In the last history class I took in college, I read a memoir in which the author began his introduction with a statement something along the lines of "an introduction is like the front porch of a house: one can either enter a house by going through the front, lingering on the porch before going in, or one can go around the side and enter straight away. Regardless, they will get into the house just fine." In other words, you don't really need to read this post. If you don't care to parse through the long winding ruminations that constitute this introduction--and why would you, really?--and just want to know what I'm doing on this trip of mine, you could never read this post and be just fine. Nonetheless, if for some reason you want to know really why I'm going on a trip like this, other than for the reason that it's a neat opportunity, then maybe you do want to read this...
Initially, I began this post to get myself used to blogging, and I figured a good way to start would be to explain my blog's title. I want to keep this blog a relatively honest representation of what's going on in my life, so I'll first do away with any pretense I might have otherwise maintained of not having spent a self-consciously large amount of time trying to come up with a title for this blog. I admit I combed through and made lists of apt-seeming quotes from famous books, poems and speeches, obsessing over finding just the right words to forever encapsulate what is going on in my life now and through the next year. I wanted that elegant, unique title that avoids coming off stultified and self-important, too long or too obscure. At the same time, I hoped it would be accessible without being over-literal or pedestrian.
Thus, having given myself a goal that clearly exceeds my writing skills, nothing came to me. I couldn't find the right combination of words to convey all that baggage, so of course, in the end, I made my stupid blog's title lengthy, obscure, inaccessible, self-important, and kind of irrelevant sounding--all the things I had wanted to avoid. And yet, when I finally landed on this title, I became immediately attached to it, and I couldn't think of anything else that seemed to fit so well on so many levels.
What's more, the process by which I did get to it touches on some of the bigger things I've been grappling with as I got ready for this unbelievable trip to what my friend poignantly called the Muddled East. In fact though, part of the reason I'm going on this trip is my aim to un-muddle, for myself if for no one else, the Middle East, and in some ways, the origin of my title alludes to that as well.
I stumbled on this blog's title one night as I was lounging around my house, reading now-forgotten news stories about this or that international crisis. Something in one of the articles sparked the memory of a feeling I had gotten that first time I consciously realized I wanted to go off into the world like this. That epiphany had occurred one day in the Vassar library as I was reading a book called "The Magic Lantern" for a history class about life under communism in the Soviet Union's satellite countries. The book's title came from the name of an abandoned theater where the author had hung out with all the most important anti-communist Czech leaders (notably having private drinks with the movement's leader and future Czech president, Vaclav Havel). The author had similarly close experiences with many of the other anti-communist movements' leaders, and throughout the book I was awed by the intimacy with which the author had been allowed to witness the fall of communism in not one, two, or three, but four different countries. So struck was I, that I had written in the book after the first chapter, "I want to be there when it happens!" These words, written in big letters that filled most of the page, had animated with sudden clarity the broader form of something like whatever are supposed to be my life's ultimate aspirations. I didn't exactly know where "there" or what "it" was, but I knew I wanted to be on the spot when the events that changed the world went down.
As such, remembering that pivotal realization this summer finally lent my consciousness a coherent, updated articulation of what I actually want to do with my life, so I figured looking back into the book that had helped shape the original inspiration would probably help me find the words to best encapsulate this beginning-of-the-rest-of-my-life period that I wanted to sum up with this title.
Unfortunately, in rereading the book, I discovered how uninterestingly written it was, and that it was the story of the book, not the wording, that had inspired me. No title to be found there.
Luckily, underneath The Magic Lantern in my stack of books was a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges which I idly picked up with the intention of distracting myself from the futile title search, only to accidentally find the words that now sit atop this blog after about five minutes of procrastinatory reading.
The words come from the short story, "Averroes' Search," which is a story about the famous Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (the Arabic name which Europeans turned into "Averroes") who, without getting into too much detail, did a lot of cool things in philosophy, Islamic thought, math, science, astronomy, and other stuff. For the purposes of this post, it's really only important to know that he lived in Muslim-ruled southern Spain during the 12th century and his work more or less introduced Europe to the works of Aristotle.
Borges's story starts with Averroes struggling to understand how to properly translate into Arabic the Greek words for "comedy" and "tragedy" when he had no analogous cultural practices to help him understand theater. Taking a break from his translations, he then gets into a discussion with some friends about how the words in commonly repeated poems and sayings actually accumulate greater meaning over time by the number of times they are read. That is to say, Averroes argues that the total meaning and significance (not unlike one of Plato's forms*) attached to such words by all the people in the world grows by every additional person's individual interpretation of that meaning and significance.
To make his point, Averroes "quotes" words** from a poem that had comforted him on the occasion of being exiled to Morocco: "You too are here, oh palm!/On this foreign soil . . ."*** The words, Averroes tells us, were supposedly first uttered by an Arab king isolated from his homeland during a protracted military campaign. Caught up in a bout of nostalgia one day, the king had looked out his window only to realize suddenly that the palm trees in whichever foreign land he then occupied looked not unlike the palms he found at home. Averroes remarks that just as it had for the Arab King, the fact that palm trees grow abroad in Morocco like they do at his home in Spain had reassured him when he too was separated from his home.
In explaining this, Averroes seeks to make his larger point about words and their accumulated meanings in unique context, but I became attached to the poem's made-up context: the idea that trees will be trees wherever I go in the world, or--more importantly--that people will be people wherever I go in the world. It seems sort of elementary, but I think I would do well to remind myself of that every now and then on this trip. Hence the title.
This post took me a long time to write, but even already as I sit here a day and a half into my stay in Cairo, caught up in the weird experience of being a new student at a new school all over again, I am reminded that I am here to meet and learn from Egyptians far more than I am here to make friends with my American compatriots. I can't just walk by Egyptians without engaging them on more than a tourist level. Hopefully this blog will serve to constantly remind me of that. I will probably have more thoughts about all this as my trip goes on, but I will try not to make all my posts as academic and cerebral as this one.
*Philosophy experts, please forgive this necessarily simplistic/potentially wrong explanation: Plato's idea of forms asserts basically that all things are manifestations of a basic form, like how when I say "cat" you think of a cat, but it's not the same cat as the one I thought of, though we are both thinking of a manifestation of the form of a cat. In Averroes/Borges's thinking, words are themselves our representations of the form, but every interpretation is a new extension of the greater form that underlies the words' concepts. I think this is the point of what Borges was writing because he knew that Averroes also studied and translated Plato's Republic (for the benefit of most of Europe).
**I put "quotes" in quotation marks here because I'm pretty sure, though based entirely on an educated guess, that Borges is actually "quoting" a poem that he himself made up. Borges frequently cited or alluded to made-up works both for literary reasons as well as for generally-being-a-cool-guy reasons.
***This is admittedly kind of a loose translation, but I feel justified in it by the very number of different ways the original Spanish of Borges's story has been translated. I know enough Spanish to reasonably believe that my translation is not really wrong in meaning, even if it is wrong in exact wording,
Initially, I began this post to get myself used to blogging, and I figured a good way to start would be to explain my blog's title. I want to keep this blog a relatively honest representation of what's going on in my life, so I'll first do away with any pretense I might have otherwise maintained of not having spent a self-consciously large amount of time trying to come up with a title for this blog. I admit I combed through and made lists of apt-seeming quotes from famous books, poems and speeches, obsessing over finding just the right words to forever encapsulate what is going on in my life now and through the next year. I wanted that elegant, unique title that avoids coming off stultified and self-important, too long or too obscure. At the same time, I hoped it would be accessible without being over-literal or pedestrian.
Thus, having given myself a goal that clearly exceeds my writing skills, nothing came to me. I couldn't find the right combination of words to convey all that baggage, so of course, in the end, I made my stupid blog's title lengthy, obscure, inaccessible, self-important, and kind of irrelevant sounding--all the things I had wanted to avoid. And yet, when I finally landed on this title, I became immediately attached to it, and I couldn't think of anything else that seemed to fit so well on so many levels.
What's more, the process by which I did get to it touches on some of the bigger things I've been grappling with as I got ready for this unbelievable trip to what my friend poignantly called the Muddled East. In fact though, part of the reason I'm going on this trip is my aim to un-muddle, for myself if for no one else, the Middle East, and in some ways, the origin of my title alludes to that as well.
I stumbled on this blog's title one night as I was lounging around my house, reading now-forgotten news stories about this or that international crisis. Something in one of the articles sparked the memory of a feeling I had gotten that first time I consciously realized I wanted to go off into the world like this. That epiphany had occurred one day in the Vassar library as I was reading a book called "The Magic Lantern" for a history class about life under communism in the Soviet Union's satellite countries. The book's title came from the name of an abandoned theater where the author had hung out with all the most important anti-communist Czech leaders (notably having private drinks with the movement's leader and future Czech president, Vaclav Havel). The author had similarly close experiences with many of the other anti-communist movements' leaders, and throughout the book I was awed by the intimacy with which the author had been allowed to witness the fall of communism in not one, two, or three, but four different countries. So struck was I, that I had written in the book after the first chapter, "I want to be there when it happens!" These words, written in big letters that filled most of the page, had animated with sudden clarity the broader form of something like whatever are supposed to be my life's ultimate aspirations. I didn't exactly know where "there" or what "it" was, but I knew I wanted to be on the spot when the events that changed the world went down.
As such, remembering that pivotal realization this summer finally lent my consciousness a coherent, updated articulation of what I actually want to do with my life, so I figured looking back into the book that had helped shape the original inspiration would probably help me find the words to best encapsulate this beginning-of-the-rest-of-my-life period that I wanted to sum up with this title.
Unfortunately, in rereading the book, I discovered how uninterestingly written it was, and that it was the story of the book, not the wording, that had inspired me. No title to be found there.
Luckily, underneath The Magic Lantern in my stack of books was a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges which I idly picked up with the intention of distracting myself from the futile title search, only to accidentally find the words that now sit atop this blog after about five minutes of procrastinatory reading.
The words come from the short story, "Averroes' Search," which is a story about the famous Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (the Arabic name which Europeans turned into "Averroes") who, without getting into too much detail, did a lot of cool things in philosophy, Islamic thought, math, science, astronomy, and other stuff. For the purposes of this post, it's really only important to know that he lived in Muslim-ruled southern Spain during the 12th century and his work more or less introduced Europe to the works of Aristotle.
Borges's story starts with Averroes struggling to understand how to properly translate into Arabic the Greek words for "comedy" and "tragedy" when he had no analogous cultural practices to help him understand theater. Taking a break from his translations, he then gets into a discussion with some friends about how the words in commonly repeated poems and sayings actually accumulate greater meaning over time by the number of times they are read. That is to say, Averroes argues that the total meaning and significance (not unlike one of Plato's forms*) attached to such words by all the people in the world grows by every additional person's individual interpretation of that meaning and significance.
To make his point, Averroes "quotes" words** from a poem that had comforted him on the occasion of being exiled to Morocco: "You too are here, oh palm!/On this foreign soil . . ."*** The words, Averroes tells us, were supposedly first uttered by an Arab king isolated from his homeland during a protracted military campaign. Caught up in a bout of nostalgia one day, the king had looked out his window only to realize suddenly that the palm trees in whichever foreign land he then occupied looked not unlike the palms he found at home. Averroes remarks that just as it had for the Arab King, the fact that palm trees grow abroad in Morocco like they do at his home in Spain had reassured him when he too was separated from his home.
In explaining this, Averroes seeks to make his larger point about words and their accumulated meanings in unique context, but I became attached to the poem's made-up context: the idea that trees will be trees wherever I go in the world, or--more importantly--that people will be people wherever I go in the world. It seems sort of elementary, but I think I would do well to remind myself of that every now and then on this trip. Hence the title.
This post took me a long time to write, but even already as I sit here a day and a half into my stay in Cairo, caught up in the weird experience of being a new student at a new school all over again, I am reminded that I am here to meet and learn from Egyptians far more than I am here to make friends with my American compatriots. I can't just walk by Egyptians without engaging them on more than a tourist level. Hopefully this blog will serve to constantly remind me of that. I will probably have more thoughts about all this as my trip goes on, but I will try not to make all my posts as academic and cerebral as this one.
*Philosophy experts, please forgive this necessarily simplistic/potentially wrong explanation: Plato's idea of forms asserts basically that all things are manifestations of a basic form, like how when I say "cat" you think of a cat, but it's not the same cat as the one I thought of, though we are both thinking of a manifestation of the form of a cat. In Averroes/Borges's thinking, words are themselves our representations of the form, but every interpretation is a new extension of the greater form that underlies the words' concepts. I think this is the point of what Borges was writing because he knew that Averroes also studied and translated Plato's Republic (for the benefit of most of Europe).
**I put "quotes" in quotation marks here because I'm pretty sure, though based entirely on an educated guess, that Borges is actually "quoting" a poem that he himself made up. Borges frequently cited or alluded to made-up works both for literary reasons as well as for generally-being-a-cool-guy reasons.
***This is admittedly kind of a loose translation, but I feel justified in it by the very number of different ways the original Spanish of Borges's story has been translated. I know enough Spanish to reasonably believe that my translation is not really wrong in meaning, even if it is wrong in exact wording,
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