Immersion

This blog might be slightly (or even completely) irrelevant, as I failed to write it before the start of my internship immersion, but considering that such a series of events is out of my power to change, and the undeniably true saying goes; "better late that never", I decided to finish it anyway.

Question #1: What are you most excited about in regards to your immersion experience? Why do you feel this way?

Answer: I was most exited about being exempt from scholarly requirements for 2 weeks. Now that half of my immersion has expired, I am most enjoying the incredible opportunity afforded by such a bounty of free time, which I am spending by reading several of the books I have been meaning to finish. I am currently more than halfway through Don Quixote (a fantastic read) and after that I want to shift my full attention to War and Peace (my drive to finish this book failed me twice, and each time was in the same part of the book. Leo Tolstoy may have produced an intelligent, deep, and thematically refined novel, but the chapters about the war are so immensely dull that I could not force my mind to continue processing the story).

Question #2: What are you most concerned about (what causes the most stress) regarding immersion? Why do you feel this way?

Answer: Fortunately this storm has passed in much the same manner as this blog entry, bringing to mind the old adage: "time heals all wounds". Before immersion, and during the early days of the intellectual sojourn, my subconscious was pressed to the grindstone of stress by the unyielding arm of my internship project. Eventually I decided to kill two plump bird with one stone, abandoning my sinking project concept to bolster the ranks of another group. In my mind, my time and efforts were better spent improving an already commendable group effort then struggling against setbacks as immutable as the laws of gravity for the sake of an already poor project. Since this liberating decision, my new group has another humble peon lending his mind and body to their project, and I have much less actual work to do, since the bigger the group the less each person must do. So here I am, taking a break from the outlandish and amusing escapades of Don Quixote to write this blog. Speaking of Don Quixote, it is a wonderful book and I particularly enjoy the wide variety of metaphors drawn from mythology that scatter every page. For my part, I would love to have the same knowledge of cultural myths that practically every character possesses and employs with such great skill and wit. One of my favorite is as follows (pg. 355):

"Along this road that I have described, rough and difficult, stumbling here and falling there, struggling to their feet then falling again, they gain the degree to which they aspire; and once they attain this, many are those we see who, having sailed over these shoals and between these Scyllas and Charybdises as if borne on the wings of favorable fortune, govern and rule the world from an armchair, with their hunger turned to satiety, their pinching cold to..."

The part of this that I find commendable (quite apart from the excellent and amusing syntax) is the reference to Scylla and Charybdis, which according to the footnote (prior to this I had no idea what these two names were) were a sea monster and a whirlpool, respectively, from Greek mythology. Such clever and apt references are rarely seen in any writing, and when used intelligently can elevate any story or argument.

PS

Mar 16:

In truth I do not know what motivated me to write this post-script besides a spate of crushing boredom, since it is essentially irrelevant and completely unnecessary. After reading Don Quixote, (which could be my new favorite book - it would almost be worth it to learn spanish just to be able to read the original version) I decided to leave War and Peace to gather dust on my shelf in favor of a much shorter, much more riveting book titled The Serpent and the Rainbow, by Wade Davis. The book is about the author's journey to Haiti in search of the formula of their zombi poison, and covers everything from history to botany to Haitian culture. Not only that, but Davis managed to combine mountains of the aforementioned (plus others) in the format of a suspenseful, informative, (true) novel, without breaking the mood, pace, flow, or whatever you want to call that elusive quality inherent to a good book.