When you’re a student, the year begins in the Fall. My year is beginning with change. The first change is pictured above. After over two years without a car, I am again a car owner. I bought a 2002 Jetta Wagon; it has the turbo engine, leather, the sport package with bigger wheels, the cold weather package with heated seats - in fact, it has just about all of the options available. Its comfy.
The reasons for the new car are three-fold:
- Instead of working for Multnomah Bible College this year, I will continue being a woodworker. Frankly, I can’t really afford to teach and be a student. Additionally, it must be noted that while a teacher I would escape from school to…school: the life of a teacher is similar enough to that of a student that I never felt like I got a break. Woodworking requires energy differently, now I can get home from work and feel like I can study. Which is nice.
- I am moving out to Scapoose. For slightly less than I am paying now (and I’m not paying much) to live in the Hawthorne District, I will be in a three bedroom house in the woods, with five acres and two cats. Interestingly, I will be commuting a bit less than now. It will be much further to school (which is two days a week) and much closer to work (three).
- 3. I don’t remember what I had in mind for the third point - except that any list properly ends at three. Ask your pastor.
And, of course, I’ve started school. I have three classes (really, not just rhetorically):
- I start with a class on Borges and Calvino. I was introduced to these two authors some years ago by Umberto Eco, whose writing is, in many ways similar to the other two. Both are nearly indescribable, and excellent. Taking this class will be like dessert.
- Second in the day is a class called “Post-Humanism,” taught by my favorite marxist feminist prof. At the end of his book “The Archeology of Knowledge,” Michel Foucault claimed - echoing Neitzsche - that humanism was dead. The class asks what it meant to be a human and what it now means to be a human after that claim. Do our perceptions change in a post-religious world, in a technologized society?
- Proust. specifically his 3600 page novel, “In Search for Lost Time.” When I was in high school I was told that “you know you’ve made it as a reader when you read James Joyce.” The person had his “Ulysses” in mind because it is such a daunting book. But I think, on the “hierarchy of daunting-ness” Proust has to be higher - if nothing else, because of its sheer size. With big books like this I need the help that a class’s structure can give.
Well, thats the update. Back to reading.
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