2/18/2004 12:01:00 AM|||Andrew|||I absolutely should be sleeping right now, but I'm too excited by various events that have taken place today and events that will take place tomorrow and so I really can't sleep, but I won't talk about any of the aforementioned mysterious "events." Instead, I want to say a few words about the subtitle I've given this blog. Not the title, mind you, as a reflection on that belongs to another day and a more normalized me, perhaps. But the subtitle: "Meditations on Life: Creative, Destructive"

Sometime over the holidays I was discussing the traditional division of human endeavor with some friends. Ok, so it was probably more me pontificating and wondering and them nodding and humoring me, but whatever. As you might have seen somewhere or another, human accomplishment (or endeavor) has often been divided, grandiously, into Science and Art. Now to me, that's always been a very unsatisfying distinction. I've always rather liked to think that Science is much too broad and misleading a term and that a better term to complement Art would be Philosophy. To me, Philosophy embodies much more than Science does. Philosophy, to my mind, covers the study of all things, whereas Science only manages to cover the study of certain things, namely "scientific" things.

However, at the time, I was considering the category of Criticism as something that seemed to defy placement into one or the other of these camps. Artists have always been very staunch that critics are not themselves artists, and I agree in general. But I also don't think that criticism is strictly speaking the study of something. The act of criticism seems to be creating something to itself, rather than merely studying something prexisting. In a final note before turning to the next section, the sidebar division reflects this earlier idea of mine. At some point I really ought to change it around, as well as make all those pages "pretty" but I simply can't be bothered at the moment.

In any case, I sprung upon the thought, occassioned by this analysis of what criticism was, that perhaps a better division of human endeavor (or accomplishment) is found in Creation and Destruction. And rather than a solid division, I think that all accomplishment (or endeavor) contains twines of each of these things, but I propose that in the end, one will be more dominant than the other in each and every case that can be examined. Either something is concerned first and foremost with creating something, with building something up (a good example is the painting, perhaps), or it is concerned with destroying something, with breaking down a thing into its parts (the best example being physics, of course).

And so I present, Meditations on Life: Creative, Destructive. Life is both creative and destructive, to be sure, but more importantly, my meditations that I humbly present here shall take both forms, because both are equally valuable to the human experience. As Ecclesiastes boldly says: "...a time to break down, and a time to build up..." My desire is that I do at least as much building as I do breaking. Finally, thank you for taking the time to read through my piece of the web. I hope you stay with me on my journey.|||107709131924223543|||