I have six days left until my semester is done, minus extinguishing the smoking embers of my social life.
And it’s time to celebrate. I need suggestions. The best one gets a prize; here’s how the scoring of the suggestions will take place:
5 points for including beer.
2 points for including a foreign city.
-3 points for including meat products.
6 points for involving the Office, John Cusack, or Pearl Jam
4 points, and a sloppy kiss for involving hummus.
1 point for involving mud.
-10 points for involving anything German.
8 points for involving an untuned guitar.
3 points for involving air conditioning.
-.5 points for involving partial nudity.
7 points for including “curioosity”, “karaoke”, or “beets” in your answer.
Do your best.
Tommorrow is the first day of class. At this stage in the game, you don’t so much think about what you’ll wear the first day of class, but what you’ll be doing to survive the first day of class. In my case, it involved going for a run tonight and finishing up the 200+ pages of history reading for the first seminar. I’m not a history guy directly, but reading this afternoon about the religious history of America around the Civil War era was absolutely fascinating. I won’t go into a lot of details here, but you check out this book for a fairly good social history of what was going on in the South following the defeat of the Confederacy.
It was a little oversimplified, I think, and follows Emile Durkheim’s sociology a little too much for me, but insightful none the less. I think it’s fair to say, as Wilson does, that cultures have a “religious” sense to them, but only provisionally. While at one point, cultures may have had the cultic flavor that he wants to give to the Old South, with rituals, rites, and creeds designed to pass on a transcendent reality, cultures today are much more fluid and transient; for my generation, regional cultures don’t have the draw they once did, as we’re more apt to float from place to place, life to life. It’s hard for me to identify with the Old South, though in many ways, it’s deep in my bones. I can almost smell it when I go into the small parts of Louisiana. You can see it in the monuments, the names of hospitals, the way that people move slowly as if at any moment, the call to arms is going to be sounded.
Anyway, the semester’s starting. Tommorow. In 10 hours. Year number two. Of PhD work.
It’s a full one. Religious History in America since the Civil War. Aquinas. Gadamer. Dante. With those four, it’ll be a wild ride. There may be an audit squeezed in there, but on top of work, I’m not sure that I can handle much more than this and keep my sanity. Following my stint at the farm, it’ll be much harder to want to do some of the inane work that comes with academia. Life is too short and too rich, and God knows that there’s more to metaphysics than Aquinas. As Aristotle, Aquinas’ philosopher, pointed out, knowledge of the good is impossible apart from its practice.
Holding breath….
