On Community and Ideas

Ahh, community! It is during nights like these that I miss my church and school communities back 'home' in Vaasa. It is also amazing that it is because of the church community that Ling forfeited a job in Helsinki to stay on in small Vaasa. Just sent an email to Pastor Tero who replied that they have new people from the college to replace the ones they have 'lost', and that they have a special service on Friday to commemorate the relocation of the church to the methodist building. It could very probably be the lack of a stable community here in Virginia that Art says, with much irritation, that I seem to be 'unhappy'. Humphz. I can't believe that after DC I will be going to Lund for an exchange programme for yet another 2-3 months. Though Chen said that it is good to relocate every few months for a change of environment, I realised that much as a traveller I am-and very probably because I have been an avid lone traveller for so long-I am strangely not as lonesome as I thought I am, that I like community, albeit of limited or particular sorts. Also, I think it is partly due to the immediate church community that I found in Finland that I could settle in so well there.  I should start praying that I find some form of good community in Lund.

So I was reading Helen Keller's autobiography, seeing her story as one that is universally known but which I have never read personally before, I savoured chapters in which I found a kindred spirit in her. Not that I have her fortitude-being deaf and blind and yet being able to go to college and do public speaking, but in the sense that she loves solitude and books. I guess people who have 'disabilities' like hers have little choice but to cultivate the rich inner lives where they could be greatly encouraged and enriched by books and good thoughts. It also reminds me of the protagonist in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, whom was severely bedridden, and though his body may be as heavy and immovable as a diving bell, his mind soared and flittered like a butterfly, keeping his spirit alive.

I like several quotes in The Story of my Life (HK's autobiography) which I shall translate here:

" The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until then had been silent. But here in college there is no time to commune with one's thoughts. One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think...Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more on the depth of our sympathy than our understanding..."

Which brings me to the notion of ideas. I feel like I have been or will be called upon, either my others  myself, to give an account of my choice of studies in the liberal arts, Literature. It certainly wasn't a choice that had earned the respect of people, and it seems that in my life, I have usually made choices that made others scoff, like teaching. That said, I had studied Literature because I love it. I wasn't matured or clear-headed enough to study a course that was technically sound, and true to my unadulterated nature, I had made a decision according to my instinct and intuition, and that is to gravitate towards my first love that was books. Well, hmm, now given a choice, I would have chosen to double major in Sociology as well, if I had to choose within the faculty of arts.

If asked, Why Literature, I guess it is the notion of ideas and words. The world and society came into being and is sustained by ideas.

Idea: any conception existing in the mind as a result of mental understanding, awareness, or activity.


At the essence and heart of each and every story or piece of literature is a single crystallized idea, a manifested comprehension and insight into a situation or an experience. What is the idea behind Helen Keller's autobiography? A testimony of the fortitude of the human spirit, the innate desire for knowledge and self-awareness despite severe disabilities. What is the idea behind Ian McEwan's A Child in Time? The experience of a marital couple's heart break following the loss of their child, and the universal hope of the redemptive element and possibilites that a child brings to two people. What is the idea behind the Bible? God's grand plan of salvation for mankind captured through the panorama of history all the way to the unknown future. What is the idea of my masters thesis? That empowering collaboration can take place across cultures through organizations.

Each idea translated through a piece of literature embodies a facet of the human experience and experiment, all in the attempt to make sense and bring meaning to our existence. We have souls and are not just empty shells, and I feel that literature attests to the inner emotions of our experiences, cleverly translated and painted by descriptive words and phrases (which to me frankly, is like literary foreplay. hehe) In fact, any piece of literature is an idea, not only those of the literary kind. Business books, management readings-they each carry within them seeds of ideas, and by reading books we engage with the ideas of others, whether it be of the human condition and abstract experience as in fictional literary prose or poetry, or whether it is how to exercise an ethical and altrustic type of management in the otherwise alienating industries and bureaucracies in Douglas McGregor's The Human Side of Enterprise. When I chose to transit from liberal art studies to a rather technical human resource management studies, it wasn't so much as a departure from my previous background as an endeavor to explore another type of idea that yet explains and organizies societies and the human condition. Even scientific theories and hypotheses are born of ideas first that are sparked by observations and an inquisitive mind, and which reflect the human propensity to make sense of a problem or a lack, by proposing a solution.

In short, for too long Literature has been discarded disparagingly. But you see, it is one aspect out of many others that attempt to present ideas in order to make sense of the world , though in the form of literary writing, an emotional settlement and closure is pursued more than a solution; it doesn't offer sanitized and convenient solutions; it invites participation and exploration. It is definitely truism to say that in our monetized society, one form of knowledge and idea is appreciated more than the other, and that is the kind of ideas that bring concrete ends, which isn't a bad thing in itself; it leads to but one form of progress and understanding. Our mainstream society, while it doesn't encourage solitude, does prosper from the solitary labors of others in the form of the birthing of ideas and eventually the fulfillment of them.