la cathédrale engloutie

Goodness, it’s been a long time. I would’ve done a lot more posting these past six weeks if I’d had my way. Nothing like being required to write 10,000 words on various subjects to stimulate the imagination on extracurricular projects. Now that I am at the start of six glorious weeks of freedom from classes, I’m working on one particular post—which is quickly turning into a significant essay—that I’ve been wanting to write for a few months. However, it’s occurred to me that for this thing to make sense, I ought to preface it with a word about my own religious convictions. That’s a lot easier said than done, not only because the issue itself is complicated, but also because I’m generally uncomfortable being so forthright. Nevertheless, this seems like something that needs to be done.

In simplest terms, I’m someone who’s had at least one significant crisis of faith, and survived, albeit in altered form. I suspect that if I sat down and tried to compose a detailed account of my own understanding of key theological issues, I would likely offend just about everyone I know, including myself. Even on a general level, I hesitate to discuss matters of faith with other people because I seem to reside in this ambiguous middle realm where I am neither one thing nor the other. Those who are unwavering in the security of their faith cannot or do not understand why I am prone to doubt, and those who do not adhere to religious convictions cannot or do not understand why I am compelled to believe. Truthfully, I don’t understand it myself. There was a time when I was quite ready to turn away from religion and God altogether, dismissing faith as something for the weak and/or unthinking. But I could not.

There’s an old hymn that begins, “O Love that will not let me go”; that’s the closest I can come to an explanation for what happened. Believe me, I have a whole host of reasons why I should not believe in God, at least not a God who is good. However, I came to be in circumstances where I witnessed a group of people showing love to others—showing love to me—in a way that I had never before experienced. This love was of a depth and purity that runs contrary to everything I understand to be true about human nature. I clearly remember thinking, “There simply is no possible way that this Love could have originated from within these people themselves. It must be a part of Something Greater.” I wasn’t exactly sure what this Something Greater was, but to me this was too powerful to ignore.

And so, I believe. I’d like to think that I’ve come a long way since then, but it depends on the day as to how much progress it feels like I’ve made. Without question, I remain a damaged person, and, at least in some ways, will likely remain so for the rest of my life. I am aware that some may dismiss my inclination to faith as a coping mechanism, as an emotional security blanket that allows me to make some sense of the painful experiences I’ve had to endure. Sure, I know that. The idea that I’m self-deluded may not cross my mind every single day, but it comes around a lot more often than you might think. But I’ve come to a place where the logical credibility of my motivations for belief is no longer top priority. I could spend my entire life trying to rationalize and intellectualize the issue of faith in God, and still never come to any definite conclusions. But so far as I can understand it (which, I am sure, is not very far at all), to live thusly is to miss the point of what faith is, and what faith is supposed to do within me.

Don’t misunderstand me here, I am absolutely not advocating a blind following of whatever doctrine one has been spoon-fed. But my brain analyzes and re-analyzes and overanalyzes things to the point of paralysis. The best analogy I can make here is to standing between two parallel mirrors. Your reflection bounces from one to the other and back again, echoing in an infinite regress. For someone whose mind works like those mirrors, one must forcibly halt the reflecting, or else one will quite literally be driven mad. Once again, I offer that quotation from Kierkegaard, which I’ve used a thousand times before but continue to recall because it is still as powerful to me as when I first read it.

What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except insofar as a certain understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. What would be the use of discovering so-called objective truth… of working through all the systems of philosophy… what good would it do me to be able to explain the meaning of Christianity if it had no deeper significance for me and my life; what good would it do me if truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I recognized her or not, and producing in me a shudder of fear rather than a trusting devotion? I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of understanding and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing. That is what my soul longs after as the African desert thirsts for water… That is what I lack and that is what I am striving after.

(The Journals, August 1, 1835; emphasis K’s)

What becomes increasingly clear to me is that I must believe—or, at the very least, I cannot not believe. I can offer no better explanation than that. I do not claim to speak for anyone myself. To those of greater assuredness than I, I admire you, even envy you, for the confidence which has been granted to you. To those who do not believe, I do not judge you for your non-belief. It is not my place to judge, and, like I said, I was very nearly in the same place as you.

Right, so that’s that. Tune in next time for “The Chorister in Converse.”

right back to where we started from

It’s hard to believe I’m already into week 6, which is halfway through the first term here at Aberdeen. The next six weeks are going to be jam-packed with reading and ‘riting (but no ‘rithmatic), by I’m doing my best to remember the sage advice of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “DON’T PANIC.” For me, this involves taking it one day and one assignment at a time, and knowing when to say, “That’s enough thinking for today, it’s time to stop for a couple of biscuits [cookies] and an episode of The IT Crowd, Arrested Development, or similar offering of comic relief.”

One great comfort is that I think my dissertation [thesis] has found a sense of direction. I don’t actually have to start writing ’til next summer, but if the last two months are any indication of time’s relativity, it’ll be here before I know it. After literally months of considering and debating and feeling lost a hell of a lot of the time, I’m finally got something. In a classic plot twist, I’m brought back to the thing that got me interested in historical research in the first place: utopian thought in the Western world. Broadly speaking, this is about comparing idealized societies with real ones. Utopias reveal much about how we perceive ourselves and others, what we value, and how our own humanity limits on what we can actually achieve. Essentially, they’re an exercise in humility.

Analyzing abstract ideas, trying to make them accessible and relate them to reality… yeah, sounds like something I could get into. (Either that, or I could quit school and open a Mexican bistro.) Really, I’m wondering why I didn’t think of this sooner.

There are still many particulars to be worked out, and they’ll have to wait until after the holidays at least, but even having that much figured out does a lot to put my mind at ease. At least for me, when faced with a momentous task like this research paper, I really want to make sure that it’s concerning something I genuinely care about. There’s an incredible amount of time and effort required, and though I know the process won’t always be enjoyable, I at least want to feel like it’s worthwhile.

Really, I guess that has been the dominant motif of my life these past few years– would it be too much to call it a summation of the young adult experience? So far as our experience tells us, we only get one go at life, and, at least to me, it seems imperative that we exploit it to its fullest. (I mean “exploit” here in a positive sense– can’t think of a more appropriate word.) If we’ve discussed this issue together before, then I’ve probably evoked that famous quote by Kierkegaard,

The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.

As I’m always quick to point out, this is not an approbation of simplified relativism, but rather a call to action involving whole-hearted commitment. Questing and questioning and reflecting certainly have their place, but when it comes to knowing what course to pursue– whether it’s a matter of faith, occupation, relationship, or whatever– there has to come a point where one says enough is enough! Abstract reasoning apart from experience gives us fragments at best.

It often takes actually doing something before one can really figure out whether the resulting motion was “forward” or “backward.” Anyway, given our own limited perspective, these directional terms are pretty relative. What seems to be a “push forward” may return us to something from the past, and likewise taking a few steps backward may in fact be the only way to move ahead.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Time for the “important” (i.e. graded) writing.

reflections on historical methodology; or, trying to figure out what it is I’m supposed to be doing

When you’re in grade school, the history you learn is primarily names and dates. Many kids and teenagers complain of boredom, and understandably so. Believe it or not, even though history is my primary subject, I’m not terribly good at route memorization of factoids.

For the few who try a history class beyond the freshman “Survey of America to 1865,” most are pleasantly surprised to find that the subject has progressed from reciting the “what” to considering the “why” things happened. Yes, particulars of time and space are important, but they are important because they provide a framework within which ideas of all different sorts—social, political, economic, religious, technological, and so on—can be meaningfully discussed. Suddenly, the American Civil War becomes a much weightier and more interesting issue than a conflict between people in the south who had slaves and people in the north who thought it was bad.

This discussion of ideas is the kind of history I fell in love with, so much so that I decided I wanted to dedicate my life to it, to sharing it with others. So, now I am in graduate school, doing what all would-be historians must do in order to earn that title. However, I am finding out very quickly that the study dynamic has shifted once again. Before, I read a lot of books about a subject and wrote detailed summaries of what the author said, to prove that I had understood their points. Now, I am expected to start writing the kind of books I used to read.

For my taught courses, I must write 20- to 30-page essays related to the broad seminar topics. Next summer, I will compose a 50- to 60-page thesis (c. 20,000 words) on a topic (hopefully) related in some way to those essays. And then, should I choose to continue in this line of work, there’s the PhD thesis, a history student’s magnum opus, around 100,000 words in length, usually an expansion of the thesis, hopefully coherent and accessible enough to be reformatted and published as an academic text.

To do all of this writing, one must spend an inordinate amount of time immersed in both primary and secondary sources. Secondary sources are those books I read as an undergrad, works written by historians about the past. The difference in my reading of them now is I’m supposed to pay more attention to how these authors construct their arguments than to all of what they actually say. Primary sources, by contrast, are the documents actually created by the people of the past, and are what historians consult and interpret to create the secondary sources.

There are numerous problems inherent in primary sources: the linguistic style may be antiquated and so unfamiliar, the handwriting may be hard to decipher, the manuscripts may have been damaged/altered, etc. But, as far as I can tell, the greatest obstacle is not technical but interpretative, and lies in the limitations of the texts themselves. What I mean is that the author of any given document only provides us with a choice amount of detail, and it’s up to us to employ educated guesswork to find place their words within a larger, societal context. This involves more than a mere consideration of the author’s probable biases. Every author of every written source—secondary as well as primary—has a specific purpose behind the words he or she chooses to combine to create that document. When being trained how to analyze writing, whether as history, literature, philosophy, or whatever, one learns how to look for clues pertaining to both the author’s perception and plan. Sometimes this task is easier than others; a lot of it depends on how much info there is to begin with. Sheer length isn’t everything, but it isn’t nothing, either. If I want to ascertain the political leanings of a certain newspaper, my assessment will probably be more accurate if I’m given an entire paper rather than a clipping with a single article. But a good analyst can usually extract something useful even out of snippets.

My problem with all this is, I think what I am most interested in is a thing that is impossible to be known in its entirety; namely, what was going through his or her head while putting pen to paper. When speaking in relation to an author’s thought process, the actual words we now possess are fragments at best. To illustrate my point, I need look no further than this blog. For every post that appears here, there are half a dozen, usually unfinished entries that I never transfer from my notebook (I always hand-write first), and at least half a dozen more topics that I never get around to writing down at all. Heaven forbid that some stranger should read this blog and then, based solely on its contents, try to reconstruct an image of my own mind, of what and how I think! Yes, obviously what I write is an extension of myself—here I firmly reject the deconstructionists, who say it is possible to divorce a text from its author— but I strongly believe that the essence of my self goes beyond what I write on a silly little blog. What that essence is… well, that’s the great mystery, isn’t it….

Anyway, when I get to thinking along these lines, then I start to wonder how much point there is in this history writing. I don’t pretend to seek knowledge based on a Cartesian model of objective certainty, but then again, neither do I think the postmodernists are right in arguing that everything is subjective. Just because I can’t get inside the head of Sir Thomas More or Abraham Lincoln doesn’t mean that I can never say anything truly meaningful about the past, based on what I’ve read by them. I suppose this—like pretty much everything else that is meaningful in life— must involve coming to terms with one’s own limitations. I want to study utopias, but I don’t need to live according to one. If I want to write history, and write it well, I’ll have to learn adjust my idealistic expectations to match the realities of an imperfect and unclear world. Otherwise, I’ll spend the rest of my life spouting nonsense on a blog.

pas si simple

When you’re an America living somewhere like Korea, the culture shock is relatively straightforward. Well, the culture part is actually very complicated, but the shock part is simple enough because it hits you square in the face. Everything is different, different in such a way that you feel isolated, alienated, singularly set apart from the environment in which you find yourself. Sometimes it’s as simple as being the only with in the crowd with a hair color other than black. The start contrast between this new society and your native is inescapable: wherever you go, whatever you do, you are a stranger in a strange land, things are lost in translation, [insert your favorite traveler's cliché here].

But see, at least on some level, you expect this of East Asia. Britain is another story.

People tend to imagine a kinship with other places that speak the same language as themselves. To some extent, I think this is real. It’d be impossible to deny there exist significant historical, political, and economic between the UK and ourselves, not to mention the fact that a good number of us have British ancestors of at least one variety. But the truth is, the modern US and modern UK are distinct cultures. The trouble is, many of these differences are subtle, and they manifest themselves in such understated ways that you almost miss them, experiencing only vague feelings of confusion, frustration, and anxiety, the source of which you can’t quite seem to place.

For example, take my first trip to Morrisons, the grocery store across the street from our flat. Having spent the last year in small-town Korea, I still find myself a little bit in awe every time I enter a supermarket here in the West. Not to say that Korea grocery stores are inferior– I was actually surprised at how comprehensive they were– but occidental supermarkets are generally larger and have a wider variety of available products, products that I am familiar with and can actually understand the labels.

Anyway, the first time I walked into Morrisons, I thought, “Oh, this is a nice store. I’ll have a look around and get a feel for where everything is.” It didn’t take long, though, before I realized that something was off. It was like one of those realistic dreams, where everything appears normal except for some trivial element, which actually alters the overall vibe of the environment. Well, in this case, I realized that although I was reading the information of all the products on the shelves, only a few of the brand names were familiar to me. It hit me in especially hard in the laundry soap aisle: rows and rows of containers of Fairy, Persil, Clear Spring and other things I’d never heard of. Then, trying to decide what pack of yogurts to buy, I had to read the nutrition facts for every one, which by the way are laid out slightly different than in the States. And when I got to the produce, there were all the familiar vegetables with unfamiliar labels: aubergine, courgette, haricot, mangetout. Not that it was difficult to work out that aubergine means eggplant, but it wasn’t something I had expected to have to do. (The others, by the way, are zucchini, beans and snow peas.)

On the other hand, when I reached the aisle with the [tiny] Mexican selection of Mexican food, the bright yellow packaging of Old El Paso was perfectly recognizable. I had to laugh– of all the Latino products available, that’s really the best we could do?

(Oh, one thing I can confirm as being the same as America is the self-checkout machines. They hate me here, too. Don’t know why I keep trying to use them.)

I spent an hour and half at Morrisons that day, and I don’t remember if I actually bought anything. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a negative experience; just unexpected.

On a related note, yesterday I made my first trip to the Asian supermarket. I felt perfectly at ease browsing amongst the stacks of noodles, gim, mirin, and hoisin sauce. Ironic, eh?

the curious community-building power of the pigskin

In centuries past, the church (or equivalent religious establishment) played a pivotal role in nurturing social cohesion within a community. The rites and rituals, feasts and festivals marked the passage of time in an orderly, predictable fashion. Everyone knew his or her role; everyone participated; everyone belonged.

Recently, I was thinking about this, and wondering what is the church’s contemporary equivalent. This is not to say that the church has lost its power to create structure within the lives of individuals, but its general sphere of influence has grown limited in an increasingly secularized society. But if the church no longer leads in this role, where, then, does the local community turn to find sustenance of personality?

If I had to guess, I would say, “to sports.”

Most people like sports. many are devoted, and some are devoted to the point of obsession. Myself, I’m not a tremendous sports enthusiast, probably due to a lack of both personal athletic ability and time to devote to the subject. After all, there’s so many books, music, and movies I’ve yet to discover. Nevertheless, I have fun watching a good game, especially when that game is American football. (And when I say football, I really mean high school or especially college football. The NFL, in all its bloated, hyper-commercial glory, just doesn’t do it for me.)

Baseball may claim the title of America’s national pastime, but in my experience, few events have such curious power to draw people together (or drive them apart) as student football. The size of the school and the ability of the team are largely irrelevant; the spirit of football thrives in all kinds of environments. To get a sense of this enthusiasm, one need only to visit any of the thousands of campus football fields on a weekend in autumn.  Football is a uniquely American game, and Americans love it.

Passion for football is plainly evident in my current part of the country. There’s an old saying that in the South, football is a religion, and Satuday is its holy day. While it’s debatable whether Oklahoma is genuinely part of the South, no one can question the intense loyalty of Oklahoman fans to of the state’s two NCAA Division I teams: the University of Oklahoma Sooners; and their bitter rival (and my alma mater), the Oklahoma State Cowboys. Being a Sooner or Cowboy fan is not just a hobby; for many, it’s a way of life.

Today was the season opener for both teams. Both teams are ranked in the national top 25 (OU at No. 3, OSU at No. 9), as are several others in the Big XII (regional conference of teams), which means that their games tend to be more high powered, and they get extra attention from the media. For example, because today OSU played against another ranked team, No. 13 Georgia, the game was broadcast on network television. Tonight, I can gleefully report that the Cowboys won, while the Sooners lost to No. 20 BYU (14-13).

As I’m not currently in Stillwater, I had to be content with watching the game on TV. After spending the past year in Korea, watching television sports was quite the novelty. Truthfully, though, I don’t get very excited about watching a game unless I’m actually there. (On the other hand, when I am at a game, I tend to get a little too excited.) Thanks to many years in marching band, I have a basic grasp of the rules– good enough to impress other casual fans (usually female) in my company– but I would still be enthusiastic even if I had no idea what was going on.

For me, the big draw of going to a game is not the game in and of itself, but the whole experience of attending a sporting function. There’s something singular about gathering in the bleachers with a crowd of compatriots, all decked out in school colors (even better, marching band uniforms), shouting yourself hoarse while cheering your team to victory. The crowd’s avidity is infectious, and even an introvert like myself can’t help but get caught up in it. Attending a school football game is intensely communal: people with a common identity come together for a few hours to participate in a shared emotional experience. Whether the game ends in “the thrill of victory… or the agony of defeat,” everyone feels it as one. And at the very end, as the band plays the alma mater and everyone sings along, the unity among team, students, alumni, faculty, and fans is boldly reaffirmed.

I love it.

wanted: a sense of ontological security

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.
–G.K. Chesterton

I’m going to do something that college profs detest as much as nails on a blackboard, a thing that I myself decry under normal circumstances, but it’s late and I’m too tired to come up with something more adequate. Wikipedia, in its infinite wisdom, defines ontological security as “ a stable mental state derived from a sense of continuity in regard to the events in one’s life.”

For most people, a significant part of their ontological security is derived from familiar surroundings. While any given place is subject to the usual alterations caused by time’s forward march, when a person identifies a place as “home,” it becomes fixed relative to the changes experienced in his or her life. There’s a whole metaphysical debate about whether the Stillwater of 1989 is actually the same place as the Stillwater of 2009 (i.e. if they are logically identical, as in x=y), but I’ll ignore this. What I’m trying to articulate is this: normal people divide the events in their lives into two basic categories, things that happen “at home,” and things that happen away from home, and then they interpret them accordingly.

I am not a normal person.

Oh, there are lots of reasons why I’m strange, but the point of interest for today is that I am homeless. I don’t mean that I’m a bum– I still sleep indoors and shower regularly and all. “Home” is a tricky word with multiple definitions, so maybe I should say instead that I’m “house-less.” At present, I lack a domestic dwelling that I can refer to as my own.

Next month I will make my seventh major move in ten years. (This is not counting the seven places where I lived during my, um, three years in Stillwater. I don’t want to think about what this says about me….) I’ve been in six cities in five US states, plus a year on a little South Korean island, and now I’m about to go to another island in another ocean in a different hemisphere.

How to move house: find a new place, pack your stuff, put it in the van and go. In town, you can usually transport your stuff in a day or two; cross-country or international might take a couple of days, depending on the distance. The mental and emotional adjustments take a lot longer, not to mention unpacking all the boxes, but the physical mechanics of the move itself are pretty straightforward.

The last place where I lived was an apartment in Jugong Sa Danji in Seogwipo-si. The next place will be a flat above a flower shop in Aberdeen City, Scotland. I left Korea on 2 August; I’m supposed arrive in Scotland on 23 September.

But where do I say I live during the six-week interim? I’m spending a lot of the time with my parents in Edmond, but their house isn’t mine. Yeah, my stuff is in boxes sitting in their garage, but it’s been five years since I’ve lived there on a permanent basis. I feel more comfortable (“at home,” if you will) when I spend time with friends in Stillwater, but again, my visits there are temporary, lasting a few days at most.

Currently, I’m on vacation in Ohio, visiting relatives. I arrived middle of last week and will be here until Wednesday. Today I realized that I can’t really refer to my trip as a “vacation,” because “vacation” as commonly understood is a recreational trip away from one’s house, or (more generally) a break in one’s normal routine. As I’ve already said, I am house-less, and this isn’t a break from my routine because right now I have no routine from which to break. I haven’t been “on vacation” for four days, but for 21 days (since I left my Korean apartment). But this doesn’t exactly work, either, because “vacation” as we understand it usually implies eventual return to the point of origin, and I can say with a high degree of confidence that I will never return to that apartment.

So, here I am, in the middle of a long, strange interim that I don’t know how to define. Since existence as I experience it appears to involve physical location, I can point to where I “am” on a geographical map right now, but I think this house-less state is contributing to a mild existential crisis. I feel like I’m “neither here nor there,” and frankly, I’m tired of it. I’m tired of everything shifting and changing and having to readjust my focus. After this next year, I want to find someplace where I can settle down for awhile.

The worry is, though, I’ve been doing this moving thing for so long now, I wonder if “settling down” is something I’m even capable of. Would having a house or apartment or trailer to call my own be of any help in breaking an established behavioral pattern? I know that the meaning of “home” isn’t necessarily contingent upon a house, but having a permanent dwelling as a fixed point of reference would seem to simplify things.

All I’m after is a little peace of mind!

(Side note: one of my classes this fall is in the field of diaspora and migration studies. How incredibly appropriate.)

you can never go home again?

I’m currently navigating this tricky patch called reverse culture shock.

In a nutshell, culture shock is feelings of surprise, confusion, frustration, and anxiety that one experiences when one is immersed in an unfamiliar environment or society, such as when a person spends an extended time in a foreign country.

Anyone who’s been or has considered going abroad will have encountered the term. Culture shock is widely discussed, though I’m not sure that there’s much one can do to prepare for it ahead of time, save be aware that it’s going to happen. It varies from person to person, but for the most part, passing through the stages of initial euphoria, withdrawl and depression, acceptance, and renewed stability takes a fair amount of time. (It took me a solid 7-8 months to adjust to life in Korea.) But given enough time and an attitude of perseverance, culture shock does eventually pass and one can move forward with greater comfort and confidence… just in time to for one to pack up and leave.

Reverse culture shock, then, is exactly what you’d expect: negative feelings that one encounters upon returning home. It’s a less obvious phenomenon, generally lesser in intensity, and is supposed to pass more quickly than original culture shock. Still, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is the worse of the two– that first round contained some mighty unpleasant experiences– to be honest, I think I prefer the first.

For many people, one of the biggest issues is the realization that time didn’t stop just because they left; friends and families continued to live and change and grow. Now, I’m okay with this. Yes, it’s weird that in the year I was gone, this one couple I know got pregnant, had a baby, and moved to another state where the husband will begin a PhD program. Yes, it’s weird that toddlers I babysat can now communicate with me in complete sentences. Yes, it’s weird that people are older and taller and fatter (or thinner). But these details are not overly concerning to me– I can deal with this.

The main difficulty I’m encountering the emotional irregularity. Sure, the original culture shock sucked, but at least it sucked fairly consistently. These days, I’m feeling positively unstable: up one minute, down the next, never knowing what seemingly-trivial detail is going to set me off. For example, I’ll go someplace casual for lunch, be sitting there enjoying my meal, and all of the sudden find myself overwhelmed by the wealth of intelligible conversation going on at the tables around me. Or, I’ll be relaxing at home (I’m currently staying with my parents), only to be overcome by an urge to get out of the house and be alone for awhile. But such feelings don’t arise every time I eat a meal or sit around the house– I’ve yet to establish a definite pattern. Maybe I should call it meta- reverse culture shock: I become anxious and frustrated because I don’t know when the anxiety and frustration will next arise.

It doesn’t help that at present, I have no real routine to settle into. The six weeks between returning from Korea and leaving for Scotland are a loosely-scheduled string of doctor’s appointments, shopping trips, meals and beverages consumed while catching up with people, and multi-hour blocks of doing nothing in particular. The transience is uncomfortable, and I find myself craving the stability I see in the people around me who are beginning fall classes, starting careers, moving away, getting married, having babies… not that I want any babies right now!! I can’t tell if this half-formed desire to settle down here for awhile is the effect of a transitory wave of “yay, I’m back!” nostalgia, or if I’m legitimately impressed by small-town Oklahoma’s charms.

I guess I’m just not good with waiting. Really, the last thing I need is a load of free time where I can sit around second-guessing myself about whether I’ve made good decisions about the direction of my life. Choices have already been made, so let’s get on with it.

a fresh venture

So, I’m going to give this blogging thing another try. Undoubtedly an ambitious undertaking for a soon-to-be grad student, but hey, the worst that can happen is I’ll lose interest and give up… again. I think one of my biggest problems of my previous blogging efforts was a lack of cohesion between posts, but this time around I will do better.

To elaborate on the previous paragraph, in September I will move to Scotland to attend the University of Aberdeen, reading for a master’s degree in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. The program is technically interdisciplinary, and I am excited about this. My undergraduate degrees are in history and philosophy, and I find that my train of thought tends to fall somewhere between the two fields.

I am interested in the past, but more about its people and their perceptions than a mere chronology of events. The Early Modern period, roughly 1500-1800 AD, is my era of choice because it was a time of such dramatic changes–social, political, economic, cultural, religious, scientific, I could go on– the effects of which we continue to experience to this day. In many ways it was a time like our own, a world altering more rapidly than in previous generations, one that inundated its inhabitants with a wealth of new information, information which compelled them to revise and reevaluate their understanding of the world and their place within it.

Broadly, I want to explore what it is that gave them then– and gives us now– a sense of identity, how humans create and maintain stability in an ever-shifting world. And, so far as I can tell, identity cannot be properly discussed without an understanding of the community within which it arises. Whatever the existentialists may say, humans are essentially communal beings, and it is the community which enables us not merely to survive, but to create and develop and prosper. From the community, we derive our purpose– even if that purpose is to break away and form a new community of our own.

“Community” is, of course, an immensely broad term, and for the sake of my sanity, I will have to limit my discourse to a few facets. I find myself drawn to the elements of physical environment (or landscape), religion and the arts. Now I just have to figure out how all of these connect.

So, there it is– an ambitious, sprawling overview from an ambitious, sprawling mind. But one has to start somewhere, right?