Procrastinating on paper-writing
Dec. 5th, 2006 12:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirLowell House on the Feast of St. John Damascus
The point of working from my nearly nonfunctional laptop is to have fewer distractions, so it's probably not such a good idea to hook it up to the Ethernet jack in my bedroom. -_-
The problem with writing a paper about Sartre is that he makes me feel disappointed in myself. From "The Humanism of Existentialism":
Man is most noble when he defies his situation, when he refuses to accept his fate. Heroism lies in hubris.
Oh dear, I'm becoming rather hysterical myself.
There's a dogmatism about Sartre, an uncompromising rigidity, that is both appealing and off-putting. It is a very adolescent philosophy; one imagines Sartre as an angry teenager who never quite grew up. Still, I suppose it's good for me to face a little of Nietzsche's "philosophizing with a hammer" once in a while. That phrase really reminds me of Chekhov's short story, "Gooseberries":
Actually reading through the Chekhov quotation brings to mind that short story by Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" (full text PDF). Although in the case of Omelas, happiness is not dependent on the silence of the unhappy but rather their very existence.
There have been a few interesting discussions of Le Guin on the friends list lately. I don't have anything particularly intelligent to say, but it did remind me of how I discovered Le Guin. I have to admit that I did not particularly understand the Earthsea books nor did they have any great impact on me. I read The Farthest Shore first, which may have added to the confusion (followed by A Wizard of Earthsea, then much, much later The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu). I do remember the experience of reading The Farthest Shore had been quite intense; at the end, I felt that I too had finished an exhausting odyssey. (Rather like reading Return of the King.) How to describe it...the sensation of crying without knowing that you are crying and then reaching up to your stiff face afterwards to find the tracks of dried tears. Although I don't think I actually cried during The Farthest Shore.
What I read next, sometime during high school, was "Solitude" (it was in a Nebula anthology), which turned me inside out, so to speak. It's set in the Ekumen universe, like The Left Hand of Darkness and Four Ways to Forgiveness. All the reviews I've seen of the short story focus on the cultural divide between the mother and daughter, but what spoke to me was the culture of introversion. Perhaps I was missing the point or perhaps not, but either way, I reread that story over and over again until I had to return the anthology to the library. I started reading all the Ekumen-related novels after that (of course, I still haven't read all the short stories yet), and I've liked all of them, including The Telling, where Le Guin does get a bit heavyhanded even for me. I don't know...somehow I've always found myself identifying profoundly with her protagonists, even when I had nothing in common with them. Well, other than the theme of being "caught between cultures", which does sound like a worn-out cliché now that I type it out on the screen. Anyway, what speaks to me in Le Guin is not so much the message she's trying to convey but the way her characters experience it. To me, she has summed up how it feels to live in the world as an individual, with all its tensions and difficulties.
Which oddly enough connects very neatly back to Sartre.
Actually, my paper is supposed to be on de Beauvoir, albeit in the context of Sartrean existentialism, so it's probably a bad sign that I haven't even gotten around to dissecting the principal primary text yet. Er. I do know what I want to argue, but I'm having doubts about my thesis because I tentatively advanced it in section the other day, and several people disagreed with my interpretation of the passages I cited. So clearly, I'm going to have to argue it carefully and probably qualify my claim somehow. I was wondering if I should just choose another topic instead, but how can I read Sartre and then back out of a thesis that I genuinely believe in because I'm afraid it might be more difficult to argue? Have intellectual courage at least, Tari, if you can't manage courage in anything else!
I think I should make a tag for incoherent rambling posts. -_- If you're wondering whether there was a point in any of the above stream-of-consciousness, please rest assured, there wasn't any.
Yours &c.
The point of working from my nearly nonfunctional laptop is to have fewer distractions, so it's probably not such a good idea to hook it up to the Ethernet jack in my bedroom. -_-
The problem with writing a paper about Sartre is that he makes me feel disappointed in myself. From "The Humanism of Existentialism":
According to this, we can understand why our doctrine horrifies certain people. Because often the only way they can bear their wretchedness is to think, "Circumstances have been against me. What I've been and done doesn't show my true worth. To be sure, I've had no great love, no great friendship, but that's because I haven't met a man or woman who was worthy. The books I've written haven't been very good because I haven't had the proper leisure. I haven't had children to devote myself to because I didn't find a man with whom I could have spent my life. So there remains within me, unused and quite viable, a host of propensities, inclinations, possibilities, that one wouldn't guess from the mere series of things I've done."I do attempt to excuse myself; as my mother puts it, I let circumstances define me instead of taking responsibility for myself. That is not the way I want to live. It really is mal foi--or as I like to put it, lacking in integrity--to merely point at obstacles and not even attempt to conquer them.
Man is most noble when he defies his situation, when he refuses to accept his fate. Heroism lies in hubris.
Oh dear, I'm becoming rather hysterical myself.
There's a dogmatism about Sartre, an uncompromising rigidity, that is both appealing and off-putting. It is a very adolescent philosophy; one imagines Sartre as an angry teenager who never quite grew up. Still, I suppose it's good for me to face a little of Nietzsche's "philosophizing with a hammer" once in a while. That phrase really reminds me of Chekhov's short story, "Gooseberries":
And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It's a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him--disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree--and all goes well.Not quite what Nietzsche meant, but essentially the same purpose: to shake us out of complacence. I wrote that Chekhov quote on the cover of my French textbook--along with that scene where Cao Cao drinks tea with Liu Bei and tells him that they are the only two heroes of the age--in tenth grade to serve as my own "hammer behind the door". But what have I to show in actual action since? Sartre also writes in "The Humanism of Existentialism" that "reality alone is what counts, that dreams, expectations, and hopes warrant no more than to define a man as a disappointed dream, as miscarried hopes, as vain expectations." Ouch.
Actually reading through the Chekhov quotation brings to mind that short story by Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" (full text PDF). Although in the case of Omelas, happiness is not dependent on the silence of the unhappy but rather their very existence.
There have been a few interesting discussions of Le Guin on the friends list lately. I don't have anything particularly intelligent to say, but it did remind me of how I discovered Le Guin. I have to admit that I did not particularly understand the Earthsea books nor did they have any great impact on me. I read The Farthest Shore first, which may have added to the confusion (followed by A Wizard of Earthsea, then much, much later The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu). I do remember the experience of reading The Farthest Shore had been quite intense; at the end, I felt that I too had finished an exhausting odyssey. (Rather like reading Return of the King.) How to describe it...the sensation of crying without knowing that you are crying and then reaching up to your stiff face afterwards to find the tracks of dried tears. Although I don't think I actually cried during The Farthest Shore.
What I read next, sometime during high school, was "Solitude" (it was in a Nebula anthology), which turned me inside out, so to speak. It's set in the Ekumen universe, like The Left Hand of Darkness and Four Ways to Forgiveness. All the reviews I've seen of the short story focus on the cultural divide between the mother and daughter, but what spoke to me was the culture of introversion. Perhaps I was missing the point or perhaps not, but either way, I reread that story over and over again until I had to return the anthology to the library. I started reading all the Ekumen-related novels after that (of course, I still haven't read all the short stories yet), and I've liked all of them, including The Telling, where Le Guin does get a bit heavyhanded even for me. I don't know...somehow I've always found myself identifying profoundly with her protagonists, even when I had nothing in common with them. Well, other than the theme of being "caught between cultures", which does sound like a worn-out cliché now that I type it out on the screen. Anyway, what speaks to me in Le Guin is not so much the message she's trying to convey but the way her characters experience it. To me, she has summed up how it feels to live in the world as an individual, with all its tensions and difficulties.
Which oddly enough connects very neatly back to Sartre.
Actually, my paper is supposed to be on de Beauvoir, albeit in the context of Sartrean existentialism, so it's probably a bad sign that I haven't even gotten around to dissecting the principal primary text yet. Er. I do know what I want to argue, but I'm having doubts about my thesis because I tentatively advanced it in section the other day, and several people disagreed with my interpretation of the passages I cited. So clearly, I'm going to have to argue it carefully and probably qualify my claim somehow. I was wondering if I should just choose another topic instead, but how can I read Sartre and then back out of a thesis that I genuinely believe in because I'm afraid it might be more difficult to argue? Have intellectual courage at least, Tari, if you can't manage courage in anything else!
I think I should make a tag for incoherent rambling posts. -_- If you're wondering whether there was a point in any of the above stream-of-consciousness, please rest assured, there wasn't any.
Yours &c.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-06 02:32 am (UTC)Anyway, I'm not sure I like the Chekhov quote (which is probably just me; being happy is a skill that took a long time for me to learn*) because it seems to associate being happy with being blind. Being happy doesn't have to mean that one is not aware that bad stuff can happen to you, and it doesn't have to mean that you're happy because bad stuff is happening to others rather than to you. It can mean that you see that yes, bad stuff happens and will probably happen to you, too (or is happening to you), but that you've decided that you're not going to sulk and refuse to ever be happy. "General hypnotism" could as easily describe those who refuse to be happy and who insist on cynicism for its own sake. Not seeing sorrow is blindness; not seeing happiness is also blindness.
De Beauvoir is awesome! I read All Men Are Mortal in high school and loved it.
several people disagreed with my interpretation of the passages I cited
They could all be wrong. Numbers != correctness. Especially when it comes to my Latin classmates (with whom I've frequently ended up in me-versus-rest-of-class arguments).
*Which means that yeah, I was once one of those "OMG LIFE IS MISERABLE HAPPY PEOPLE ARE IGNORANT POSERS" people. *wince* It was my angsty teenager phase? It took a while for me to snap out of it, and I didn't until I realized that being happy was not a sin and it didn't mean that I was stupid or blind, and that actually, concentrating on all the reasons to be unhappy made me miserable.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-09 02:01 am (UTC)Hm, I think the Chekhov quote makes more sense in context, because the "happy man" he's referring to is specifically blind and happy. It is not so much that speaker of the quote wants men to recognize that bad things happen and sulk about it; he wants men to become dissatisfied and take action to change the world. I considered it a warning against complacence rather than a directive to be ashamed of my happiness (although if my happiness really is dependent on other people's suffering, which to a certain extent the character in the story is, then I probably would be ashamed). ^_^
I loved reading de Beauvoir. Not only the way she thinks, but the way she writes. I know it's hard to really know an author's voice when reading in translation, but I really loved her moments of wry humor as well as her more serious tone. Anyway, I usually don't easily get swayed by numbers in an argument, but the people who disagreed with me were unusually articulate and persuasive, which made me doubt myself. ^_^;; But I think I figured out how to argue my interpretation better in the end.