Tag Archives: philosophy

PERSONAL FILE: Life, Outside the Box

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(Photo: @Doug88888)

Confession: I’ve never really had a firm grasp of what I wanted to do with my life. Shocking, I know, because I’m pretty sure all (or most) twenty-something college grads who randomly move to Korea know the answer to that question. The name of my blog, random though its inception may have been, has become a “profound” question of sorts–what does it mean to be “roygeneable”? Hell if I know, and that’s the point: I’m looking for something that’s roygeneable, that’s me. Of course, I’ve always had a lot of options and a lot of different things I found mildly interesting. Teaching was probably at the top of that very long list, but it definitely wasn’t and isn’t anything I would call a “passion.” A great many of the people I know really like using that word and its meaning has unfortunately been numbed–sort of like the word “love.” I became an ESL teacher because I needed something fun to do for a few years where I could make good money and pay off loans. The job is terrific, but it’s not even remotely something I’d want as a career.

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DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY: Shit No One Talks About

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Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (1931...

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (1931), Museum of Modern Art (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

I’ll lead by saying this probably isn’t the sort of post everyone will find riveting. All I can say is, It’s about time. Literally.

During the research phase of writing my senior paper, I came across a study done by Stanford professor Lera Boroditsky that looked at the different frameworks within English and Mandarin concerning how to express the abstract concept of time in spatial terms. Okay, now let’s unpack that. First, what do I mean “the abstract concept of time”? Well, I mean time as independent from the arbitrary measurements we impose on it. We measure time in hours, days, weeks, years, etc. for a reason–actually many different reasons. A year is, of course, the length of time it takes the planet to travel once in its elliptical path around the Sun. While a “day” is the length of time the Earth takes to make one rotation on its axis (which, to note, is not constant), how the day is subdivided is an ancient, arbitrary determination, with the roots of the 24-hour day lying in pharaonic Egypt. The concept of a seven-day week is primarily an outgrowth of Christian and Jewish beliefs concerning creation while other cultures have different week-lengths.

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PERSONAL FILE: A Box-full of Memories

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What if it were that easy?

Dumbledore has an armory of peculiar magical devices in J. K. Rowling’s story of Harry Potter but there’s one that’s of particular interest to me. He keeps it locked away in a cupboard and when the young wizard first stumbles upon it toward the end of the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, it’s only a short time until the final contest of the Triwizard Tournament. After having a vision of the dark lord Voldemort, Harry finds himself in Dumbledore’s office and accidentally discovers the object in the cupboard, left slightly ajar: it’s the Pensieve and Harry’s curiosity gets the better of him when he leans in too close to the shining basin and falls in, finding himself doused in the headmaster’s memories.

As with many things in Rowling’s books, “Pensieve” is a play on words: “pensive” means to be thoughtful or absorbed in deep reflection and contemplation. Dumbledore periodically takes his memories–which appear as a wispy white vapor on the tip of his wand–from his head and drops them into the Pensieve where he will return to examine them on occasion to search for “patterns and links.” Continue reading →