Friday, January 12, 2007

An existential Roomba?

I'm thinking about the crossing-over point that seems attached to most parts of life. I've been in houses that were no longer decorated but instead became warehouses for decorations. Does this happen to lives? I think so. There are lives that become warehouses of events that themselves lead to no ultimate goal or benefit. I ask myself about this as I become busier and busier. Am I merely stocking my warehouse more quickly? There seems to be a tradition among students to resent the acquisition of facts as irrelevant and needless. When this is placed upon them by teachers who cherish facts as if they were silver dollars, then I think the complaint is reasonable. But there are still a lot of students who find the argument convenient for justifying their own laziness. So, I think that there is a line between information whose value is demonstrated by the ideas it supports and information that is merely decoration. I'm thinking that events that happen in a life might also cross over and become decoration, too. I'm thinking that lives can become as cluttered as curio cabinets filled with porcelain trash, filled with happenings that are fleetingly attractive, laughably similar, ultimately useless. I can throw out the trash in my house and make space for pieces that make it a home, but how do I throw out the trash in my life?

1 comment:

Lisa M Lane said...

About information versus meaning: shouldn't information be a foundation, not a decoration? Meaning derives from facts, doesn't it? Or perhaps this is just the difference between inductive thinking, where one collects facts and creates meaning, and the deductive, where one creates categories of meaning into which to file the facts. The decoration could then be the conceit, the inflated manner, one might engineer in expressing these ideas self-consciously. That, by all means, could be done away with.

Within the context of a life, the collection of events is only clutter if one displays them all, remembers them all, gives them all equivalency of meaning. Instead, don't we put some on display, some in the closet? The events of our lives are important in that we can bring them out when we need them, later, when there is a context that gives them fuller meaning. Lives have no goal, or rather the goal is in experiencing them fully. If ones life seems just a clutter of events, then it's time to enjoy life more, placing the past in the context of the present only when it becomes truly useful.