A Reckoning
The original use of the word reckoning labeled a numbering or census, an enumerated list. In connection with another use implying thinking or belief, I reckon it's as good a way of organizing a retrospect as any. (Ed. note: I should never ever be allowed to buy an actual Oxford English Dictionary. The etymology is as addicting as wikipedia). The real reason of course is that this is one of the few times I'm actually not looking forward to seeing the chapter of my life end. In any other situation I'd try to look ahead and see how things would improve in the future, but here I can't really see how my life could get better than the time I've had here.
That said, I do like looking back at times and seeing how different periods of my life have gone. After high school, after each year of college, I've found it's a good idea to look back to see how I've changed and what I've done. It's helpful in trying to figure out what I need to do next in life. In this sense, I need to do this reckoning to figure out how I'm going to make next year at all comparable to the time I've had here. So what I've done is compiled a list of things that I have done or have experienced while I've been here: at least the things I could count. By no means does this encapsulate my experience here. It is merely a guide towards an approximation.
Travel
Countries visited: Nine, not counting the U.K. Five were visited by plane, the others by train.
Miles walked in foreign countries: about 120, give or take.
People noticing I was American: at least 20 who mentioned something.
Conversations had with people in a language I had tried to learn that morning / the night before: 6. One couple actually knew English, they honestly thought I was Italian.
Languages I remember now after trying to learn them overnight: 0
Times I was scared for my life: 2. Once in Budapest, once somewhere in Romania.
Number of times I've broken the ice by telling the train story: 8
Number of times I've broken the ice by talking about guitars: 3, all in the same hostel
Number of fantastic beers I've had: Too many to count
Number of fantastic meals I've had: see above
Phones lost while / because of traveling: 3
Times been to London: 5
Most visited attraction in London: outside of this one great coffee shop, the British library
Most surreal experience in London: realizing that it's exactly like Paris except tidier.
Place I most wish I could have visited but didn't: probably Amsterdam, although I saw great pictures and had recommended by one of my tutors Tripoli.
Biggest letdown: Not being able to see Vienna because the train was delayed
Most awe-inspiring: toss up between Notre Dame and Hagia Sophia. Runners up include the Duomo, Rustem Pasha,
Guernica, Dachau in an obviously more subdued light, and the whiskey tasting at the Jameson's distillery.
Productivity:
New books read from: 579, of which, I read 508 completely.
Books read including re-reads (read here more than once) and repeat readings (reading a book I've read before): 812. (Ed. note: you cannot believe how long or the necessary neurotic perfectionism it took to count them all)
Biggest surprise: How much of "the Diary of Lady Murasaki" I could actually read.
Biggest letdown: toss up between Michel Foucault and the later Heidegger.
Pages written: 950, give or take, not counting these pages. Break down: Non-fiction, assigned: 192. Non-fiction, drafts for larger things: 202. Non-fiction, random crap including blog and journal: 304. Long fictions: 80 and 114. Short fictions: about 58. About 40% of the total was handwritten and 60% typed. Percentage I now think is crap? Too much.
Number of story / argument ideas that I had to trash because they were bad: at least ten including some that I had before I came here.
Songs learned on guitar: a dozen or so, depending on how you define "learned".
Pieces composed not for guitar: Well, it would have been four, but my flash drive ate three of them.
Hours spent playing guitar: not enough
Meals accidentally missed because I was too busy playing the guitar / writing / reading: Too many
Times seriously considered giving up academia in order to pay the bills with the guitar: at least once
Amount of money made from performing, ever: $0. (Ed. note: hmm.)
Subjects I now feel fairly competent in: 2
Subjects I presumably need to be competent in for the writing I have planned: not counting the fiction? At least 6.
Best answer I can give for why I write so much: "I can't
not write."
Best answer I can give for why I read so much: "Because books are awesome!" (Ed. note: both these have actually been said.)
Biggest time waster: Outside of guitar? Webcomics.
Concluding Remarks
Most lasting impressions: The friends made here. By lasting I guess I mean something I still have.
Thing missed most from the States: Other than certain people? Seriously, Mexican food.
Good memories: All of them, no regrets whatsoever.
P.S.
- I'm going to take this moment to mention casually to those of you in Utah that I will be there for approximately a month starting July 1st. I might want to mention to those of you in Spokane that I will be there after that. We should hang out. Totally.
The Value of History
(Eds. note: I've mentioned I keep a notebook where I jot down ideas and such. I don't often move those writings here - I think I mentioned it the one other time I did it. I'm not very happy with this one, and though I've cleaned it up a bit I think the tone is still off. Still, I'm hoping it's interesting; it does deal with some other things I've written here.)
Two things brought about this train of thought. The first was reading, in a book of essays by the philosopher A.C. Grayling, that the best thing to read for the autodidact was history; it was the best reading for those wishing to improve their lives because it showed the best people acting out their lives. The second was remembering something my history tutor last term mentioned when I said my primary tutorial was philosophy. This man, perhaps the most brilliant person I've ever met, said, "Philosophy? I never could wrap my mind around that stuff. It's too deep for me." This surprised me, because I thought if there was anyone I met while in Oxford who didn't need more philosophical thinking, it was him.
Besides the obvious point that people tend to think that things that they don't understand are more difficult than they actually are, the combination surprised me: the philosopher praising history, the historian acknowledging philosophy's complexity. The two statements aren't exactly the same; I can't imagine my tutor going on to say that everyone should study philosophy because of or despite of its difficulty. But the similarity of the two statements are suggestive. I think it is because of a misunderstanding of the methods of these two disciplines. By method, I don't mean to imply the historian's or the philosopher's version of the scientific method; the method of looking at the data. I mean method in terms of the goal. Philosophy aims to explicate and analyze reasons, while historians look to track causes. Again, these two things sound similar, but they are not quite the same and they require different skills. A philosopher should be creative and perceptive on the one hand and hold a sharp analytic razor in the other. A historian should ideally be able to abstract cause and effect from discrete data rather than just re-relate what has happened in the past; but he or she should also realize where there is not enough information and not be creative in interpreting in the same way a philosopher might be.
I've talked about what I think philosophy should be elsewhere. But history has shown itself quite capable of resisting radical change. Historiography is an old and relatively stable science, when compared to the radical nature of philosophy and the modern genesis of such disciplines as psychology, sociology, and anthropology that study fairly similar things. History as a discipline has showed fortitude against post-modern and post-structuralist attacks in the same way the hard sciences have, and this is quite an accomplishment considering the way the majority of the humanities have made way for some levels of relativism and irrationalism. Either the discipline of history generally attracts epistemologically conservative scholars or the field itself is naturally resilient to such attacks. Most of the methods modern historians use would not have been too foreign to Herodotus and Thucydides; perhaps updated somewhat, but the intent is fairly clear. Tell what happened and more importantly why it happened.
This search for cause is part of what links philosophy and history. Philosophers create explanations which best fit what they perceive; historians have an advantage in that the explanations should already be present; it is but a matter of finding them. How much they in fact create is a matter of debate but for me the evidence is on the side of the historians.
So, if this is the case, I can take a look at Dr. Grayling's statement. Would I agree with him that history is the thing for those who wish to educate themselves? Let me begin by saying history is not good biography. Reading history will not tell you how to be like Napoleon, or Jesus, or Han Fei-Tzu. The best you can hope for in that case is to try to learn what other people are like, what makes them tick. And for that, I would say novels are a better source of information than history, since the sensitive novelist can create a character much more life-like than any honest biographer or historian. You can learn more about how people work from Jane Austen than from Edward Gibbon or Thomas Carlyle, except for when Carlyle writes like a novelist. But I've said that historians are supposed to tease out cause and effect. Wouldn't reading history be a good way to learn that? Perhaps. But reading history does not have the same effect as doing the job of a historian. A history book lays out the causes and effects that the historian has found. The reader hopefully will analyze the arguments made - but that lies, as I have it, under philosophy. Other than the methodical practices learned, history is excellent for teaching the causes of the modern processes we have; but that is not a reason to claim that origin implies actuality. The genetic fallacy is one of the most pernicious; it is very easy to claim that where or how something originates determines what it is.
I think many people have the idea that history is the subject best for self-education, and I believe people think this because they trust in the adage: those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. But I have a hard time with this idea, since there are only rarely occasions when the circumstances are similar enough to provide a guide. This is especially true when one thinks about the lack of perfect information at the time a given decision is being made; it is easy in hindsight to find a correspondence between two given events. Or the opposite situation occurs: people jump to a conclusion that something is the case because it is similar to a certain event in the past: look at how all of the revisionist historians looking at Japan in the 1980's claimed that Japan's remarkable growth in taking over market shares was simply a holdover from the rampant nationalism of the 1930's. It turned out only afterward that Japan's economy was only doing so well because of the inflated performance of the stock market and that the single drive to take over economically was non-existent.
But the fact remains that if history is what interests you than it should be the thing you read. I have been treating all of these disciplines as means: learn philosophy so that you can learn to think critically; learn history and you will learn to extract causes. But that's not why anyone learns a subject - which I'm considering in a broad sense. I'd like to think that people who read find themselves fascinated with a certain problem, or a certain question, or a certain beauty in a theory, explanation or explication. And if that's the case, they will already have some leg up in figuring out what books should be on their reading list. On the other hand, if someone wants to educate him or herself without that drive then there is very little which will give them active improvement. They are honestly better off finding something that they love to do, and hopefully it will be something of more value to the human race than sitting around thinking about these problems; something like raising a family or helping people or simply fixing things and making sure every part fits. There is nothing more useless than a person who does something only because everyone else is doing it or it is the "thing to do"; the only thing that comes close is someone who has found what it is they love and it turns out to be academic.
