Monday, April 25, 2011

Mashup

Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away...


1. "You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms  or books written in a very foreign language."  


2. "Things and animals- and our enjoyment of it is so indescribably beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions. In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exaltation. And those who come together in the nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet, who will appear in order to say ecstasies that are unsayable." 

3."For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first."

4. "When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No... don't blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are."     
                          5.  

6. "It is also good to love: Because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward- beating heart, they must learn to love." 


7. "But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is-; solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves." 


8. "Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you." 


9.  You don't need to watch the whole thing. The first 2 mins are enough. 

10. "We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far." 



11. "Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent-?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances."


12. "But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment...: and what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many other who still wanted to come." 

13. "By about 4 AM he had decided he was in love with me. Which, though a little strange, since I’d barely spoken, was fine with me. It’s always nice when someone’s in love with you. Gives you leverage."

14.

15. "It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always  go on doing that-), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way-." 

16. "You can never know if a person forgives you when you wrong them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. You don't think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of perception when you are in the middle of your first kiss."

17. "Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?" 
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Works Cited.

1. Rilke, Rainer. Letters to a Young Poet. New York: Random House Inc., 1984. Print. (34). 
2.  Rilke, Rainer. (39).
3.  Lightman, Alan. Einstein's Dreams. New York: Warner Bros. Edition, 1993. Print.
4.  Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Dir. John Madden. 2001. Film. 
5.  Poehling, Allison. allie-poehlingx3.xanga. Dec 11, 2010. Web. 04/25/2011. 
6.  Rilke, Rainer. (68).
7.  Rilke, Rainer. (69). 
8.  Rilke, Rainer. (41).
9.  Akon. Universal Records: SRC Records, Inc.,2005. Film. 
10. Rilke, Rainer. (87). 
11. Rilke, Rainer.  (69-70).
12. Rilke, Rainer. (70-71). 
13. Poehling, Allison.
14. Nicholas. Otherwise source unknown. 
15. Rilke, Rainer. (72). 
16. Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie's World. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1991. Print.
17. Lightman, Alan. 

Best of the week: Do You Mind?

When Mr. Allen first introduced Do you mind? I was intrigued and that it was a very interesting thing to do. We get to answer two questions every day that we usually don't get to answer or think about. Answering the questions was only part of the beauty; the real thing that caught my eye was how people answered those questions.
Everyone sees the world in different ways and we often don't realize this. There is a psychology approach that talks about this. The Phenomenological Approach. Even though this is a very long and complicated approach name, all it really means is that people see the world in different ways.
Through answering the same questions and then talking about our answers, I noticed how very true this is. People would answer the question in ways I would never even think of.
People experience things in very different ways than us that is why we are not able to just assume that what and how we see things is the right way. It might be the right way for us, but the completely wrong way for someone else... this is what makes the world so interesting and every person so unique. People find beauty in the randomest things for the most random reasons. This is the whole reason there is so much creativity and uniqueness in the world.  It's Awesome!

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Blogging around

From Me to Debra's Entry of Captured Thought: Free Will.
Your entry made me wish I was in that class, it seems like a very interesting one. I also wish to believe that we have free will but I think that our free will is very limited. Past our simple choices like "to go to the bathroom or eat some food," everything is influenced by something else. We choose to do something but past that someone influences us to make the decisions we end up making.
I feel that "freedom" is just a word. In reality we are far from free. Every action that actually matters is somehow limited. The bill of rights are even limited when they actually matter.
I feel that even in classes where we are supposed to have the freedom to say anything we want, we are limited by the teacher and their opinion. Many teachers shut down our opinions because they think that there's is more important.
A Response to Lizzie's Metacognition: First Semester.

I took humanities for the opposite reason than you did but I definitely agree that it opened up my creativity as well. I admire your want to take a more difficult class for you to explore the other part of your brain that you usually don't use, for me, I use my creative brain all the time but in the end of junior year and the summer I had a lot of trouble with creativity and coming up with my own ideas; this class opened up my mind and let me create new things instead of just taking from others.
I agree with you that the Mindbook was probably the best part of the class. It opened up my mind and let me explore assignments completely lacking in boundaries. That helped my mind the most.
I just wish the class was as easy going as it is now, the whole year, instead of being so tight-knit and 50 projects at once.