Oblivion's Torso

I have found that quite frequently I will encounter the same topic of an idea in the different venues of my life at the same time. This could be that I am merely looking for a certain thread and therefore find it everywhere, but it pleases me to think that there is a sort of progressive unfolding of understanding in my development. My most recent example of such an occurance happened earlier today.

My last post was ultimately concerned with, what in my view seems to be, the lack of definition for our current era. Today I attended a lecture from one of my first year profs, a man who has done much to free my mind from the slavery of dogmatism. He was lecturing on Hegel today and quite fittingly he began to talk about the ideas that I had been discussing in my last post. He was talking about the concept of Zeitgeist. I have been familiar with this term before, but it did not occur to me that Zeitgiest was the topic of my last post. In German Zeit roughly translates age/era. Geist has three meanings, mind, spirit and ghost. I do not know German, but it doned on my also that the Latin word animus also mean mind, spirit and ghost. The word Zeitgeist therefore means spirit of the age. It is the ethos of a generation, it defined the age, but it also haunts it like a ghost. Hegel believed that the Zeitgeist of his time was that truth was progressively unfolding through rational inquest. I have not actually read any Hegel, so please someone correct or expand on this assertion. Hegel lived in the 19th century when modernity and rationalism reigned supreme. Although those terms themselves are elusive and complicated I will not get into a discussion on them. I have always had a strong repugnance for the 19th century and the "enlightened" smuggness of modernity, so I am perturbed. I began this post by claiming that I think of my life as something that unfolds rationally. I will leave this idea for now because I don't know enough about Hegel to continue.

However; the idea that a Zeitgeist haunts every age is interesting. For, with the claims of my last post, it seems that I am discontented by the lack of ghosts to haunt me. Perhaps what holds true of horror films hold true here as well. The most terrrifying element of a horror film (a quality one at least) is not what is seen, but that which is obfuscated and enigmatic. A chimera is more frightening than a crazy texan with a chainsaw, or a Punk Rocker with a Norse Broadsword for that matter. Likewise the Zeitgeist of our present age is more terrifying than those which haunted previous generations because we have no idea what it is. My fear of Zeitgeist is not unlike my spiritual fears. The only thing I fear more than a malevolent god is no god at all.

So I am terrified, terrified because our age isn't even defined by decadence or waste anymore. We are haunted by nothing and nothing has therefore become material. It is not that our age is actually defined by nothing which terrifies me, it is that nothingness has taken a shape and now haunts us. We are haunted by a very real and powerful nothingness, rather than a benign and apathetic nihilism.

And now for something vecetious for a change...and that shape is Oprah, beware her gaping maw of nothingness...