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watching walking in old town square: I took this photo with a Nikon F3
The first book related to Prague that I am reading is a collection of essays by the Czech-born Miroslav Holub. The reason I chose this specific work, titled “The Dimension of the Present Moment” (the title of the first essay in the collaboration) was because of the life and focus of Holub himself. He was born in Plzeň, western Bohemia, and was educated at Charles University, a site I walk by nearly every day in Prague. Holub’s focus in his essays cover topics that are of immediate interest to me, not only as a student pondering the “art of travel,” but also because of my areas of interest as a student at Gallatin. His interdisciplinary approach to intellectualizing struck me immediately: he studied science and medicine, as well as philosophy, pathology, poetry, and literature.
Holub, like myself, considers more than historical or formal pathways towards wisdom. He writes about personal theorizing and the journey to contentment in one’s own mind, both intellectually and emotionally. He covers topics from the act of thinking to a philosophical take on the death of a muskrat (“Shedding Life”). The sometimes-rambling words of Holub were not pretentiously ordered, for he was aware of the fact that the act of thinking is not “an uninterrupted, uniform flow. Is it not rather a procession of brief tests, pauses, criticisms of the preceding thoughts, new trials?” (Holub 5).
He understands metacognition as an imperative aspect of living life. While I study abroad, I find myself reflecting on myself or those around me quite often. My actions, my words, and my thoughts, are all a part of this self-referential act of “blogging” about my “experiences”. Just like Holub, I find myself seeming quite introverted as I re-read my past posts. This blog has been a source for my own ramblings on the “meaning” behind certain things. I’m sure that I sound quite pretentious and confused, as Holub oftentimes does throughout his essays.
But, I am truly interested in the relation between science and creativity, a topic that underlies nearly every layer of Holub’s theories and remarks. I took a class last semester titled “The Evolution of Intellectual Complexity” that helped me look at science and mathematics in a way that I had never imagined. I had always leaned more towards the humanities and arts; learning about societal cognition through evolutionary linguistic capabilities helped me to understand the necessity of interdisciplinary work between scholars. And it also helped me to understand that learning can and does happen in every aspect of life, not just from a researcher or student’s point of view.
In Prague I find myself often wandering and staring at the vast scenery around me. At times it seems I am thinking of nothing in particular, simply absorbing the panorama without focus. The feeling of cold wind on my eyelids or the chime of a clock can lead me down pathways of thought I would have never imagined. Holub reflects upon thinking in the present moment throughout a few of his essays, and particularly references the pedestrians of Prague. He cites statistical data on the speed of walking and notes “that only in Prague do we seem to be particularly overburdened by social stimuli and want to get the hell out of Wenceslas Square at a speed unusual for other places” (Holub 66-67). Although he is a man educated in science, he quickly dismisses his facts and figures, stating, “in reality, in the lives of specific individuals, the driving forces and movements are totally different, frequently incommensurable and notably obscure” (Holub 67). He is talking about the random and yet predictable nature of the interaction between different bodies, or cells, within a given system. Even though I am a stranger in Prague, I am still part of the total movement of life in the city. It seems that the more one travels, one becomes more used to the feeling of being a “stranger” while at the same time realizing that the feeling of alienation is oftentimes self-inflicted. To absorb oneself in the current of the busy pedestrians in a foreign city is for me a meditative act in which I attempt to remove my ego, and simply use my senses to tell me what direction to step in next. This may be why I am constantly lost. This may be why I always carry a map.
This book sounds incredibly
This book sounds incredibly interesting. I think that it is important to rethink what we have been taught and put it in a context that is different from all others. When we look inside and try to understand our own processes, everything else becomes clearer. We live in a society that tends to look outside for knowledge and happiness, but if we reflect deeper, our processes inside and how we see the world outside is inevitably linked. Knowledge is something acquired through a study of life through thinkers and their works. But Wisdom on the other hand is a knowledge that has been acquired from the outside and understood and lived in the inside. In other words, our development becomes all-round to what is called wisdom. In fact the process of removing your ego and learning to understand the world in a deeper way is indispensable in the process of acquiring wisdom.