The Enjoyment of a Day

September 5, 2013

I really enjoyed our De Anima dialogue today, all thought at the end of it I was feeling very frustrated. During the dialogue I think we did a great job as a group in trying to understand the text. I really do think that we are expressing ourselves so much better than we used to, and we are also asking more questions. This is one of the only dialogues were instead of having totally understood the text and trying to answer all of our questions we actually ended up with more questions, which we left unanswered. I kind of liked this too, because I think it got us very curious about the text. Now, the reason why I ended up frustrated is because I was trying to understand part of the text, but there were a couple of sentences that just didn’t really make sense to me. When I told my classmates about my doubt and trouble I don’t think they understood me completely, and I think the reason for this is that I didn’t express myself correctly. I don’t know why it is, but every time I try to explain something that I don’t have clear or complicated I don’t finish my sentences as they should be, and I can’t get my point across. Well, it’s good that I realized this, because I know that I have to work harder on trying to clarify my ideas and express them correctly. I was also a bit frustrated because this was our last dialogue for De Anima, so my doubt never got solved. 

To brighten up my day, I had another great dialogue afterwards. Last time we had Ingrid’s art class I wrote that I was very frustrated with the class and especially with the text. Well, the first couple of paragraphs that we read still didn’t make a lot of sense to me and then my classmates started discussing about something that really didn’t have any relevance to the text (not that I think so anyways, who knows I didn’t understand it completely). But what was great about this dialogue is that afterwards, when we concentrated in only a few of the sentences and once my classmates started discussing I really got the point that the author is trying to make in his book; and let me tell you, what he says is so interesting. As I wrote before, I have always been interested in art and especially in art history, so once I got the main idea of the author and I started looking for examples of what he was trying to say I really understood it. The author says that painting shouldn’t be classified by labels or different schools; he says that painting should be classified depending on the common feelings, values, philosophies and thoughts that the artists had. I mean this really makes sense, for example, if you take the impressionist group (although they all painted with more or less the same techniques) they all shared common values outside of art, and were always together. I mean, who says that things should be classified as we have usually learned? The author believes in changing the way you classify art. Another thing that I really enjoyed talking about in this dialogue was the part about organisms. When the author talks about organisms, he talks about how they are made up of two phenomena: one that is inspired by nature and another that is inspired in all of that which we can’t see and is in our subconscious or our dreams.  Now I got really excited with this, because I thought of so many examples for this, from architecture to art. In architecture I thought about Gaudi, and how everything he did was made by thorough observation of nature, you can see this clearly in the archways inside of the houses he made; he made them to resemble the skeleton of a serpent, or the stairway in the Batllo House, made to resemble a spine. In art, I thought about El Bosco, and his famous triptych. Well, all I can say is that now this class got me excited.