I'm Sloane, a first year student from Chicago's northwest side. I'm here to get this party started.
You've
probably all heard this sort of stuff about Shimer: it's a
intellectually stimulating experience that expands and enriches your
mind. While this is definitely true, it's not all we're about. We're
not just a colony of uber-intellectuals determined to gain all knowledge in
a systematic, robotic fashion--we're also silly, silly people, and I'm
probably one of the better examples of that. Here's something that
happened in my Social Sciences II class when we read Thomas
Aquinas' On Law, Morality, and Politics.
We were discussing the subjectivity of law,
especially how it applied to Aquinas' concept of "concupiscence", which
is basically the human desire for things of the flesh: a close synonym
is lust. Anyway, we were talking about the subjectivity of
concupiscence and to do this we were discussing how other less
biblically entwined laws were also subjective. One example was a
traffic light: red means stop, but if there's a meteor crashing to
earth right where you're stopped is the traffic light's law void?
Several others were listed, one of which I could have SWORN was
prostitution. I mean, it does
go along with the theme of concupiscence. So I jump in and start
talking about how prostitution and concupiscence are linked, and all of
a sudden one of my classmates says, "Sloane, wait a second: where did
these prostitutes come from?"
Turns out no one had said ANYTHING about
prostitution and I had imagined it. The rest of the class was spent making references to my "obsession" with
prostitutes--even Albert, our facilitator, got in on it at: after class he told
me that if prostitutes were what it took to get me to participate more,
then I could talk about them all I wanted so long as it was relevant to
the text.
In the end an analogy was made comparing
concupiscence to a hooker with a knife: concupiscence involves physical
temptation (like a prostitute) coupled with a sharp stab (haha) of regret or conscience.
So you see, there's a lighter side to Shimer that not too many people get to see until they get here. You can sit in on a class, but to be honest we totally show off when someone sits in. At least, I do. :)
Also, this is my face:
It's reading some Thomas Hobbes for Social Sciences II.
Also also, sometimes I draw comics. Often they are about things that happen to me in class, things happen in stuff we read, or stuff that happens at Shimer in general. Such as this delightful scene from Hamlet:
Comments