Eccentric Flower:199903/small epiphanies and overthinking
From Eccentric Flower
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thirty march small epiphanies and overthinking I read a comment about Moby Dick the other day that made everything lucid for me. It was like finding the one piece of the jigsaw puzzle you later realize you've been looking for for hours, and once you've found it, you can work the rest of the puzzle in no time. This sort of small epiphany is the Holy Grail for me. In my book, the essence of teaching is finding that one phrase that makes the light appear in the student's eye. But it's a difficult quest, even for a good teacher and a good student. I searched through references and textbooks on the computer language C for five years before I found the passage which suddenly, finally, made pointers understandable to me and removed my fear of them. Is this because all the other books were poorly written? Possibly, but more likely it is because everyone's epiphany is different. While I believe - almost fundamentally - that I could make C pointers easy for all of you (were you interested, which you're not) I would probably have to find a different method for each of you. Reading the sentence that did it for me might not help. I'd have to give several repeated lessons, restate the same information many times - and most schools don't have the freedom and time to do that. Unfortunately. - - - Anyway, the passage about Moby Dick explained that Ishmael is trying to find out about the whale his way - gathering as much information as he can, in a continually-expanding cycle where facts lead to more facts. Ahab is trying to find the whale his way, tracking it steadily in a continually-narrowing cycle to destruction. Two triangles pointing in opposite directions; yet both Ahab and Ishmael seek the whale, and both think they are seeking the truth. The book's odd structure - plot chapters interspersed with chapters of pure information about whales - are Melville's way of contrasting Ishmael's approach (the lumps of knowledge) with Ahab's (the tale of the pursuit). And both reach the whale at the same time. You know how it comes out. - - - I am learning that I rather like Ishmael. His tendency to ramble philosophically at the drop of a hat annoyed me in high school; now it entertains me. I also have something in common with Ishmael - the problem of the pursuit of knowledge. I realized today that I cannot possibly absorb all the information I want to absorb in my lifetime. My interests spawn other interests; I will never do them all justice. Maybe I will never do any of them justice. Today I resisted buying a book called The Design of Everyday Things that I've had my eye on for a while. After all, I still never have finished Why Things Bite Back - both books are about the consequences of poor or unplanned design, as opposed to Henry Petrowski's books (I have several) which are about how good designs for common objects (like the fork) have evolved in a Darwinian fashion over time. You see that I could give you 2000 words on this right here, right now - or on C pointers - or on Chinese characters, one of my fascinations. After bravely not buying that book, I went to Schönhof's and bought a book on Chinese characters for the traveller (I have three books on Chinese already) and another on The Joy of Hebrew. So much for willpower. I have books you may not have known existed. Six general references on Greco-Roman mythology. A whole shelf on folklore and folk tales. Five books either on decoding or written in hieroglyphics. Eight books on the Bible - and I'm not even religious! That alone is enough to drive me to despair. Even considering it purely as a work of folklore, without dragging religion into it, I could read and write about nothing but the Bible for the rest of my life. Sometimes I envy the people who do sit in rooms and devote all their lives to one subject, like some students of the Talmud/Torah. It seems a little tedious to me, but at least they have focus. - - - All this information - and the fact that I am now able compose 2000 words on anything without advance warning, which rather scares me - means that sometimes my writing gets scrambled. Today alone, at various times, I thought I was going to write a postcard that mentioned: - Kosovo and I am writing none of them, as you see. At least two of those would each generate about 2000 words on their own. Maybe I should save them up for rainy days? "You look pensive," someone said to Marc. "No, I'm just thinking," he replied. The problem is that I'm "just thinking" a lot. And no matter how much I do it, it only makes me want to think more. Is it any wonder that some of my hottest fantasies involve being temporarily placed in a mindless state? It's not that I dislike thinking. I love thinking. But I'm only thirty-one, and yet I already hear the wings of the chariot behind me. Andrew Marvell was on to something.
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