me whatever is going on in the news sent a quirky little piece from the Times of London appropriate for this weekend. The article is disappointingly cynical about love, but some of the quotes were good for amusement. I do have to deconstruct the conclusion and provide my own take on the matter, however.
Romantic love can be so confusing that sometimes you simply want to give up on the whole thing and concentrate on the nature of dark matter, or macroeconomics, or something else less tiring.
Any article that realizes that macroeconomics and love are roughly as comprehensible has something right. However, while macroeconomics has done vastly more harm than good (I'm looking at you, Lord Keynes), love is — despite the pain — ultimately a good thing as part of the creational intent for human beings. The pain may be a result of the Fall, but the Fall has not managed to totally corrupt God's handiwork.
Plato said that love is a mental disease. Modern researchers agree enthusiastically, categorising love as a form of madness and echoing what psychologists have been telling tearful patients for years. (There are certain shrinks who refuse to treat people in the early throes of love because they are too insane to do a thing with.) Currently, scientists are having a genteel academic squabble over whether love most closely resembles the manic phase of bipolar disorder or the characteristics seen in obsessive compulsive disorder.
Insane, indeed. For my money, I think OCD fits better than manic phases. Either way, if that was all one thought about love it might be reason to argue against it. Sadly, the author seems to find the whole idea of love troublesome enough to start arguing that at least certain key parts of it are mere cultural baggage,
The idea that every human heart, since the invention of the wheel, was yearning for its other half is a myth.
Well, maybe the author was right; that yearning doesn't go back to the wheel. It goes back further, to the Garden, to Adam. For all the splendor and goodness of God's creation, not everything was good. “The LORD God said, 'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him'” (Gen. 2.18 NIV). One of the three creational mandates for humanity from God is marriage and really the yearning of the heart is the yearning for Eden, the yearning to achieve the creational intent God has for us.
Some have questioned that intent's validity post-fall, especially in the present era. Yes, Adam and Eve enjoyed for awhile something more perfect than can exist in the fallen world, but that doesn't invalidate the creational design here any more than the difficulty of labor eliminates the properness of working or separation from God argues against worship. While the article raises some interesting points, outside of a creational understanding of the world, it ends up missing the point.
But, come on, the macroeconomics reference was amusing, wasn't it?
The bug I caught a few weeks ago still has me moving slowly, but the New Year is off to a good start for me, I think. My parents, my uncle and I had a nice little party with a nice meal accompanied by a nice, friendly Wii competition.
Happy New Year, everybody!
Well, I seem to have caught some bug that's held me down the last few days — I even had to miss teaching Sunday School yesterday. I had a few symptoms for most of last week, but kept thinking it was allergies; apparently it was a bug of some sort that was just taking its merry time to attack.
It finally hit early Sunday morning. I think (hope) I am on the mend, but it has been a bit frustrating moving so slowly just a few days before Christmas.
On the bright side, I've continued to catalog my books (I now have 212 of my books in a computerized catalog) and I've sorted through about two years of unsorted papers from classes and put them in appropriate (real) file folders.
So, at least I can feel like I accomplished something, right?
