I have a request for any Stephen Colbert fans out there (you know who you are). One of my students told me yesterday that he's planning a visit to Hungary. Needless to say, I'm intrigued. However, my initial search has turned up no information. I'm guessing it has something to do with the Megyeri Bridge, so perhaps I should explain this a bit. (Or you can read about it on Wikipedia.)
Last fall this same student asked me maybe the best question I've ever gotten in class: "Excuse, Mr. Ackerman, do you know who Stephen Coal-burt is?" "Do you mean Stephen Colbert?" "Ummm, maybe." The student went on to tell me that they were going to name the new M Zero bridge over the Danube after Colbert, and he thought the guy must be a jerk. It turns out the Hungarian government decided to choose the name for the new bridge by internet poll. Colbert made a plug on his show for the "Stephen Colbert Bridge" and his supporters soon swamped the voting. The Hungarian Ambassador made an appearance on the show and explained Colbert would have the bridge named after him on two conditions: he had to demonstrate Hungarian fluency and had to be dead. I tried to explain to my students that this was a joke, not another example of American imperialism. They seemed skeptical.
Anyway, the latest rumor is that Colbert is coming to Budapest. If anybody knows anything, please fill me in. This is something I do not want to miss!
4/18/2007
4/17/2007
"a grace wholly gratuitous"
While watching CNN today I was reminded of one of my favorite Annie Dillard observations. Perhaps it's wrong and shallow that I often think of it in times of great tragedy, but I find it comforting.
"...Frogs were flying all around me. At the end of the island I noticed a small green frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn't jump.
He didn't jump; I crept closer. At last I knelt on the island's winterkilled grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like the bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. The frog skin started to sink.
I had read about the giant water bug, but never seen one. "Giant water bug" is really the name of the creature, which is an enormous, brown beetle. It eats insects, tadpoles, fish, and frogs. Its grasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the only bite it ever takes. through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim's muscles and bones and organs - and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim's body, reduced to a juice. This event is quite common in warm fresh water. The frog I saw was being sucked by
a giant water bug. I had been kneeling on the island grass; when the unrecognizable flap of frog skin settled on the creek bottom, swaying, I stood up and brushed the knees of my pants. I couldn't catch my breath...
That it's rough and chancy out there is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, 'The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?' It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator's, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened?...
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous...
We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don't know. Our life is like a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise."
"...Frogs were flying all around me. At the end of the island I noticed a small green frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn't jump.
He didn't jump; I crept closer. At last I knelt on the island's winterkilled grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like the bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. The frog skin started to sink.
I had read about the giant water bug, but never seen one. "Giant water bug" is really the name of the creature, which is an enormous, brown beetle. It eats insects, tadpoles, fish, and frogs. Its grasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the only bite it ever takes. through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim's muscles and bones and organs - and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim's body, reduced to a juice. This event is quite common in warm fresh water. The frog I saw was being sucked by
a giant water bug. I had been kneeling on the island grass; when the unrecognizable flap of frog skin settled on the creek bottom, swaying, I stood up and brushed the knees of my pants. I couldn't catch my breath...That it's rough and chancy out there is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, 'The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?' It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator's, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened?...
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous...
We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don't know. Our life is like a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise."
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