In the not-too-distant future, people will ask couples “Did you meet face to face or on a dating app?” But why did we grow such a fondness for these dating applications? What does this new order reveal about ourselves?
When James Hutchinson ’24 called Yale’s Acute Care Emergency Line and told the operator that he was considering suicide, he was told to expect a counselor assignment in a month. For now, however, he was advised to “go for a walk.” Hutchinson, who requested a pseudonym to remain anonymous, was assured that his counselor assignment process would be expedited, given the urgency of his situation. By the time Hutchinson spoke to The Politic in January, it had been over two months since Hutchinson first called the Acute Care Emergency Line. At the end of February, he still did not have a counselor.
In some rare cases, admiration of a masterpiece is personal. You try to resist the urge to underline every sentence and fold every single page to later return to it, and you become enchanted by the tiniest details across the pages. Milan Kundera’s “Ignorance” became one of these for me.
When Derya Kır, a 25-year old lawyer who works as a volunteer at Greenpeace, travelled from his home to provide emergency aid to villages along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey last August, he came across an old lady sitting outside of her fire-blackened house. Kır asked what the woman planned to do next. She did not know; all of her belongings, life savings, and animals had been consumed by the fire.
One may argue that the Orient and the Occident neither are nor can become the things they represent, since language is always prone to being representative. This exercise regarding paintings under the light of language and representation may alert the need to change our constructed way of understanding the Occident and the Orient.
“Nothing is its own symbol, it can only be a symbol of something else.”
