Hot Hot Heat
I just spent three weeks driving through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and southern California, among other places. In Las Vegas, it was 115 degrees for three days in a row. Then I came home to beautiful Minnesota, known for its icy winters, and today is the first day this year that I have broken a solid sweat sitting stone still. Oh, the irony.
In case you missed it, I am now in fact back in Minneapolis. The trip was awesome, so buy me a beer or three and I'll tell you all about it.
I looked over my old postings the other day and realized that my blog has a split personality. Half the time, it has a fairly conventional "this is what happened in my general vicinity recently, and this is what I think of it" flavor, but then sometimes it goes and does a "these are the drops of commentary that have condensed from the vapor of my thinking on an abstract intellectual topic over the last one to fifteen years." I've been a bit sparse on the latter lately.
I was recently caught making wrong use of a quotation. That is, I offered a quote -- "To hear, one must be silent" -- without fully understanding what I meant by it, and was rightly called on it. So I thought about it, and I think I've found a meaning to exonorate me (which may have been lingering in my mind from the start, and I will pretend that it was). It is this:
I think ideas (beliefs, philosophies) are like wine.
I am a fan of wine, and I encourage anyone with the motivation and the resources to try making wine, because no one can suffer from there being too much wine in the world. Even if it's bad wine, the world can learn something from it by understanding why it's a bad wine, and we can't do that if it's never produced.
But before we can tell if a wine is good or bad, we have to give it a chance. We can tell something about a wine from its color, its consistency, its fragrance, but we cannot properly judge a wine if we're holding a mouthful of something else. So we have to spit out our favorite vintage, cleanse our mouths and take the new contender into ourselves; only then can we know it well enough to say if one is better or worse than another.
Ideas are the same. Many ideas are generated by the din of human thought -- some are very good, others are terrible. But in order to know the difference, we have to let go of our own beliefs and accept a new idea openly, make it a part of ourselves; we must actually believe it. Only then can we see its nature and implications clearly enough to judge its value. So, to hear an idea (or rather, to give it a hearing, a fair chance), one must temporarily silence the old ideas within.
With that in mind, I try to believe every outrageous thing I hear; how else could I know that it's outrageous?
In case you missed it, I am now in fact back in Minneapolis. The trip was awesome, so buy me a beer or three and I'll tell you all about it.
I looked over my old postings the other day and realized that my blog has a split personality. Half the time, it has a fairly conventional "this is what happened in my general vicinity recently, and this is what I think of it" flavor, but then sometimes it goes and does a "these are the drops of commentary that have condensed from the vapor of my thinking on an abstract intellectual topic over the last one to fifteen years." I've been a bit sparse on the latter lately.
I was recently caught making wrong use of a quotation. That is, I offered a quote -- "To hear, one must be silent" -- without fully understanding what I meant by it, and was rightly called on it. So I thought about it, and I think I've found a meaning to exonorate me (which may have been lingering in my mind from the start, and I will pretend that it was). It is this:
I think ideas (beliefs, philosophies) are like wine.
I am a fan of wine, and I encourage anyone with the motivation and the resources to try making wine, because no one can suffer from there being too much wine in the world. Even if it's bad wine, the world can learn something from it by understanding why it's a bad wine, and we can't do that if it's never produced.
But before we can tell if a wine is good or bad, we have to give it a chance. We can tell something about a wine from its color, its consistency, its fragrance, but we cannot properly judge a wine if we're holding a mouthful of something else. So we have to spit out our favorite vintage, cleanse our mouths and take the new contender into ourselves; only then can we know it well enough to say if one is better or worse than another.
Ideas are the same. Many ideas are generated by the din of human thought -- some are very good, others are terrible. But in order to know the difference, we have to let go of our own beliefs and accept a new idea openly, make it a part of ourselves; we must actually believe it. Only then can we see its nature and implications clearly enough to judge its value. So, to hear an idea (or rather, to give it a hearing, a fair chance), one must temporarily silence the old ideas within.
With that in mind, I try to believe every outrageous thing I hear; how else could I know that it's outrageous?
posted by a at
6:02 PM
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