April 2000
April 4, 2000
I was thinking about emotion just now. We have some dull sounding words that convey meaning about emotion. We can say that we are "happy," "sad," or even something a little more interesting like "ecstatic," or "melancholy."
A poet or lyricist will rarely resort to those sorts of adjectives. They seem to prefer pulling our five senses into it. "I feel like I felt when I saw/heard/smelled/tasted/touched.."
Why?
Is it because they suspect that we all feel the same thing when we look at a sunset? Are they merely grasping for the easiest method of conveyance?
I think we have this whole emotion thing backwards. We fail to express our emotions well at all without giving them sensory eqivalents. We can describe with rigor the exact dimensions of a skyscraper on a few pages of paper, but millions of words have been poured out in a failed attempt to describe emotions.
I find this odd because skyscrapers are external. They ought to be alien. On the other hand, we deal with our emotions daily.
A skyscraper is 967 feet tall, but an emotion must simply be experienced before we can really know about it. Then we must speak in spacial terms if we attempt to describe it at all -- I felt little next to the sky scraper. As though we felt ourselves with our hands and determined that we were little.
Is this a weakness in our language, or a buit in incapacity?
What if the world outside is actually about the same size as the world inside? In that case, it may be that we look at awe and skyscrapers in the same way. This skyscraper is the same height as 946 rulers stacked end to end; This feeling of awe is of the same magnitude as experienced while viewing a 946 foot high skyscraper. Of course, the amount of awe one experienced would be inversely proportional to the number of skyscrapers one had seen, whereas a 946 foot skyscraper will always be 946 feet regardless of what we think of it.
I guess one could say that the relative length of the skyscraper changes at different velocities of the observer, and that awe is relative in a similar fashion, but that makes my head hurt. Blab, Blab.
It seems as though we are simultaneous observers and partakers of our own emotions. We can get far enough away from them to describe them using our mind's eye, but not so far away that our very description isn't affected.
April 9, 2000
I guess I should at long last explain why I no longer update my Pilgrim's Progress page. I gave up on it because the scripture references often times had little or nothing to do with the story. When they did relate to the story, it was often necessary to take the scripture out of context to understand the parallel. So, now you know.
I have resumed ( again ) my study of Greek. I've set aside a time every morning to work on it, and I'm actually making progress.
It's now my bed time.
April 15, 2000
Ah, my corner of the web. It ain't much, but it's mine. I like to think that amidst the grammatical errors, misspellings, and digression, I've said something here over the past year.
Or perhaps not.
I am really not too terribly brave when it comes to sharing. I wouldn't especially like to be, either. Many of the things I write here skirt my "comfort zone." In fact, on a number of occasions, I have written things here that I later regretted writing. To someone who has perused my pages, this may seem a curiosity. Only a few times have I opened up and really shared much.
Most of the time, the things found here are aimless; the puddles left over after an intellectual thunder storm. But, it occurs to me that in being so closed off, I have given everyone a far deeper picture of who I truly am than if I had revealed all.
What I mean is, I am a person who, like most poeple, does not wear his heart on his sleeve. Frankly, I grow weary very quickly of those people who do. Sometimes you just have to pack it in and trudge on. But anyway..
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Contact me: adam.stephens@ttu.edu