Coffee, snow and a Friday night out

A few weeks ago I managed to spill a cup of coffee rather spectacularly. I was on my way across the Graduate Union building to present a paper on language (available here) to the CHAS (Christians in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) group. Perhaps unwisely, I had a newspaper in one hand which I was reading and a large cappuccino in the other. I think perhaps I tripped. Somehow half the contents of my cup of coffee flew up into the air. I had dressed up slightly for my presentation so was wearing cream/beige coloured trousers, which were then nicely decorated with coffee and foam all the way down one leg. The newspaper I was holding was made soggy with coffee. There was also a pool of coffee on the floor which looked a bit like someone had been sick, and coffee dripping down one of the new wooden chairs (the GU having had a recent makeover). I was rescued by the PA to the GU president, a lovely Texan lady with whom I have some acquaintance.



A couple of weeks ago I was invited to a pub crawl for a friend’s birthday. I was running a bit late so tried to catch up with the crowd. The plan was to try to find where they were, and if I couldn’t find them by my own ingenuity, then to ring them to locate them. Unfortunately, my phone was out of battery so I couldn’t phone them. I ended up wandering the streets for two hours before giving up and going home. I think it's quite impressive in some ways that I managed to spend a Friday night meandering aimlessly between pubs without the aid of a drop of alcohol.



I also managed to leave a bag with some of my thesis work and library books in it in Sainsbury’s, but retrieved it later in the evening, since they kindly kept it safe for me.



In other news, it snowed.

“Advice is like snow – the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

juxtapositions

(one of my dad's favourite words)

On Thursday I was caught out in a thunderstorm. I sheltered during the worst of it, so didn't get as wet as I did on 29th July, 2005. The first thunderclap came as I was walking out of King's College, past the imposing chapel, just as a lone bagpiper processed down the street towards us, followed, it seemed, by a small bedraggled clump of people, a few wearing gowns. I am unsure what this was in honour of.

Bagpipes appeared, somewhat surreally, in the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Some of the parade of the competing nations was accompanied by a Dundee pipe band - apparently they caught the eye of Chinese officials on a visit to France. On Friday, BBC News 24 split its screen down the middle - on one side was the spectacular Olympic pageant of Chinese culture and its ideal of 'harmony' expressed by the synchronised movement of thousands of performers; on the other side were the tanks rolling into South Ossetia.

On Friday night, I went to an open air performance of Shakespeare's Othello - an excellent performance of a rather grim tale. Today I went to the seaside at Great Yarmouth with my housemates. Morning sun; afternoon rain. Morning on the beach; afternoon on the promenade (some of us playing crazy golf assailed by the elements); fish and chips in the middle.

Philosophers aren't often interviewed for the weekend colour supplements of our newspapers. Today, answering short and snappy questions in the regular 'Q&A' feature of the Weekend Guardian, was Slavoj Žižek - according to Wikipedia, "He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-Marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock." One of the great thinkers of our time; not a very cheery chappy. Here are some highlights:

When were you happiest?
A few times when I looked forward to a happy moment or remembered it - never when it was happening.
[...]
What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?
A mask of myself on my face, so people would think I am not myself but someone pretending to be me.
[...]
What or who is the love of your life?
Philosophy. I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.
[...]
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
My birth. I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.
[...]
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
That life is a stupid, meaningless thing that has nothing to teach you.

If you read the whole piece (which isn't very long - click on link), I think there are a couple of answers which suggest some sense of moral right and wrong which is inconsistent with the general tone of nihilism in his answers.

On the next page there is a brief column about 'How to ... undo things', which expresses how 'undoing' what we have done in life is much harder than undoing what we do on a computer. The following paragraph caught my attention:

The only way things that are done can be completely undone is by the total forgiveness of the person to whom the thing has been done. This means total surrender of the will of the perpetrator to the grace of the victim. Christianity's foundation is that Jesus Christ is a cosmic Ctrl+Z. Buddhism encourages you not to be idiotic in the first place.

Here is Bono of U2:

You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics - in physical laws - every action is met by an equal or opposite one. It's clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I'm absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that "As you reap, so will you sow" stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff.
(Bono on Bono: Conversations with Michka Assayas (Hodder, 2005), pp. 203-4)

moving around

I'm going to try to post something here, however brief, each week, so that it's worth your while checking back.

On Sunday at church there was a spontaneous reunion of people I was at college with, one of whom has got married and moved to Madagascar, one of whom has got married and moved to China, and two of whom have married each other and returned to Cambridge. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident writer, has died. One of the quotations from him that strikes me most is the following, describing his thoughts in the gulag:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates through the years. If only it were all so simple, if only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it was necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. Yet even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains an unuprooted small corner of evil. And who wants to destroy a piece of his own heart?

(The Gulag Archipelago)

A Russian proverb he quoted in his acceptance speech for the 1970 Nobel Prize for literature says "One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world."

Oh, and I think I've found somewhere to live for the coming academic year.