aspirations.

One day, I hope I will be able to write like this:

"The long miseries and vanquished heroics of Troy inspired the world for millennia, though there is not much in the tale to offer comfort except the spectacle of futility on an epic scale. I am not sure we have at the moment any notion of comfort in that sense, of feeling burdens which come with being human in the world lifted by compassionate imagination. Our always greater eagerness to describe ourselves as sufferers makes us always less willing to identify with suffering as a fact of human life...This being human -- people have loved it through plague and famine and siege. And Dante, who knew the world about suffering, had a place in hell for people who were grave when they might have rejoiced." > Marilynne Robinson, "Facing Reality"

zeitfreude.

Grad school, I've decided, is one long subject convergence continuum. I've written about this before; about how there are constant strange subject convergences that occur again and again, somehow randomly and yet unsurprisingly. Case in point: a couple weeks ago during my office hours I had a long discussion with an undergrad and and my fellow TA about Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt. Neither of them had read Schmitt, and I was attempting to (badly) summarize The Concept of the Political and how it may (or may not) relate to Arendt. This was, by the way, the first time anyone has mentioned Schmitt since I started classes here.

Within the next week, in three separate classes, three different professors mentioned Schmitt and Arendt in the same sentence. Not exactly earth shattering; talking about Arendt and Schmitt in a political theory class is hardly off-topic, after all. It's not like all my professors suddenly became obsessed with Britney Spears, or the best way to clarify butter. But still, Arendt and Schmitt just happened to come up, in totally organic ways that had nothing to do with me. It was awesome; like I had somehow introduced the topic into the political theory universe, and it started to bounce around and into other people's brains and conversations, only to get repeated back to me within days. Totally ridiculous, I know, but...fun to imagine.

I mentioned to one of my fellow grad students that I think there should be a word for this kind of thing (prefereably some German noun that would be both fun to say and randomly capitalized, like Schadenfreude or Zeitgeist) and not only did he look at my like I was possibly insane, but he suggested that the word "coincidence" already had that covered. Coincidence! A coincidence is when you run into someone you know in the street, or you happen to own the same pair of shoes as the person sitting next to you; what I'm describing is academically cosmic. I don't think he quite got my point, though. And, unfortunately, I don't speak German, so someone else will have to come up with the appropriate word. I bet Arendt and Schmitt would know.