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The Timelessness of Experience

January 8, 2018

experience, feelings, growing up, identity, life, musings, nostalgia, time

Remember a scene from your childhood: a movie that you saw for the first time, which made a lasting impression on you. Depending on how old you are, it might have been Gladiator, Apollo 13, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, or even something older. Try to remember how you felt watching it, who you were at the time; where you lived, how life was, how the space around you was; what kinds of thoughts you had at that age, what kind of hopes. Hold that thought. Let’s talk about the timelessness of that experience.

timelessness of experience — Time is a construct of our experiencing

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Frankenstein, #MeToo, and School Shootings

January 5, 2018

Literature

equality, feminism, gender, Gothic, identity, life

2018 is the year that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein turns 200. What could possibly be the connection between one of the core works of the Gothic canon and the #MeToo campaign? Allow me to begin with a little story.

It was a fittingly dark and dreary day, typical of Finnish autumns. My Gothic fiction students and I began our discussion on Frankenstein. As it usually happens in such cases, people enter the discussion with certain preconceptions, only to see them shattered. That’s a good thing. As an educator, you want people (yourself included) to discover something new. We had talked about most of the usual elements touched upon by literary criticism. We’d discussed about the connection between Frankenstein and identity, aspects of ethnicity and “race”, morality, nature and the sublime, and others.

Frankenstein - a 200-year-old #MeToo echo — Mary Shelley’s novel is a story replete with symbolism

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The Grownup Paradox – Am I still a Child?

December 31, 2017

Experiencing

experience, feelings, growing up, identity, life, musings

I remember it very vividly: when I was a kid, it really felt there was a threshold between me and the grownups; a curtain, separating me from, presumably, all my hopes, dreams, and desires. I characteristically remember thinking that there would come one day when I would be a grownup. But there is a paradox awaiting there, which I will refer to as the grownup paradox.

grownup paradox — Can grownups play in the sand?

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