Blue sky and yellow sun

"Jesus says: "If those who lead you say to you: 'Look, the kingdom is in the sky!' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you: 'It is in the sea,' then the fishes will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you and outside of you."

"When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the children of the living Father. But if you do not come to know yourselves, then you exist in poverty and you are poverty." - Gospel of Thomas 3

I have had so many crazy ideas during my time at school. I sit back sometimes and cringe when I think about the nonsense I wrote in some of my first papers. But I move on, and I move on all the time, and I can work pretty hard and articulate myself relatively well. The more classes I take in a single subject area, the happier I get.

Nothing is moving me, now. When I think about leaving school, I think that the only thing I will be happy with is graduate school. I enjoy the thought of surrendering myself completely to a single subject, and knowing it intimately. Now I just feel exhausted from too many disparate courses. I can't make sense of it.

I sometimes harbor a false wish that I will happen upon The One Thing That Matters. I will find it, if I poke around long enough. So I have wandered and tried so many different professors and times and places and I'm exhausted. I leafed through my dogeared copy of Wonderful Life and remembered how it felt to be taking science courses and history of science. I feel like I am abandoning things.

I think I see a man walking across a peaked roof but I know that isn't happening. I see a boat up in the top of the trees and I know it's real. I see an arrow in my thigh but I know it's a hallucination.

This is the first semester I've taken any course that dealt with quite recent subject matter and I barely know how to deal with it. I feel like it's a whole new language that I have to learn, and quickly, because I have to write about why the Weimar republic failed by Friday. My religion course I am more comfortable with, but prompts a different set of crises (How strange and distant the New Testament begins to feel! How much it feels like it belongs to a different world, and not mine. This is what happened to me in Classics. We have claimed them as our own, and we have co-opted them, and it feels somewhat wrong.) My English class, well, she thinks I am writing good papers and I think she's wrong. My historiography class - I am most familiar with the stuff of it (Medieval Europe and Early Modern S. America). I should be able to do this class, but I lose myself in the theory books that I should have read two years ago and begin to feel paralyzed.

What on earth am I going to do when I leave here?

2002-10-08, Blue sky and yellow sun

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