Liberal Arts in the Woods

A fresh crop of undergraduates has matriculated at my alma mater, and for the past two weeks I guided a group of eight of them through an intensive transitional program set in the beautiful northern woods of Wisconsin. Eight bright-eyed dudes, laden with books and rumors of books and myriad anxieties, scrambling up a 12-ft wall under the benevolent gaze of me, their bearded leader, silently cheering for them.

We ate meatball subs and debated the proper shape of Christian witness in politics under canoes lashed to the ceiling of the dining hall. We pondered the unfathomable depths of the love of God on a pontoon boat, which 20 minutes of effort helped to anchor in the shallows near the lake's bank under a patchwork cover of pine tree shade. We talked about community sitting cross-legged in cool dirt, stood up to brush off our behinds and hike back to camp. As campfire smoke filled our jackets and fleeces we talked Dostoevsky, transubstantiation, metaphysics, and dating. I commented on academic paper formats and the school's language requirements while picking marshmallow out of my beard.

I helped to build the cabin they slept in. We built it lincoln-log style from some kind of kit one year when I went north for spring break to read and work. During the long winters, the snow muffles everything but the sound of the wind across the frozen lake. It is possible to build a fire in the middle of the ice, a couple hundred feet from the nearest shore. Standing in its glow, looking at a darkening forest above the buried banks while the sun goes down, it can feel as though you've reached the edge of the world—where eternity clips time, as Annie Dillard says.

In late summer, the sounds never stop. Bugs and outboard motors, shouts, rifle retorts, backfires, fireworks, campfire crackles, leaves rattling like a cascade of rice across a counter, deer suddenly bounding through the woods in front of you, birdcalls. It all floats on a light wind, the organic counterpoint to the mechanical city hum I've become accustomed to.

We walked over acres of forest and grass, turning over ideas and perspectives in the workshops of our souls and burning off extra energy in a steady chatter. Hymns sung next to a sputtering Hobart lifted the dishwashing room into the celestial spheres. Our puckered hands slung food waste and scrubbed baking sheets. The damp that spread through aprons into t-shirts was holy water. We may as well have been wearing robes and tonsures. God smiled upon us, likely in amusement.

Of course, you have to come back to earth sometime. Those students are about to begin their freshman year; our wonderful faculty advisor is already busy advising his new advisees. The engine is about to turn, and within a few weeks, Wisconsin will likely seem distant in history. That doesn't matter, though. What happened will prove its relative value over time. I'm just glad to have been a part of it, whatever it will mean in the long term. Embodied, thinking creatures that we are, I don't know of a better place to start a liberal arts education than in the woods along the banks of Long Lake.

Crucible

Radio silence until June 1. The thesis and three papers are all due on May 29. May God have mercy on our souls.

the promise of June

Round Two

Our break has ended, and a new term has begun. The department secretary will be posting our first term grades on Wednesday, at which point we'll be able to see who will need to come back in August to retake failed examinations or rewrite failed papers.

Most of the courses being offered this term are in a seminar format, which means both smaller class sizes and higher expectations for enrolled students. A difficult choice looms: I have room in my schedule for two seminars, but there are three relevant options:

1. An intensive course on disgust. Fascinating and exciting material, taught by an intimidating (but wryly funny) professor who has leveled some very serious demands regarding course attendance and preparedness. I expect it'll be engaging and a lot of fun. The only question I have, the one preventing me from locking it in to my schedule, is: how relevant would this be for my thesis? 
2. The Husserl Archives Seminar. This would probably be the most directly useful for my research, but it will also probably be the most dry and boring of the three. Might just have to bite the bullet and take it anyway, my apprehensions about reading large quantities of Husserl notwithstanding. 
3. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. This class will meet for extended sessions once a month until the summer, and promises to dig deeply into the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He's the original reason for my philosophical interest in language; I would love to deepen my acquaintance with him, but given his location in the canon (he has primarily been appreciated and appropriated within the analytic tradition in philosophy), this seminar would probably diverge the most widely from my current philosophical interests and research. 

As you can see, concern for the thesis provides this semester's dominant theme. Hopefully my research panic doesn't edge out my commitment to classes for this term; it will probably be important to come up with both a sense of boundaries and a regular work schedule in order to avoid dropping any of the various balls I'm going to try to juggle. 

Bonus round: here's a picture of me and roommate Dan at the Eiffel Tower just over two weeks ago: 

"Look, my cowlick is gone!"

Write us letters and emails; we are hardy boys but it is going to be a tough fight, and our souls are sensitive to the rain and the slush and the existentialism that apparently soak this town during the winter months. 

January is a Month for Exams

And papers. I'm 6,000 words deep, between the two that are due. If I can get them both done for tomorrow I'll have the weekend to study for my first exam, which is slated for Monday morning. It's as though the month of January is solely intended to remind you why some writer originally replaced a generic word connoting movement through time with "grinding." Grinding is an apt word to describe the sort of conveyance that it's gonna take to make it to February.

Anyway, during the past week I found out about two apps that I think are worth sharing. The first is called "Flux." Apparently your monitor produces light that mimics that of the sun, and it doesn't let up after the real sun sets, so your eyes don't get the rest they deserve while you're nocturnally devouring the internet. This app (thankfully free) corrects this problem by automatically raising the "color temperature" of your display at around the time the sun sets in your part of the world. It's pretty neat. To be honest, I have no idea if it's actually helpful or if I've just been duped by a lot of hype into thinking that it is, but in any case, here's the site where you can download it, or investigate it, or both. I figure it's worth trying. As a bonus, it works with OS X, Windows, and Linux! Hear that, nerd? Linux! Oh, and Apple's iOS... so you can get to sleep faster after finishing a game of Angry Birds between the sheets?*

the boss's kid messed up this cartoon yin-yang and the company logo was born

The second app requires a little more courage to plug, because to recommend it is to identify with the problem it is designed to mitigate. It's called "Freedom" and it lets you shut off your internet for a variable amount of time, anywhere between fifteen minutes and eight full hours. The interesting thing about Freedom is what it assumes about you, its user: namely, that you are incapable of working in a focused and disciplined way on your computer so long as your computer has a connection to the whooshing black hole that is the internet. Really, your willpower is so slight and your resolve so pathetic that you can't just unplug your ethernet cord or disable your wifi. You need something a little stronger—the firmness of a maternal authority, perhaps. You need Momma App to fly into a rage, pinch your ear and say "that's IT! NO MORE INTERNET for you! [...] umm, how long would you like me to keep you offline?"

It's an old-school sort of freedom they're talking about

And you know what? Yeah, I am that creature of pitiable resolve. Today, severed from the digital mothership as I was, I wrote some 2500 words in a six hour window. Yes, it was hard and tiresome and lonely and claustrophobic and dizzyingly scary just like every online junkie knows withdrawal will be, but at the end of the day, I'm thankful for how much crap I got done. I only wish Freedom wouldn't put you out for $10, but eh, someone else's discipline has to come at a price, I suppose. Here's the site. You can also download a free trial version with five uses, and the app is compatible with OS X and Windows Vista/XP/7/whatever.

I've written two longer pieces for this blog that I need to clear with other people before I put them up, but they're in the hopper at least. Not sure what else will go up here in the next few weeks, with all the tests and the papers and the endless sighing that dominate this month in my calendar, but who knows. Thanks for reading. As a bonus, here's a balloon sculpture commemorating a painting commemorating a couple that was well acquainted with old-school freedom and all its attendant zaniness:

"We don't play Angry Birds between the sheets!"*

__________________________________________

*Could this be the euphemism for sex that this generation has been waiting for? Not the euphemism we want, but perhaps - the euphemism we deserve?