Redeem the Time

No morning news today, because I don’t feel like it and I don’t see anything interesting.

However, I did hear an interesting thought this weekend. A woman told my wife and I that too much time in graduate school takes a toll on men. The longer guys are in school, she said, the more they become inable to make decisions, obsessive-compulsive, perfectionist, insecure, overly-sensitive, and generally unhappy. Why? The reasons she gave included: graduate students are low on the totem pole and no one cares what they think; of the writing of papers and dissertations there is no end (or clear deadlines); and perhaps most significant, men in graduate school are completely beholden to others for everything. They are not providing for themselves or their families and are wholly dependent on the recognition and sustenance of others.

Heh. There is a lot more that could be said along these lines, but I think there is a lot of truth to this.

Every morning when you take a hot shower* you are experiencing what the vast majority of the billions of human beings who have lived on this globe thus far would call an extravagant luxury. Even today, I would venture to guess that at least half the world would envy your hot shower.

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* Hopefully you shower every morning, but I’ll spot single cavemen and hippie women a day or two in between.

Love is not some tortured possibility or angst filled passion—love is someone who will make you a cup of coffee.

. . . our intellect is related to the prime beings, which are most evident in their nature, as the eye of the owl to the sun.

—Aristotle, Metaphysics (993b) as quoted by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Contra Gentiles Chapter 3, 6.

The Pegis translation I was using at home (I couldn’t find the Pegis online) has “owl” rather than the usual “bat” that one sees in most other translations I remember, hence the post.

See, for example, this version of the Summa Contra Gentiles:

. . . as the eyes of bats are to the light of the sun, so is the intelligence of our soul to the things most manifest by nature.

Or this translation of the Aristotle:

. . . just as it is with bats’ eyes in respect of daylight, so it is with our mental intelligence in respect of those things which are by nature most obvious.

Although, in one way, the difference is accidental to Aristotle’s famous analogy, and the reason for this disjunction in translation may be entirely trivial, it still allows for worthy meditation on the profound subtlety of the analogy.

Go here and translate the passage in question, as quoted by St. Thomas, yourself.

Go here for one way to start meditating on it.