Metaphysical Musings

Sometimes, when one is reading, the rows and rows of words lose their meaning. They are deserted, abandoned, left as a husk: a sound. The strange property that allows words to form a picture in the mind, to be transmogrified into something of value, vanishes. As if this special aspect of language like an opal butterfly wing were clipped, leaving only the legs, the abdomen, and the head as empty irregularities and odd edges, curlicues and serifs, on the ground and on the page.

Water is ineffable. To truly convey the experience of reality, as opposed to an image of it, one must abandon techniques based on imitation; one must delineate the essence of the element in different ways, different to nature’s inherent compositions. Differences in portrayal can then be read as the unique characteristics of an individual’s - the painter’s - perception. This essay concerns the liminal differences between reality and painted depictions of it, and how beauty ari

Scenes of reading in early Black Atlantic literature are often taken as autobiography: the enslaved subject acquiring Western literacy as a tool to bargain for freedom. This misreads them. When James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley, and Prince Hall write about literacy, they are not describing a skill but staging it for a white readership that used print culture - authentication prefaces, signed certifications, the demand for proof - to police the boundaries of hu

For this assignment, I went to the Getty. As much as I wanted to go to the new David Geffen Galleries, or the Broad Museum, even the Hammer, the promise of the Getty’s venerable collection stole my wandering eye. The Center is perched over the languorous hills of the fancy part of LA, it sits tall and lofty and bone-white. There’s a gorgeous garden there. The day I happened to go there just happened to be a grey miserable one. The painting caught my attention because of how

Severance reads as factory lines of sentences, queues of commas lined up with ideas leading to a fevered apocalypse. It is a text that fully inhabits its ideas, in plot and form. It is full of modern-day malaise, detailing the experience of living after capitalism has stopped progressing and is instead manifested through monotony, automation, and homogeneity. How capitalistic structures have reached a complacency of new corporate-slop-shop-restaurants and the poverty cycle.

Introduction: Doctor Faustus - first performed in either 1592 or 1593 and officially published posthumously in 1604 is an Elizabethan era tragedy. Summing it up in adjectives, it is a short, beautiful, and haunting text. In Doctor Faustus, a romantic quality is imputed to the epistemically dissatisfied Renaissance man and his quest for knowledge through the gothic imagery, fantastical adventures, and the intrigue of the occult between heaven and hell. However, by the end, Do

To what extent was Deng Xiaoping successful in reconciling a communist political vision with capitalist economic practices? The two main sources used by this investigation are Immanuel Hsü’s ‘The Rise of Modern China’ (specifically Part 7: China after Mao) and Martin King Whyte’s essay ‘China’s Post-Socialist Inequality’. The sources are distinct in their outlook. In Part 7, Hsu provides a micro survey of Deng’s actions and their immediate effects on China’s people, economy,

Analyzing and comparing The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez offers a similar yet different exploration of family, community relationships, and themes of power. Generally, power is represented through the autonomy and agency of individual characters. If a character does not have such autonomy, they are to a large degree powerless. The context a character is written into dictates this. Both novels delve into how these d