I am still bouncing back. Sometimes, and absolutely not seldom enough, I come up with a pre-existing idea and get all excited about it.
"Wow!" I say to myself. "What brilliance!"
Well, I do not say that exactly. Still, I feel it. So, that is what happened just the other day with my discovery that atrocities have taken place everywhere in the world. I had found a pattern. I was breaking new ground. People in groups commit violent acts against other groups. Yes, I was onto something.
I was beginning, as you may have observed, to take note of instances of genocide in various countries according to the 1948 definition. Then, as I found myself distinguishing genocide from other acts of war or violence, I noticed the familiarity of the information. If the acts of war and violence do not have to fit the definition of genocide, it is easy to find examples in every region.
Oh. Awkward. These sorts of moments fascinate me. Of course, when I took a course on the history of Russia, I studied one war or battle after another. There were also the many Ivans and the killings of people in the way of some ambitious would-be kings. History classes are full of the violent pattern I had discovered. Yes, that is because everyone else has discovered the same thing. Even I learned about this when I first took world history as a freshman in high school.
How did I forget something so basic? It was not that I no longer knew that war was a part of political and social history. It was that I recognized a pattern in a new context but did not realize that the context was not really new. Weird.
I had a friend in college who used to get all excited about something that she was learning. She and I had this in common. Whenever we would tell each other what we had learned, though, it always was dismal in a way. We both would realize that what felt like enlightenment inside our heads was something else. What was it? We would see connections and get inspired by them. But the connections later felt like tautologies. Oh, that is so sad. That is precisely the kind of problem that Isabel faces when she reflects on her life. She believes that she has discovered something about herself, but careful thought written down helps her to recognize that she has had the exact same thought about herself before. She thinks in a loop and does not realize that she is in that loop unless she finds evidence.
You know what that is like? I will tell you. It is like watching Gilligan's Island reruns. If you have never seen a show before, you may know that you have not seen it. If you see a show and you have seen it before, you cannot be sure whether you have seen it only once or whether you have seen a rerun already. Thinking about the self is like thinking about a rerun.
"Wow!" I say to myself. "What brilliance!"
Well, I do not say that exactly. Still, I feel it. So, that is what happened just the other day with my discovery that atrocities have taken place everywhere in the world. I had found a pattern. I was breaking new ground. People in groups commit violent acts against other groups. Yes, I was onto something.
I was beginning, as you may have observed, to take note of instances of genocide in various countries according to the 1948 definition. Then, as I found myself distinguishing genocide from other acts of war or violence, I noticed the familiarity of the information. If the acts of war and violence do not have to fit the definition of genocide, it is easy to find examples in every region.
Oh. Awkward. These sorts of moments fascinate me. Of course, when I took a course on the history of Russia, I studied one war or battle after another. There were also the many Ivans and the killings of people in the way of some ambitious would-be kings. History classes are full of the violent pattern I had discovered. Yes, that is because everyone else has discovered the same thing. Even I learned about this when I first took world history as a freshman in high school.
How did I forget something so basic? It was not that I no longer knew that war was a part of political and social history. It was that I recognized a pattern in a new context but did not realize that the context was not really new. Weird.
I had a friend in college who used to get all excited about something that she was learning. She and I had this in common. Whenever we would tell each other what we had learned, though, it always was dismal in a way. We both would realize that what felt like enlightenment inside our heads was something else. What was it? We would see connections and get inspired by them. But the connections later felt like tautologies. Oh, that is so sad. That is precisely the kind of problem that Isabel faces when she reflects on her life. She believes that she has discovered something about herself, but careful thought written down helps her to recognize that she has had the exact same thought about herself before. She thinks in a loop and does not realize that she is in that loop unless she finds evidence.
You know what that is like? I will tell you. It is like watching Gilligan's Island reruns. If you have never seen a show before, you may know that you have not seen it. If you see a show and you have seen it before, you cannot be sure whether you have seen it only once or whether you have seen a rerun already. Thinking about the self is like thinking about a rerun.
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