Khari > Recent Status Updates

I started reading this with the goal of being able to leave it here in Japan and not take it with me because I was so unimpressed with the same series book guide to statistics.

I am foreseeing the same set of problems. Thanks to the first chapter, I now understand WHAT an inverse function is. (not a mirror image like I conceptualized before) But I don't know why we use it. What purpose does it serve?

write for other people, you need to provide a transcription of the sound of the other language word you are including, as well as a brief translation of it's meaning. Also, preferably, a transliteration of the grammatical features as well.

I am even more firmly committed to this after reading this book and having no idea what he is talking about a great deal of the time.

...honestly, they don't even get the broad overview of the meaning, because here is this word in Greek, that they can't even sound out because one semester of koine Greek 20 years ago insufficiently drilled that alphabet into their brain, so it's just this mysterious symbol that you just skip over while you are reading.

That reminds me to say thank you to my professor in grad school who drilled into me, when you

Sigh. I understand the poor man's dilemma, I really do. When you speak more than one language, there are words from one language or the other that have a different semantic reach than the one that you are writing in, that perfectly cover exactly what you want to say so you use them...the problem is that those who are reading you don't share those same languages and so they don't get those nuances of meaning...

...it is a unique experience that is similar to the joy that it is Friday, but it is a joy that you can't really explain, and the more you try to explain it, the more you work yourself into circles and grasp at odder and odder analogies of what you are trying to mean.

I think that's what he's trying to say.

So, basically, he is saying there are feelings associated with experiencing God's holiness that cannot be elucidated.

Take for example, waking up feeling happy. You start to wonder why, and concrete reasons come to mind, and you can often come up with 'the' reason. For me, today, it's the fact that it's Friday, and all of the concomitant truth entailed therein.

But when you experience joy in the presence of God

That would have helped, I've been reading it as rational as things which are in alignment with what logic dictates, and non-rational, as things that go against logic.

Well. At least now I know better.

Well, I missed that.

Apparently he defined what he meant by 'non-rational' in the introduction...

what he means is that "'rational' in the idea of God and the divine is that...which is clearly to be grasped by our pour of conceiving, and enters the domain of familiar and definable conceptions." So, basically, things that can be understood are rational, and things that cannot be understood are non-rational.

"Mere morality is not the soil from which grows either the need of redemption and deliverance or the need for that other good which is likewise altogether and specifically numinous in character, covering and atonement."

I've still got all the T-Ws to work through in this bibliography and I've already gotten 78 additional references to check out from it...

"These words were chose, that that which could not be comprehended might yet in some measure be understood."

Hugo of St. Victor

That's an awesome quote.

"Musical feeling is rather something 'wholly other', which while it affords analogies and here and there will run parallel to the ordinary emotions of life, cannot be made to coincide with them by a detailed point to point correspondence."

Is he saying that some things that are true are things that are not explicable?

Is the whole point of this book a really roundabout way of saying that all language and concepts are abstraction of things? If so I'm going to be miffed.

I do not want to spend a ton of my time struggling through a book I do not get just to arrive at something I already knew.

On a separate note...I think this is a book I can only do 5 minutes at a time. 10 is too lofty a goal.

I feel like I need to stop every 2 pages or so and sum up what I think he is trying to say.

The last several pages are about how our feelings don't transmute into other feelings, feelings are qualitatively different. What happens is one feeling decreases and another increases until it seems to us to have taken the place of the other, but this doesn't mean that the one feeling changes into another.