What I Don’t Like About Blogging November 3, 2007
Posted by Mayee in : Daily Babble , 1 comment so farIt freaks me out to think that I may seem to know strangers more than I know my real friends.. my friends whom I see in person and have conversations with.
I read a blog and it’s like I’ve unlocked a door to the writer’s personality.. how they think, what they feel, what they go about doing in their everyday lives, if reading into souls was possible.
Yet what gain do I have in knowing these people as thoroughly as I do?
Though I know, and you may argue, that writing in an online weblog or journal has its benefits (a lot of them actually), I sometimes stop and think if I’d be better off spending my precious few free minutes with my friends, living life and having fun, rather than blogging about how I think the world should run.
Bottom line: I would dare not confirm to myself that I have become much of an anti-social being that I know strangers of whose lives I only know of by words on a virtual page, more than I know real friends who have arms to hug you tight in times of sadness or loneliness.
What brings me to this dramatic state and sad conclusion? I dunno.. blame it on Antoine de Saint Exupery.
Literary Puzzles and Historical Amazement November 1, 2007
Posted by Mayee in : Literature , 4commentsI was rearranging my book collection when a small piece of paper fell from one of my books. It’s quite a few years old, judging from how it’s become stiff and yellowish. But what puzzled me was what was scribbled on it.
“Schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf, Denn zum wurdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff.”
Apparently I myself wrote it down (copied it from somewhere) and now can’t remember where the heck I got it from. I asked Jeune what he could make of it and he translated the first part of it for me. I guessed it must be Goethe (the only German Lit character I’m a BIT familiar with thanks to World Lit classes), but I still haven’t the faintest idea why the heck I noted it down in the first place, seeing as I’ve never actually read Faust I or II (But you’d be surprised I got a perfect score on my exam on Faust.)
I did a bit of research on the internet and apparently it means something like this
“Nature alas, made only one being of you although there was material for a good man and a rogue”
I am at a loss on what that means exactly (for now), but it makes for a good think-topic.
I’ve always loved Literature, be it Children’s Literature or, if I may be so bold as to dare to read into such famed authors as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Dante or even the dark and controversial works of Oscar Wilde. I have even, at some point in my life, become conceited enough to believe that I could parallel my World Lit teacher, who so happens to have a Doctorate on these things, at unhinging how an author’s mind works, or what they were thinking when they wrote their masterpieces. Now that I have stepped down from my air of big-headedness and have humbled myself enough to accept that no amount of interpretation of a literary piece (contentwise) would ever reveal a writer’s mind, I can tell you that that attempt would be more feeble than a direct psycho-analysis of how something is written rather than what is written. (more…)
