Midnight Train to Georgia – Gladys Knight and the Pips
I usually take a dim view towards discussing music in the same vein that we talk about literature. When we use this literary vocabulary on music we inevitably turn songs into texts, and to my mind this puts too much emphasis on interpreting lyrics, [...]
I’ve lately been experiencing something approaching depression regarding the prospect of meaningful communication between human beings. Even writing these sentences is something of a painful act, since what I’m feeling isn’t “depression” but some kind of disheartening feeling, and therefore just seeing the word “depression” depresses me further: I can’t even adequately express my frustration [...]
The main reason I think Bob Dylan is overrated is because when people listen to his music they are not experiencing the best of what music has to offer. Bob Dylan offers many things: he is a singular force in music history, an intensely creative poet, an enigmatic legend whose body of work is [...]
My last post was really long, so this one will be really short. Here’s a laundry list of some of my more provacative tastes, and if anyone would like to learn more about a like/dislike, or to challenge my taste in music, you are free to do so in the comments section, and I [...]
Now it’s my turn to follow up on an earlier comments thread. After exposing myself to be a cold-hearted snake for not feeling substantial empathy for the Katrina victims, I went further and proposed that is impossible for us non-Katrina survivors to every really understand their plight, and thus some kind of detached compassion was the best response to the calamity. I’d like to offer both a defense of my lack of sentiment and a critique of empathy itself, basing my points on two novels by the 20th century British author Graham Greene. (I have tried my best to not give away the endings in the novels.)
The problem with empathy is that it relies on understanding, and understanding is so subjective a process that it defies our best efforts, inevitiably leaving us reliant on a jumble of personal instincts and impressions that we convert into a workable truth. If we admit that we can never truly understand each other, is it possible to experience empathy for another person? Or is it better to assume we can understand each other on some level, perhaps an intangible connection that binds us together and acts as a kind of social glue for society? Going even further, the degree to which we process the world through media like television, film, radio, and the internet offers up a new, even more ambiguous realm for relating to other people. I can’t address the all of the layers of my query, but I do think Greene’s novels provide an interesting lens through which to view the our relationships with other people.
Hello everyone, my name is Nate. Mike has graciously given me the opportunity to write some posts at the Pagan Agenda. You may have seen some of my comments around the site, so probably the best introduction to what I’m all about is to read them. I’m 28 years old, live in [...]
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