3.44pm
Wednesday
24 May 2006
As though she might say, "I came here from whatever unspeakable distance and from whatever unimaginable otherness just to oblige your prayers. Now say something with a little meaning in it." My sermon was like ashes on my tongue. I baptiszed two infants that day. I could feel how intensely she watched. Both the creatures wept when I touched the water to their heads the first time, and I looked up, and there was just the look of stern amazement in her face that I knew would be there even before I looked up, and I felt like saying sincerely, "If you know a better way to do this, I'd appreciate your telling me." Then just six months later I baptized her. And I felt like asking her, "What have I done? What does it mean?"
—more from Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
More classes have been researched. I signed up for a math class, tentatively: the math department is much more tightly conjoined to the computer science department than the Interactive Telecommunications Program is (which I looked at a lot last night, but can't sign up for classes in it easily: it's part of the Tisch School of Arts, not the Graduate School of (Mathematical) Arts and Sciences).
But doesn't this look fun!
ALGEBRA I: Basic concepts of groups, rings and fields. Symmetry groups, linear groups, Sylow theorems; quotient rings, polynomial rings, ideals, unique factorization, Nullstellensatz; field extensions, finite fields.
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7.05pm
I'm a little distracted lately with something I've struggled with for years: the disinclination to find a way to combine the creative & aesthetic with the scientific & mathematical. I was put off time and again from my computer science studies at GT because of how rarely anyone gave a damn about the beauty of Things, the beauty in a precise description and interaction with the world, the beauty of the world.
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A rainbow is falling upon my neck as I sit in the pew of a church. That tall boy is playing the drums. The dusk is about to fall; the light is something amazing, as it usually is through church windows.