Time Worms

Last night I spent most of the night helping my friend out with her Sartre paper. I have never read any Sartre. She simply needed a sounding board for ideas and someone to help crystalize her thoughts into a more coherent form. Although it may not seem like it sometimes on this blog, I do have some talent for extracting the essence of and repackaging thoughts. We spent a long time on the phone and then on skype-chat trying to figure it out.

Although I do not miss the stress and horror of finals week, I miss the intense discussions it created between students. Most of my friends who are still in school have this crazed vibrancy about them. Staying up late last night to talk over this existentialist work reminded me of some of the reasons that I like academia. That rush of excitement over suddenly comprehending something, phrasing a sentence artfully, or writing something both for a class and because it is fulfilling is fabulous. I am not a fan of existentialism, so far as I know, but I enjoyed the process nonetheless.

In my senior year of college, I started a group reading the first half of Being and Time. Although I had little time to spend on it and I probably should not have started it in the first place, the group of people who came (including the wonderful Ovid II) were wonderful and the discussions were fun and productive. I did not read Heidegger nearly as closely as I should have, and I would like to try reading it again sometime in the next two years. Hopefully soon (even my Greek history reading and my Horace has fallen by the way-side a bit). One of the things that someone mentioned was that Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, which I was given a few years ago, was considered "a brilliant misunderstanding of Heidegger's Being and Time" and I am very excited to read it at some point.

I have more Μήδεια to read tonight, which is one of the fun things that I've been doing with old friends from my Alma Mater. However, it's much less fun to read Greek when I'm sick because my brain does not process it very well (and I hate that I'm still sick).