Brainstorming about history, politics, literature, religion, and other topics from a 'gypsy' scholar on a wagon hitched to a star.
"Why is it always in the last place you look?"A fool's question! Who but a fool keeps looking after finding it?
Labels: Polar Express
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 7:55 AM
2 comments
I am a retired professor. I last taught at Ewha Womans University, mostly composition, research writing, and cultural issues, but also the occasional graduate seminar on Gnosticism and Johannine theology and the occasional undergraduate course on European history. My doctorate is in history (U.C. Berkeley), with emphasis on religion and science. My thesis is on John's gospel and Gnosticism. I'm also an award-winning writer, and I recommend my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, to anyone interested. I'm originally from the Arkansas Ozarks, but my academic career -- funded through doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships (e.g., Fulbright, Naumann, Lady Davis) -- has taken me through Texas, California, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Israel and has landed me in Seoul, South Korea. I've also traveled to Mexico, visited much of Europe, including Moscow, and touched down briefly in a few East Asian countries. Hence: "Gypsy Scholar."
2 Comments:
A reasonable formulation would be something like, "Why was this in the place that one would think the least likely for it to be in (of the places that it could feasibly be in)".
But this is too unwieldy for normal discourse. So us normal chumps protest, "Why was this in the last place that I looked?" Or similar.
Given this account, I further suggest that us normal chumps knows that we are expressing a complex idea a little too loosely. And, indeed, we are often aware, to some extent, we are, in formal terms, speaking tautologically.
You're right, of course, and I hope no one takes my joke too seriously.
Jeffery Hodges
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