What It's Like

I wrote: "I’ve had all sorts of interpretations of experience tonight already and it’s only 8:20, which is in some ways the message of the evening, or maybe of the last several days, which seemed to remind me that although the most memorable stuff happens after you’ve gone to bed, the learning takes place before you are fully awake and have formed an opinion on the subject.

Right?

I went, in the early part of the evening, to a talk about Aristotle’s conception of the good life, what I took from it is a question over the nature of the good life, but now, I’m having doubts about that. Here’s the central question as I understand it: How should someone who knows what the good life is live? Like, I’ve already seen the answers, what is the question?

Honestly, I kept falling asleep during the talk; that’s messed up; how does one create the classroom experience right off?

I’m lucky; I know how to help emerge that experience among students of a certain type. Meawhile, it doesn’t really matter what I say so much as how I say it.

But at that level, an education simply becomes a way to reaffirm the extant power structures. While it serves me to endorse those structures, I’m not sure that they promulgate values I aspire to.

Meanwhile, I am feeling the effects of sharing two pitchers of pumpkin beer over dinner such as it was. Plus, my experience is somewhat augmented by the cookie I consumed the moment I left the lecture hall at the UW. I’m not at all convinced this gives me any insight into the arcana of all existence, but at least it keeps me from obsessing over the wild and whacky week on Wall Street."

Now, though, in the bright light of an autumn morning, it all seems fine; sunshine is streaming in through the windows, and I’ve got a whole fresh pot of coffee for company.