Sunday, November 16, 2003
(9:04 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
I grow weary of holding it in.
Sometimes I read through my past commentaries, and I'm always struck by how little has changed. If I were to write something new today, I would write that essay over again, with a few changed details.
UPDATE: This has nothing to do with the post that I originally put here, but just linking to this article about why America is doomed to lose the intelligence war did not seem worth a whole new post. Be forewarned: the author partly blames Martin Heidegger for this problem.
SECOND UPDATE: Again, this has nothing to do with the original post, unless you count the fact that it flatly contradicts it -- I have indeed written something new today, and it's not just me bitching about a girl. It is called "Art is better than life," and it's moderately long, though probably not as long as "Education with a Christian Purpose." I don't know if you'll like it or have any use for it, but there it is. One might be able to consider it a more intellectually rigorous companion piece to my post last week about the cross.
Honestly, though, this essay didn't turn out to be what I thought it would be. Having been confronted anew with my own stupidity and futility in the last few days, I wanted nothing more than to write another "teary-eyed confessional" in order to get past my weariness with holding it in. Several concerns combined to make such an essay impossible, so I thought I would do the next best thing and write about the hypothetical satisfaction of writing such an essay. That essay would have turned out to say little more than "it's cool, because when things aren't going your way, you can write about it, or read a novel about a similar situation, and all of a sudden it takes on this fresh meaning that makes the suffering almost seem worth it." Then this led me to think of what Tara Smith was saying Saturday night about how the reference to Christ doesn't seem to add anything concrete to a "good deed" or a general love for the human race -- at least I think that was what she was saying, because I was doing my best not to spend an entire party talking about Jesus.
THIRD UPDATE: I'm turning into InstaPundit here with the updates. Just so everyone knows, I was called to sub tomorrow, which means that after staying up until 3:00 on Friday, then about 4:30 on Saturday, I get to wake up at 6:00 AM. I think that the extremely erratic sleep patterns, which led to excessive coffee use, probably contributed to the general malaise that hung over me today. I'm always disappointed when my moods have probable physical causes -- I want them to be meaningful somehow, and feeling depressed because I'm crashing from a sugar high or something doesn't seem meaningful. Maybe I just need to change my standards for meaningfulness.
