Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Specificity

So, I was talking with Whiskey about animals, (there had been a cat outside the school), and he commented that I seemed to really like cats. It's true, I do. It got me thinking why I like animals in general so much. I really like watching squirrels, or birds, or bugs-It isn't purely scientific, though I do like noting their peculiar colorations and behavior. Ultimately, what i arrived at was that I liked the specificity of life. A squirrel is not a rabbit. It is its own thing. This could be seen as a love of variety, but that's a red herring. Even if their were only one, I think I would like its one-ness. Beyond that, I like the specificity of each individual thing. I like thinking about the millions of squirrels I have missed, the millions of people I have missed, the millions of a million other things i have missed, because I simply was born, centuries earlier, or in another place. My life must necessarily be filled with a limited number of specific things. I don't see a squirrel. I see that squirrel. This specifity seems peculiar to life. Surely their can be a specific rock, or location or cloud...but these seem mutable, or lacking identity...clouds smush into each other, and lose their cohesion, oceans and landmasses and locations all have blurred edges. You can't tell where they stop and where a new ocean, or landmass, or location begins. Life is limited to the bounds of the particular....I still feel like I haven't put my finger on it exactly...

2 Comments:

Blogger M' Lady's Topsail said...

What's great is that even the sky can be a particular...the concept "lost in space" is reversed when you remember that a Star once led us home.

7:50 AM

 
Blogger lord_sebastian_flyte said...

I like to think about it in terms of the Trinity: the more you enter into the mystery, the more you are convinced of both the oneness and the threeness of God. Just so, the more you get to know and love the world He has made, the more you see both the unity and multiplicity of it, the similarity and specificity--it's that forever-growing tension I love.

11:21 AM

 

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