The Face of the Other

Jeremy reporting back in. First of all, I've heard some rumors that people are astounded at Buffy and my page counts. The simple reason is, we do nothing else. We eat, we sleep, we read. When we go out, we go to the library. I go to class to discuss what I've read. Buffy gets together with other women to discuss what she's read. For family time, we read out loud together. This results in a lot of books being checked off the list. On the other hand, some of you may have more diverse lives than we do. These are the choices we make.

So: I finished Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn: Green Angel Tower, Part 2 (815 pages). Not much to say - a classic overly sprawling fantasy epic, but well worth your time if you think Tolkien is a much better writer than, say, James Joyce, and if you've ever spent an entire 24 hours playing Dungeons and Dragons with breaks only for Pizza and Mountain Dew.

In a more scholarly vein, I'm reading Emmanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity for my philosophy colloquium and finding it immensely rewarding (although terribly hard work). I said to my philosophy professor (the kind and eminently qualified Dr. Frank Seeberger, an expert in Heidegger) that I hadn't been happy with philosophy lately, that I didn't feel like it was making me a better person - and that Levinas had changed my mind. He laughed and said that reading Wittgenstein was like taking a cold bath - it didn't necessarily feel good at the time, but it refreshed your mind to do something more constructive. He also said in class that if you are reading Levinas carefully, you cannot emerge from it without being changed.

In a sentence, Levinas insists that before all society and all language, we are confronted by the face of the Other, the stranger, the widow and the orphan. We can either try to force the Other to be the same as us, or we can encounter them honestly in language - and it is this openness in language that produces infinity rather than the "sameness" of totality that grinds everybody into cookie-cutter molds. Beautiful and moving, and requiring the intense discipline of a marathon runner to comprehend. I highly recommend it. (180 pages so far.)

Keep on reading, brothers and sisters!
-- Jeremy