Nicky Lawrence?

It was a great 2^nd week of school. Beautiful weather.. getting the hang of classes.. meeting new people… Wednesday I was up early again, went to my Passions lecture and then my Beauty: Pleasures and Principles lecture.

In my Passions lecture we talked about Catharsis.. the release of emotions resulting in a sense of cleansing or relief. Throughout history the meaning of the word has changed many times, and we talked about all the different interpretations of the word and what it had been used for. In my next lecture we talked about critics of beauty and what makes them a true critic. Do we need a critic, or guide, to tell us what is truly beautiful? Or does taste depend on the individual… “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”?

I had my last workshop of the day from 3-5 for my Australia anthropology class. After that, I headed home to relax for awhile before some of my friends and I went to the pub for some drinks. Thursday I was able to sleep in a bit, since I only had one seminar from 3-5pm for Passions. The first half was basically just an introduction to the course and what we should expect from the next 10 weeks. We then got into groups of 4 or 5 and the professor gave us a list of the 6 basic emotions… joy, distress, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. Within our groups we were to come up with clichés associated with each emotion. For example, for the emotion ‘joy’ we came up with “bursting with joy”, “tears of joy”, “walking on sunshine”, “on top of the world”, and “on cloud 9”. For ‘fear’ we came up with “paralyzed with fear”, “hair standing on end”, scared to death”, “frozen with fear”, “racing heart”, and “cold sweat”. For ‘anger’, “boiling with rage”, “hot-headed”, “fire in your eyes”, and “short-tempered”. We compared all these cliché phrases and sayings and discussed why we use particular kinds of words to describe specific emotions. Why is it we associate certain body parts, colors, temperatures, and directions with certain emotions? Why are we ‘frozen’ with fear? Why are we ‘boiling’ with rage? Why are we ‘on top of the world’ or ‘down in the dumps’? Why do we ‘have the blues’ or are ‘green with envy’?

It was a good class, and I think I’ll really enjoy that professor, though I didn’t really click with the other students. I’m really looking forward to what this course has to offer.

Thursday evening we met up for some pool and cheap boxed wine (also known as ‘goon’ and very popular with the young Australians). This weekend I don’t have any particular plans. Earlier this week some of the international students were trying to organize a day trip to Mount Lofty and Cleland National Park for Saturday, but we may have to postpone it due to the rainy weather. We’ll see. Woke up this Friday morning around 11 and laid around for a couple hours watching The Office and eating breakfast. It was a beautiful afternoon so I walked over to my coffee shop on Gouger Street (about a ten minute walk from The Village) and had some coffee and ‘Me Time’. My Passions professor recommended an author to us in class this week, so I decided to look him up, as he sounded very interesting. D.H. Lawrence. I browsed through a site with some quotes by him and do believe I’ve found my soul mate of another lifetime. Here are some of his quotes I loved:

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"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."

"One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, and the journey is always towards the other soul."

"I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I'm sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I'm sure that is entirely wrong."

"For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack."

"It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it."

"It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them."

"I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze."

"If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night"

"Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it."

"...no form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny, just death"

"Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life."

"Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved."

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-D.H. Lawrence….

    …I wonder if he has a great-grandson.