I am not able to sleep. I am not able to read. I am not
happy with the leg room. I am quite miserable right at this moment.
Which is crazy really because I had been looking forward to
the flight. Travelling without kids has seemed fun for the last 7 years. I still think it is so much easier being on
this plane without the kids, don’t get me wrong, I am pitying both the moms and
the poor wailing, screaming, take me to the tiny potty lil ones on this plane right now with me, I
really am, but I am not thinking of this as too much fun.
This flight to E is only three hours and forty seven minutes
long, and I cannot wait for it to be over. I am only glad I am not flying to
I. That is one long flight and I am always sort of scared of it. I am so
proud of my mom that she does it so well. She never complains, and she still
makes the effort to visit us when we cannot.
I am grateful for this mac. Thanks husband. I did not want
to get a mac. Last night as I unsuccessfully tried to download the pictures
from my camera to the mac I was not so happy with it. But right about now - I
am. It is tiny. It fits into my HUGE
tote so easily – which has its own ups and downs and I haven’t made up my mind
if I like it so much yet. $44 down the drain, or not, will know in a few days. But
I digress, back to the mac. I am grateful for its battery life, my old lappie
could not survive a two second detachment from the power supply, that is how
old it was. Writing is keeping me sane right now.
Wish I could sleep - really want to. I even tried my
looks-like-a-padded-push-up-bra eye cover but the crying babies on the plane
will not let me relax enough. No there’s not that many, but when you are away
from your own, you some how tune in to all the sounds the other kids make. I am
not sure who I was feeling worse for the moms or the babies during takeoff. I
never know who is in the worse situation.
I am reading Dan Brown’s inferno, and … well, I was hoping
it would be interesting, gripping, and hold me in its jaws like the davinci
code did. It is not. I can pretty much skip entire pages, read a couple of
lines here there and still get the main point of the book. No, I am not doing
that. Not yet. I did not keep the other book in my carryon. So this is all I
have. What’s the point of finishing it in an hour. I have miles to go. That would be
self-defeating. I am too old to be doing that.
I am not even sure what is wrong with the book. I mean what
is the guy going to do, get up and dance for you? He starts with this first
person narrative of some guy trying to go from hell into heaven, or not trying
to leave entirely, and yet leaving . Something.
I am not entirely sure what that bit was. But here’s the
thing, Dan Brown has written at least one good and a few successful books so
far. So if the man wants to go on rambling about for three or four pages about
something that probably makes a lot of sense to him, and in his mind is vital
to how the story needs to be told, then I think he very much has the right to
do so.
So what if it makes no sense to me as an average- above
average, sometimes dimwitted, mostly critical reader. So what.
The book is his too. So I let him have that. He did not hold
me. But I did not leave him. It will hopefully make sense to me by the end of
the book. Principle of charity – see I am learning something from the
philosophers.
Speaking of philosophers he mentions Kripke. Kripke!!! I
have mixed feelings about the man. I thought of what he says about necessary
truths before I knew of him or his ideas, so I had a very hard time believing
he was famous for that particular thought.
I could not believe no one had thought this before. I am not
that smart. Or may be I am. It is just hard to believe that, given all the many
completely idiotic things I do.
There is also the issue I have with how credit is given in
western academia. I cannot believe that any one person is ever completely
responsible for having a brand new thought. In fact, my belief in this is so
strong, that I never trust myself for having come up with a brand new thought
either.
This thing about truths, if true, being necessarily true – I
know I thought of it, I struggled to put it in words, especially eloquent,
persuasive words - that happens to me a lot. May be I get lazy, once a thought
makes sense to me, I stop trying to make it make sense to others or something,
but I know I thought of it, it was a complete thought, it made complete sense
to me, and yet when I look back, I always doubt if I thought of it entirely on
my own or was it inspired. Had I heard of Kripke’s idea somewhere, years ago,
just not his name, then forgotten it.
And when Prof. R talked about how water being H2O was not a
necessary truth, as in scientists could one day find that we have been wrong
all along, my mind rebelled.
If it were true that we
had been wrong all along, then water being H2O was not a truth to begin with,
leave alone its being necessarily true. We were just making a false statement
we believed to be true.
See what I mean,
about not being eloquent enough. I am probably not making any sense. Prof. R
did not take me that seriously either. He must have seen a half baked idea. So
I suffered for two or more weeks, never accepting that a water=H2O identity was
not true in every possible world.
So now imagine my relief when in comes Kripke - dashing,
flamboyant, the knight who saves the day, with brand new vocabulary, perfectly
balanced equations and says so beautifully what I had been mumbling in my head all
along.
How could I not have immediately fallen in love with that. Yes,
yes, what he said. I am saying that.
SO for a week and a half Kripke was my most favourite person
on this planet.
And then the TA had to burst the bubble. He started talking
about Kripke’s ideas about names referring to a particular object and well… I
am just leaning more towards Russell on this. Now a criterion of being IN LOVE
is that it is an all or nothing state of being, so I was no longer IN love with
Kripke.
However I do give him the benefit of doubt, I haven’t read
Russell so well yet, and hence have not had a chance to disagree with him so
far. Who knows, I might still comeback to the Kripkean way of naming. But
that’s the origin of mixed feelings about Kripke. Long story. I know. Oh and I completely disagree with him on his
zombie thing too. But another long story. Leave it for another time.
When I go on rambling like this moving from subject to
subject, never having enough time or patience to say all the things I wish to
say about a particular subject, I can almost feel sympathy for Nietzsche. My
Indian upbringing makes me quite certain he was way smarter than I am, so it
must be way harder for him than for me.
Just went to the washroom, looked at myself in the mirror.
Why do I always look worse than I think I do? That makes me question what if I
am actually less smart than I think I am? Can one ever trust one’s own
evaluation of oneself? Whose evaluation to we trust then? Who else could have
as much data as you do on yourself. Should you ever bother trusting an
evaluation based on less than complete facts. I love myself. I think I am all kinds of
amazing. I also think I am all kinds of an idiot. And given my two
contradictory conclusions I conclude I am not in a position to judge myself.
Oh and now I have digressed so far even I have forgotten
what I was writing about. Yes, inferno.
So the point I was trying to make was this. Dan Brown cites Saul Kripke
as an example of child geniuses. One of the main characters in the book has an
IQ of 208, whatever that means. So my beef with that is, how come writers need
to exaggerate the abilities of their characters so much. Why do they have to
have eidetic memories, be the youngest professors at Harvard, and generally be
so much more accomplished than normal people like you and me.
I guess writers of fast paced, save the world kind of
thrillers do need extraordinary characters for their stories. May be.
I do not plan on writing those kinds of stories. I want to
write ordinary stories of ordinary people. I somehow find them to be the most
extraordinary. People like my grandmothers. They were so completely different
from each other in a million different ways. But they were the same too. They
were wise. They had patience. They lived through bad times and had come out
stronger. When they were around you somehow felt like you were protected. They
had these auras, of hope, of safety, of truth. I want to write about them. Hmm…
