I was lucky...

I was lucky, I guess. I learned not only habits of mind, but substance of value. Both have informed my life.

The habit of analysing a text to discover the interplay of surface and depth, to uncover its connections to the culture in which it's embedded, to think thoughts I couldn't otherwise think, all these have enriched my life. Most of all, they've helped me get some inkling of what it's like to be someone else.

As for substance: The works I read for my degree have common themes. They are all riffs on the central insight of our religions and philosophies: that connection with other human beings is the only thing that makes life worth living.

My faith tradition supplies one version of this insight: "Love God, and love your neighbour." To love God means to love his creation. To love your neighbour means to see each other as precious beings. To do both means to be overwhelmed by awe at the gift of being alive.

It was the study of secular texts that brought me to see the sacred texts as primary. They are historically the first ones to teach those habits of mind and those matters of substance. That's why they endure. And that's why study of the humanities remains essential. Without the discipline of deep reading, a text will feed the darkest impulses of the human heart.

 

Three Haiku

1.
Frog in sunlit pond
Heron stalking with prim steps
Bubbles on water

2.
Planes glide through blue air
Silver fish in white water
Death waits for his time

3.
Tulips stand bravely
By dark cedar hedge, spilling
Colours like water

 2022.05.24

Airplane travel

We don’t travel on airplanes, we are shipped from one location to another like parcels of fish.

Sure, there are windows from which we can observe the clouds, if any, and the topography, which looks so little like the maps we’ve filed in our memories that we can barely recognise our location. That’s why some like to watch the display of the flight path over a vaguely aerial view of the ground. The alternative is to watch a movie, which seems a more honest admission that we can’t experience flight as travel.

Travel requires not only movement, but the sensation, the awareness, the feeling of movement. There is none such when we fly in a modern aircraft. The plane may as well be standing still somewhere in space with the surroundings flowing past. A car isn’t much different: we sit still in the car, and the road, the landscape, the air move past us. Does this mean the car is moving? Hard to say, until something interrupts the motion of the car, and we move inside the car and possibly out of it. The absence of the sensation of movement explains why driving and flight simulators work so well.                                
Travel requires agency. We move ourselves, by moving our limbs. We move across and through our surroundings. In a plane, in a car, in a train, we are carried by the machine. The only machine that enables us to travel is the bicycle, which we cause to move by moving our limbs, just as we cause our body to move by moving our limbs.

“Travel by airplane” misrepresents what’s actually happening. The plane transports us, just as it transports our bags.  Just like a parcel of fish.