Ataraxia

ataraxia - "peace of mind: freedom from worry or any other preoccupation" MSN Encarta World English Dictionary

When I found this somewhat obscure word, I immediately thought of a character from a play. In Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, Laura Wingfield is a cripplingly shy girl who prefers to stay home and take care of her glass animals, instead of going out into the wide world for any reason at all. For Laura, the glass animals are a way to get at peace of mind.

But how can Laura Wingfield obtain ataraxia? She has no skills of survival, no money, no comfort in life, and no nerves to deal with any situation outside of her glass menagerie. She stays at home while her mother and brother work in a department store and factory, respectively: she lives at the cost of her mother's pride and her brother's freedom. She's living as someone's burden. There's no financial stability, no peace in her home due to her mother and brother arguing, and no emotional rest from the toils of the depression. How can Laura Wingfield find peace?

Perhaps it's an instinct. Perhaps humans are endowed with the ability to be at peace in all situations, as a means of survival. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn survived 8 years in a labour camp and lived sanely enough to tell the tale.

New Year Resolutions - On this face of Janus

Resolution number 1: post blog entries at least once a week
Resolution number 2: remember resolution number 1 at least once a week

It's the most basic problem with resolutions. In the midst of fire works, overly-enthusiatic tv announcers, and the final lingerings of Christmas music, you decide to scribble down a few resolutions on a brand-new, fresh piece of paper, to be carried out in the brand-new year, untainted by previous failed attempts and other disappointments. Then, that piece of paper gets pinned to a wall, a mirror, or a fridge, where it becomes crinkled and creased, just like any old piece of paper you might find in the recycling bin. Eventually, and also inevitably, it gets discarded, along with the promises written upon, to wait to be reincarnated in the next new year, on the next brand-new piece of paper.

But, do people really think that the turning of the year, the shifting of focus to Janus' other, really constitutes a new year? New Year's Day is, afterall, somewhat arbitrary in its selection. In the passing of time in the universe, January 1st is alike any other day, but by different names. For the Romans, the year started in March and March 1st was New Year's Day, because March is the month that's just warm enough, in darling ancient Rome, to go to war. But, perhaps because we call it a new year, does that hit some chord inside us that makes us assume a new beginning and try to start afresh? Perhaps because we assume it to be a new year, it really would be so. It really is a new year and all the misfortunes and iniquitous blows of fate and the period of drudgery that slows productivity can truly be left behind and forgotten.

But, is it ever possible to start afresh? There was once a Greek philosopher who believed that there is no such thing as change and that any change would bring contradictions. This is to be understood in the way that, if something becomes different in its state of natures, it always had the potential and the expectation to make that altercation and its present state is merely a result of what it already was. So, in other word, when people appear to change, it's not real change because they cannot change who they are, but only how they present themselves to the world. The object cannot change its essence, but can change how it expresses its essence. Wood cannot help being wood, whether it is in the form of a sapling, a giant tree, or a nice rocking chair.

Then, since you cannot change yourself as a person, how significant is "starting afresh"? One's only materials for building one's character are already deemed to be unchanging, so how significant is it to change the expression of that unchanging character?

In the spirit of Greek notions of change, cheers for New Year's resolutions and the brand-new year.

Ode to Sleep

I can't sleep.
I close my eyes, see the darkness,
the lack of thoughts,
And still sleep comes not.
My thoughts: details of the day, what was done and what was supposed to have been done
And all the winding things that lead to the feats of the day.
I just want to stop this waking consciousness; I'm stuck on too much me.
It doesn't matter the number of blankets or the fluffiness of the pillows
Nor the fatigure creeping over my eyelids.
It's like being left being by the pied piper,
All the others hop and dance with merriment, towards some Transylvania town named Slumber,
All the other sleepers sleep and some even snore.
I hobble, unable to catch the piper's song - it's the fault of that mishappen pipe.
I toss and turn, throw a pillow off the bed.
For that elusive piper comes not for me.
Where is the fountain of sleep? Never the fountain of youth, there's something much more important at hand.
I seek only the commonplace lull and call to sink and find rest for the weary.
Is there no rest for the weary?
And weary am I indeed.
But how?
I wonder how we fall asleep.
Shall I be wondering 'til morning comes?
With its dreaded claws of sun and light and wakefulness that strikes me like a mathc and fire through another day,
Only to be unable to rest after?
Oh, I have just one plaintive wish, to sleep, to sleep, if only for an hour!
Peaceful places ...
Shall I think of a lush quiet forest?
- the black forest is filled with ghosts and ghouls and goblins and graves and grooves and ...
Perhaps a calming lake?
- who knows what leviathan lurks beneathe the glassy blue exterior? What lost civilizations laid their haunts there? What monster holds its lair?
Oh sleep, oh sleep ...

Weltschmerz: A Dissertation on Life

weltschmerz - "melancholy over the state of the world" (Webster's New World College Dictionary)

Melancholy is exactly the word to describe how I feel when I hear people talking about how much they hate university and how they just want to get out as fast as they possibly can. Sometimes I dismiss it as differences in disposition between people, but other times, I really comtemplate the state of my little world.

What exactly is the purpose of university? Is it a means to getting a job and moving on with the rest of one's life? Is it four more years of schooling to make us conform to some societal expectation? So, you go to an institution, get put through a bunch of classes, forced to study and learn things you'd otherwise ignore, and what for? If you don't enjoy it, then (begging Tennessee Williams the use of his phrase) what is the pleasure of a cat on a hot tin roof?

Whatever else university is, it is a place where you learn about the world so that you're more equipped to live in it. When you take away the frills and lacey obscurements, that should be the core of university life. Students encounter new ideas and ways to think in whatever field they're in. A science student learns something about the order of the universe. A math student learns about the formation and manipulation of ideas. A literature student learns about the evolution of stories. Whether the student encounters these ideas about the world in the language of algebra or English (or, if you were a literature major 500 years ago, Latin), the key point is to learn and to be enlightened.

That is the point of university. We loose sight of that sometimes, but reminders of that are all around us. It's what school's mottos allude to. University of Waterloo's motto is excruciatingly uncreative for a school that Macleans calls innovative. It's concordia cum veritate, meaning "in harmony with truth" and the enlightenment, the knowledge of the world is the truth that it's talking about. This message is echoes everywhere, including places like

Harvard (veritas, "truth"),
Yale (lux et veritas, "light and truth"),
Columbia University (in lumine Tuo videbimus lumen, "in Thy light shall we see the light"),
Caltech (the truth shall make you free),
Johns Hopkins University (veritas vos liberabit, "the truth will make you free"),
Amherst College (terras irradient, "let them give light to the world"),
University of California (fiat lux, "let there be light"),
and the University of Cambridge (hinc lucem et pocula sacra, literally "from here, light and sacred draughts" and colloquially "from the University, we receive enlightememt and precious knowledge").

And learning shouldn't stop at the classroom, at the assigned homework, and at the assigned reading list. Not all learning happens in classes. The spirit of university is to instill in its students the quest for knowledge. Most of the time, I don't see that around me, here in Waterloo. I mean, how cultured are we that we can't support a fine symphony orchestra? Yes, it has the makings of a university; it has classrooms and professors and students and textbooks. But it's missing the cafes where students talk about the things they read, the things they learn. It's missing the atmosphere of a liberal art's college, which is acceptable because Waterloo isn't one. This is why we get to hear so many students despising university and treating it, not as a search for the light, but as a hot tin roof they have to walk across to get to the other side which is to say the rest of their lives. It's moments like this when I really wish I'd done something different and ended up at a university where the school motto of pursuing the light was more than an obscure Latin phrase found only on the walls of the old gynasium.

Sometimes a person's actions matter surprisingly little in directing the course of their own destiny. Sometimes, the environment surrounding a person has perhaps more to say. Pounding through a reading list of important literature has all the benefits of knowledge that can be found in a library, but you can only take so much on faith. What is the point of reading books that no one around you has read? You can't discuss the ideas and you can't refer to them in conversations to make a point more clear (it'll do the exact opposite, if anything). At most, you can write a melancholy blog. The promise that there's a bigger world outside where you, with your ambitious reading list, will fit in, can only be believed in for so long before you start to doubt that the world can never live up to your expectation. It's tiring to always be the person in Plato's allegory of the cave, who's seen the light outside of the cave and is trying to convince everyone who's only ever seen shadows to believe him. Sooner or later, it'll just too much easier to watch those shadows with that feeling of weltschmerz.

And that is why this blog is called "A Little Like Weltschmerz".

Eleutherophobia and Idomeneo

"fear of freedom" Grandiloquent Dictionary

When philosopher Nietsche said "God is dead", he meant it in the way that God never existed. Nietsche meant it in the way that scholarship and knowledge is supposed to take all the aesthetic pleasure out of life, but it can be interpreted differently. Particularly to mean that human existance is unbounded by a higher authority and is free to choose it's own route. Then, the whole philosophy of life is based on one thing - freedom.

Freedom is one the most disputed things in the world. People demand it and some who would fight to the death for it, never exercise it. Soren Kierkegaard said that people ask for the freedom of speech, but never practice the freedom of thought that they already have. Freedom, whatever it means and whatever it leads to, should start as freedom of thought. The expressions of thought, henceforth, should be, in a free society, be unfettered by fear of reprisal and free of constraint. Art is an expression of our freedom of thought and luckily, we also have freedom of speech for it to go with.

Last Monday, the Mozart opera Idomeneo was recalled from Berlin Operahaus's line up last Monday, because of an added scene where Idomeneo runs onstage holding the heads of religious figures, including that of Muhammed. The message is one of freedom to choose one's own destiny. It is ironic that it was closed of its own choosing, in fear of the backlash it might spark in German Islamic communities, instead of actual riots in the opera house.

Self-censorship is the fear of freedom, because freedom is not just the right to say whatever it is you want to say; freedom comes with responsibility. Since you have the power to say what you want to say, you are responsible for your words; they were not forced on you and they express what you want to express. If you shirk from the onerous burden of this privilege, this freedom that is so central to our philosophy of life, then you are suffering from eleutherophobia. It's not only reprisal that you fear, but also freedom itself.

I've read dozens of articles asking for government to actively protect the freedom of speech. But how is that to be done? Freedom of speech is not something that governments should be protecting. If Idomeneo was a given in an opera house with the army lined up outside and a dozen security checks on the way in - that would be more reminiscent of a Nazi regime than any type of self-censorship. Freedom is freedom - it cannot be enforced by military means, because then it ceases to be freedom.

The whole point is that freedom is a human notion. Freedom is a human construct on society. Society was not created to evolve around freedom. And hence, freedom is the gold on a gilded statue; if you dig down you find something else that is not quite to golden. There are times when the things we say scratch at the surface of this gilded statue. Under the layers you scratch away, you'll find some other, mor basic pillars of society, like survival. It's clear that the Islamic faith is less secular than others and wants to remain that way. And, under our ideals of freedom, they have a right to remain so. The Danish cartoonists were perceived to be attacking the lack of secularity in the Islamic faith because of their casual depiction of Muhammed. Whenever you are perceived as attacking any culture's way of life and beliefs, you risk being perceived as pitting your right of freedom against their right to the survival of their culture. Freedom against survival is never a fair fight; survival is more essential to humanity and forms the core of that statue, lingering under the gilded layers of ideals like freedom. How can there not be backlash?

Governments can only do so much to protect freedom. If you need troops to feel safe in a playhouse, you should think twice before setting foot in one. Censorship and the persecution of artists are horrid aspects of society. It is undefendable. However, sometimes the cause is rooted deep in human nature. It is ultimately the artist's own risk and judgement to brave such barrages.

If you dig down into the history of mankind, freedom does not have its root as a commonplace right or even a commonplace desire. Yet freedom is the refinement of society. It is a drive that moves society in a forward direction, and so we must ourselves protect of our freedom of speech. And that is done by exercising it and not blaming others if we cannot uphold our ideals of ultimate freedom. Freedom is yours for the taking and if you do not exercise your right to freedom, you are contributing to the general eleutherophobia of society. In the end, it is not angry mobs or book burners that restricts freedom. Eleutherophobia is the true bane of freedom.

Gadarene

"headlong; precipitate"

"The rush of the Gadarene swine" is a phrase meaning to plunge or rush headlong into something, gadarene is derived from a Biblical story. Predictably, it's a word with some message other than its direct meaning. The implicit moral is not to plunge headlong into things; something Epimetheus, with his infinite aftersight would recommend. Only in retrospect, of course.

But whether it's swines possessed by demons making a gadarene rush into the Sea of Galilee, or some decision made in haste, how do we know that Epimetheus, the king of after-thought, is so wrong?

In Greek mythology, Epimetheus was the god of afterthought and his brother, Prometheus, was the god of foresight. When creating creatures of this earth, Epimetheus gave all the good gifts or fur, claws, etc. (a dubious classification of good and bad by today's standards) to the animals and had nothing left for man. So, his brother stole fire from the immortals to give to mankind. The moral of the tale is foresight is better than after-sight.

But is it really? Did Epimetheus's headlong rush into his gift-giving turn out to be correct. Perhaps leaving Prometheus to give a better gift was Epimetheus's plan afterall. And, Epimetheus is certainly not the brother chained to the side of the mountain as a punishment.

So, is Prometheus a hero because of his great foresight? Is a hero built on things like foresight? Well, swimming with superhuman skills to save people from a bursting dam has much better theatrics than preventing the dam from bursting in the first place. And theatricity has is place in the definition of a hero; Achilles sulks, Hercules has marriage problems, and many heroes bemoan their lives repeatedly. So, perhaps after-sight is the preferred predicament. It's certainly worth considering, when making cynical remarks about the next fashionable gadarene rush.

No Rest for the Weary

-a saying relating to continuing despite tiredness.

Yesterday, I experienced this, when before going running with the swim team, I realized that I forgot my running shoes and had to bike half an hour to get them, then run for an hour, and then swim for an hour. There is indeed no rest for the weary.

But, outside of my microscopic existence, is there rest for the weary?

Anyone who reads the news lately would have to think very carefully before answering. It's an unrestful world out there. Perhaps it's because the world is becoming full of unrest, or perhaps it's just because I never read the news when I was little, but the more I look at the outside world, the more weary I become, and the less restful the world gets.

The pope is causing unrest, there is hellfire in the UN, and a Turkish novelist is put on trial for fictional insults. Is the world really so unrestful, or is this normal? Are popes supposed to be saintly and agree with everyone? Is the UN always supposed to be a cohesive, harmonic organization? Haven't novelists always been criticized for one thing or another?

History is littered with controversial popes, like Alexander V. The UN's goals are beyond my political comprehension, but they're doing a better job than the League of Nations. Banning and burning books is a common occurence throughout history, for a variety of reasons. And, people like Salman Rushdie, Marat (who had to hide in the sewers of Paris), Galileo (house arrest), and even Machiavelli (exiled) have all had trouble due to their writings and ideas.

Perhaps all that's happening in the world is that people are standing their ground - standing with things that they would logically stand for. And, because it's a big old world, they happen to be standing against other people, who are also standing their ground. So, all in all, they're all just people with backbone, trying to preserve their own ideas. Perhaps unrest arises from the weariness of a peaceful existence? Perhaps, in a few decades, we'll run across a quiet decade and finally find rest for the weary.