Professional Documents
Culture Documents
An editorial aside
On December 31, 2000, I was in New York City. I went there because I
wanted to attend the New Year’s Eve festivities at Times Square; having
watched the spectacle on TV for years, I felt it was time I experienced it
for myself. Time and time again, people warned me not to go. “I’ve been
there; it’s horrible,” someone would say. “You can’t see anything, you can’t
hear anything, the crowds are crazy. You’d have a much better time if you
just stayed home.” And each time I replied, “I believe you. I want to go
anyway.”
I hate crowds, yet there were bound to be close to a million people there. I
hate the cold, and it was well below freezing—a major snowstorm had just
blown through. I hate noise and chaos; the scene was likely to include both.
In spite of all these things, I went, even knowing for certain in advance
that it would be unpleasant, and knowing I could choose not to go.
The kind of knowing you get from experience is qualitatively different from
what you get by reading about something or hearing a story. This is why
people travel instead of just reading travel books. However much you may
trust other sources of information, they can’t provide what your own
senses can. And just as some foods are worth eating even though they don’t
taste good, some potentially unpleasant experiences are worth having.
There are plenty more interesting things to experience and report. In the
meantime, get out there and experience things. Try it, you’ll like it—or
maybe not—but you’ll know something you didn’t know before. —Joe Kissell
Listen to This Article (07:34; 6.94 MB) • Get full-text RSS feed with
podcasts
Descartes has been criticized for his dualist metaphysics, but he still has
some very interesting things to say. See, for example Discourse on Method
and Meditations on First Philosophy. If you want to have the experience of
reading some really dense philosophical writing, check out Edmund Husserl’s
Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy or, a somewhat lighter read, Cartesian Meditations.
But really, when it comes to experiencing things, I think Dr. Seuss said it
best—in books such as Green Eggs and Ham and Oh, the Places You’ll Go!.