For me, this course has been about finding things. Certainly it's been about finding new places, people and species, but above all that it has been about finding truth. Beautiful, simple truth: something we can hold on to, touch, make real. Something that gives us a foundation, a horizon ahead of us, or something to come home to.
I believe in the stunning, excruciating simplicity of truth. I believe that nothing holds more power than something honest, real - good. Some people turn to science. Some people turn to God. I turn to words. When I find them - the ones that have magic - their value is almost always impossible to define. I can find no common thread to help me find the other words that are waiting somewhere for me. I have only one way to recognize them - it's a feeling in the pit of my stomach. My stomach jerks and squirms, as if it has registered the presence of some unadulterated piece of greatness. And so I write the words down, saving them to a bit of scrap paper and making them real and tangible. I secretly wait for my office to turn into Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium. I imagine one day these words, all these scraps of paper, will swirl around, shuffle and reorganize and become an answer to the big bad world with its confusion and complexity. It hasn't happened yet. Until it does, I'm happy with my bits of paper.
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Toria--It's interesting how words and truth are conjoined for you. Your will to have order appear from words on scraps of paper, stirred perhaps by imagination (or scholarship), reminds me of Linnaeus's will to put order in the world by bestowing names. I think Linnaeus probably shared your sense of words as parcels of truth. I like the idea that our course has been 'about finding things.'
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