Nostalgia.
UC Irvine | ENG 102B | Professor Gross | A definition about an emotion
Nostalgia
n. It is a peculiar merging of time and space, the past layering with the present, drawing forth feelings from one’s past in a particular situation. A wave of extreme reminisces, most likely of childhood memories, triggered by an object, place, or action found in one’s past. This trigger can be as simple as a childhood favorite candy or a place that was often visited in the past and results in a wave of fuzziness within. Once triggered, this feeling of fuzziness can remain for a brief moment or even last on and off for up to a couple of days. The commonality is that the trigger must be a thing, place, or action no longer visited but was once a regular occurrence. It must be felt in retrospect. The gap of time where a habit grows thin and eventually stops is the root cause of nostalgia. It is an emotion that cannot be felt without emptiness in a particular memory. In other words, one must not be making memories in the present with the trigger. Not to be confused with the feeling of deja vu, where something never happens but is believed to have happened due to uncanny familiarity or similarity, nostalgia can only occur if the memory of the particular event or thing actually exists and exists in a fashion that makes it a significant part of your past.
Ode to Emotion
UC Irvine | ENG 102B | Professor Gross | An expansion beyond definition
Ode to Nostalgia.
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THOU, envelopes the heart and soul
Like waves of fuzziness one has stole;
From a memory carved out of space,
And like a dream made wide awake;
Like translucent shadows casted on thy walls
By a flickering flame burning from within,
Lingering as if a tickle in the throat
Not too strong nor too weak
Its existence made known
Yet not disturb
A gentle reminder of having lived
But not returned
Epode
A Gatsby who once chased
a green light slipped away
A part of him long gone
with a girl named Daisy his illusions fall
Futile attempts turning back time
pieces of memories crafted and lost
What was sought
a false alarm
desperately hanging but nothing to hung
He who thought never lived
In his reality one escaped
A dream he made wide awake
Not too strong nor too weak
The piece of Daisy within him
Fuzzy like an animal fur
Taunting, tickling his mind and heart
But never to be grasped nor resolved
Antistrophe
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Thou is like grasping fog within your hands
Only for its vapors to escape,
through the crevices they leave
Only to envelope once again
It calls upon the good old days
Of fulfillment and joyous chorus
Of better times and of lost time
It comes in full but leaves empty
Bittersweet it can be,
A milestone on a lonely road
A mark’d of time passing by
Silent and deadly it can creep
Leaving its host stunned and in a wakened sleep
Thou who comes unannounced
Blanketing the aches for a past
Offering up a piece of time
To play and replay for a while
A dream that happens under the sun
Tugging on the strings of heart
And thou dances without a pause;
When the flames burn near,
Like magic, YOU will disappear
A Question of Pride
UC Irvine | ENG 102B | Professor Gross | Final Exploratory Essay (exerpt)
Hume’s theory of the passions begins with understanding two kinds of human perceptions: “impressions” and “ideas.” Impressions are felt whereas ideas are thought with the former being felt with the “most force and violence,” and the latter being “faint images” of impressions. Within impressions are two subcategories: sensation and reflection. According to Hume, passions belong to impressions of reflection which are reactions or responses to ideas and include desires, emotions, passions, and sentiments (Schmitter 2021). There are three steps in impressions of reflection: first, there is the experience of pleasure or pain, then there is the formation of an idea regarding that pleasure or pain, and finally, there is a reflection on the idea of pleasure or pain.
Pride as concerned in this essay is an indirect passion as it has objects that are distinct from their causes. Indirect passion differs from direct passion as the latter arises immediately from harm or pleasure, good or evil but the former occurs in conjunction with other “qualities.” This establishes the framework for the development of the “double relation of ideas and impressions' (T II.1.5 286), in which impressions are related to resembling passions, and ideas of the cause are related through various principles of association to the object of the passion” (Schmitter 2021). This double relation between ideas and impressions is the root of passions. With pride, this can be illustrated with painting as the idea and pleasure as the impression:
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“1. I have an initial idea of some possession, or “subject”, such as my painting, and this idea gives me pleasure. 2. Through the associative principle of resemblance, I then immediately associate this feeling of pleasure with a resembling feeling of pride (this association constitutes the first relation in the double relation). 3. This feeling of pride then causes me to have an idea of myself, as the “object” of pride. 4. Through some associative principle such as causality, I then associate the idea of myself with the idea of my painting, which is the “subject” of my pride (this association constitutes the second relation in the double relation)” (Fieser)
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Hume finds that the object of pride is the self as it produces feelings of pleasantness involving thoughts about oneself: “Being so far advanc'd as to observe a difference betwixt the object of the passions and their cause, and to distinguish in the cause the quality, which operates on the passions, from the subject, in which it inheres… these passions are determin'd to have self for their object, not only by a natural but also by an original property” (T II.1.3.2 280). There are five conditions for the subject to cause pride including having a close relationship to the subject that causes pride, rarity, the admirable quality being known to others, stability and lasting, and the variety of qualities amongst different cultures. Although Hume’s theory of the passions seems quite complicated with various categories to consider, it is essentially using an inductive method to make sense of impressions and ideas to explain the cause of emotion.
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Such inductive enterprise is what Hume believes to be the “science of man.” His experimental methodology is dependent on observations of human behaviors and drawing conclusions. Hume also conducts experiments on the self as initial attempts toward repeated empirical studies. His science seeks to establish universal empirical generalizations, and, once established, it becomes principles used to explain human cognitive and social phenomena. This differs from modern-day psychology which uses extensive pre-existing frameworks and theories as a basis for its methodology in order to find results that are incredibly particular. There is not much room for arguments over the results unless a similar experiment is conducted producing repeated results that oppose the original research or if the collective psychology community recognizes a significant issue of validity with the experiment. This brings us to another defining difference between psychology and Hume’s experimentation with pride as the latter prompts readers to ask more questions.
Rainy Day Thoughts
UC Irvine | Patient Project | A Poem on a Whim
What is black and what is white
If there is no black then there is no white
If there is no white then there is no black
Is there anything so pure of itself
giving no chance for doubts
or is it just our wishful thinking
Trying to grasp onto something invisible because
we dislike the bitter taste of the unknown But why
define the undefinable
instead of flying amongst the technicolor clouds
Letting the colors splatter onto us
blending together, coloring our souls
making us one and making us many
so that when the fog before our eyes
one day dissipates
we won’t fall from the skys to the world beneath
of only black and white
A Poem in 5
HGSE | H804 | A Poem of Remembrance
Sometime I remember
the good old days
A box of sand
And an afternoon
No button to snooze
Nor worry or care
Books hauled around
like treasures and gold
An afternoon just disappears
In calm, in gentle, with the setting sun
I still can’t imagine
Anything better than that
Writing in Name
HGSE | H804 | An Exploratory Short Piece
Jessica - a named received on a second try. Perhaps it is a foreshadow of a story that is of start-overs and resilience. It is a name that Shakespeare created or so I'm told. The irony in that is that I love literature. I have always been particularly drawn to characters battled and scared, but rich in personality and resilient.
There is no special meaning to my name, or so I think. I was given it because it sounded pretty, and most importantly, it sounded like the American dream. As a Chinese American, my parents, like most Chinese parents, name their kids with dreams of the future and their hopes. It is obvious what mine were. Belonging to the land I was born despite looking "different." But the issue of identity is its complexity.
A name cannot make who I am or who become but it influences how I interact with the world and how the world interacts with me. My name is first part American and second part Chinese - "God beholds" and "talent." Words that have accompanied my growth. It feels like a fate foretold with two words but I'd like to think there is more.