coldhearted scientist وداد

Now I am reading Ancarett’s really smart post on the modern and the postmodern university. My problem is that I am in Right postmodernity and I long for Left modernity. I understand at last.

Earlier today I wrote the paragraphs which follow. I wonder whether they are merely symptomatic of my longing for Left modernity, such that in the end I resolve to emulate a chimera? Or, on the other hand, have I identified a member of Left postmodernity, so that my resolution to emulate him is actually attainable? (Are these even the right questions?) In any case, these are the paragraphs:

When I was in college I took a lot of math. This was to avoid science, which had laboratories, and I already had more laboratories than I could stomach because of being in foreign languages. It was also to avoid the social sciences, because these had reading, and I already had more than enough reading because I was in the humanities. Finally, it was because I enjoy abstraction and math was the most abstract subject I could find.

I do not mean I took recreational math, applied math or math for future doctors, I mean I took math for mathematicians. This kind of math is so ethereally beautiful that its denizens, abstract personages themselves, are wandering paths of awe and forget even to speak.

The math department had a room with T.A.’s in it whose job it was to be there answering questions on homework for any undergraduate course. This room was lighted and manned some 60 hours a week. It was not a Remedial Math Center, it was a Let’s Get Seriously Into It Math Center.

All of the students and T.A.’s were serious and everyone was under 30. We were contemplating esoteric theorems and cracking the most advanced problems. No professorial supervision was needed. One of the T.A.’s was a French anarchist and Buddhist. His influence was very calming. It is this light atmosphere combined with seriousness which I miss.

Now there is a math student similar to these math students who likes to discuss film theory in our local café. How does he exist here when there is so little context for his type, I wonder. But he appears to flourish. I will emulate him.

Axé.