About seven minutes after I started my road trip to LA, I had to pull over because a big storm hit and I couldn’t see anything. That’s a picture of the lake in my town, Lake Waramaug, which doesn’t usually have such big waves or a runaway police boat heading toward Litchfield Falls. “Help!!” But the storm was too scary to help the police officer.
It cleared up quickly, though, so I kept a-goin’. Branches and trees were down everywhere, and I don’t know how but the whole thing induced in me a weird manic state , which led to a flash of insight: “Oh my God! I love Gossip Girl!”
Wow! What a great start: the trip’s first epiphany! What else would I learn about myself? I laughed as I considered it: “I love Gossip Girl!” It was so true. I made a note of it in Evernote on my iPhone: “I actually love gossip girl.”
Eventually I was able to recognize that I don’t love Gossip Girl. That was the first and last realization about myself on my road trip. But I did learn some things from the Teaching Company lectures I listened to, including:
- Koko the gorilla lived with a gorilla named Michael for a while (he was her “erstwhile companion,” in comforting Teaching Company parlance). She taught him some signs. One day, he described seeing his mother being killed by poachers.
- Two differing conceptions of the soul in antiquity: “a transcendental entity sitting above the head shaped like an ellipse” and “a transcendental entity sitting above the head shaped like a small wafer.”
- Before the break-up of AT&T, there was considerable worry that it would inflate prices so greatly that we would be a nation of “telephone haves and have nots”
- The Yąnomamö, a group of indigenous people living in the rain forests of Brazil, have a religious figure with a role similar toSt. Peter’s. They aren’t worried about meeting him after death because even if they’ve led a bad life they can always lie.
And one non-Teaching Company thing is that calves crossing a stream will lift their tails above the water in a little arch, because they don’t want to get their tails wet.
cool blog, pretty happy with it so far. would love to hear more about the road trip from you!
thanks!
I love the Teaching Company. Frank Cardulla’s Chemistry lectures are so fun.
Oh man, I’ll have to listen to those. I’ve liked Timothy Taylor a lot. A bad but funny one I listened to recently was “The Terror of History,” about mysticism and heresy. The lecturer just kept saying “the terror of history.”
“Heresy…is one way men and women have dealt with THE TERROR OF HISTORY.”