i spent the summer after my sophomore year in college working on a research project at carnegie mellon in pittsburgh. it was a powerful experience for me– both in terms of my evolution from a mathematician into an engineer (thank you matlab, for being such a beautiful language) and in terms of my emotional devolution from human being to multicellular automaton.

i was coming to pittsburgh from a pretty bad breakup, and as is usually the case in these situations, i kicked off a personal renaissance– devoting alot of time to good books and good music (this is about the time i really ‘heard’ radiohead for the first time, thanks to david and matt). one great source of (free) reading material i discovered was bibliomania, where i read of human bondage by w. somerset maugham.

(aside on language: i feel like you can tell good writing because it ’sounds right’ in your head. i’m sure everyone has a different preference for what sort of writing sounds best to them, but for me, the only person who has ever sounded better than w. somerset maugham is virginia woolf. even his name rolls off your tongue like buttercream.)

the book follows the life of a guy in britain who is born with a club foot as he grows up and makes his way in the world. much of the story focuses on his relationship with mildred, this generally horrible waitress who he is hopelessly in love with and how she almost destroys his life. well, i guess not ‘almost’– she does destroy his life, he just happens to recover.

the timeframe of the story is 1800s britain, and the ideas of the enlightenment and modernity have a strong influence on the main character– as a young adult, he commits himself to living his life by reason and rationality.  he fails miserably at this, as his passion for mildred generally overrides his better judgement.  he only really gets his life together when he recognizes that all of his decisions are driven by emotion and he stops denying their primacy.

i wrote most of this post before reading that piece on spinoza i linked to below.  i had originally planned to write a paragraph here on how attempting to live your life by reason and rationality is itself an emotionally-driven decision– it’s a decision that you make when you’re terrified of your emotions.  i referred to myself above as a multicellular automaton, implying that i somehow killed off my internal emotional life over the past couple of years in order to avoid pain.  but now i’m wondering if i didn’t just prefer the emotional experience derived from abstract thought to the emotional experience of human interaction.  this makes me feel better– the idea that i might not just have been running away in a blind panic, that there was a natural place for me to go and feel at home, even if i wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time.

Labels: literature, philosophy

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