Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Cold toes and a buzzy light bulb

Actually, I just turned off the light, so no more buzzing. It's such an institutional sound. I mean the buzzing of flourescent lights. It makes me think of all the long days spent in coldly tiled rooms; Of hospitals and schools and all those things which are beneficial but not at all organic.
Isn't it funny how easy it is to tell between a mechanical sound and an organic one? And by organic I mean alive, animal, natural, etc. Just like you know the difference between an image and a landscape. I think that there's no possible way to make a recording that truly sounds like being outside. And there's no way to make a movie that's as good as life. I was thinking about this sort of thing today, because I had to write a french essay on what the future will be like. One of the (retarded) criterion was to use the future anterior verb tense. This is when sometime in the future, something will be in the past. Example: I will have handed in my essay by tomorrow night. This is a very scary verb tense. Someday, I will be looking back on university instead of looking forward to it. I will have had jolly times. I will have met and known and missed and forgotten people who I don't even know yet. It just creeps me out to think of what I now think of as a vague and slightly mythical future becoming a vague and probably undramatic past.
On the subject of myth (I did mention it up there...): I was thinking about my English teacher today as I was watching the movie "Big Fish". He had a shtik about the difference between truth and fact, and how a myth can be more true than a history book. That movie really played with the idea. I'm only part done it, because my father interuppted. But it's a strange thought. I've always felt that myth is a part of truth, but so is fact. Myth is the melody and fact is the rythm. You need both to make anything any good. If you focus too much on either one, the total result won't be up to snuff. (Apologies to C.S.Lewis for mildly stealing his metaphor. Read the book Perelandra to catch it in its contextual beauty) I believe there will be future explorations into this. The book Fifth Business deals with it also, but I feel that its conclusion is unsatisfactory.
In other news, I had a nice day at school, with the exception of getting a lot of homework. I could do it, I suppose, but I really like this blogging business. It feels like a more useful passtime to explore my own thoughts and theories than to read about oblique asymtotes or molecular shapes.
Oh, I think I'll begin posting the word of the day here. Today was "commandeer". Funnily enough, the word the other day was "oblique" or "obliquity". It's not a word that one comes accross everyday. But as I was reading Guliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift this afternoon, I came accross a paragraph that used both of those words. I was really excited. Possibly pathetic, that.
I'm going to propose the word "supercilious" for tomorrow's WOTD

No comments:

Post a Comment