Tonight in class I thought about/learned:1. PETA once pushed for calling fish "sea kittens."
What makes us different from animals?
2. It has something to do with the realm of ethics and ethical responsibility.
3. Also, our cognitive ability to project ideas of our virtual selves into the distant future. Essentially, our ability to hope as well as our ability to contemplate our own death.
Perhaps i am not so morbid afterall- just very, very human. In a prior winter break journal rambling, I wrote "What is it like to be dead and how do people continue to live so comfortably in their unknowing?"
I remember a porch conversation in Steubenville that centered on the saying, "Remember your death, brother, remember your death." I think some group of religious took that as their mantra. The idea that it is important to grapple with and ultimately accept our own mortality always resonated with me. I am grappling.
If I remember correctly, the memory of fish (or maybe just goldfish) maxes out at something like 30 seconds. It's in the chorus of some Ani D song, too... the idea that for goldfish, the little plastic castle is a surprise every time.
Am I to regard this (as far as we know) uniquely human ability as a curse or a blessing? What am I supposed to do with it? Notions of an afterlife seem so cloudly- so beyond any ability to fathom at all... Is the idea of an afterlife where our ability to project ourselves into a future and our ability to hope intersect? If our cognitive abilities do exceed that of the rest of creation, how do we know how to correctly use them? What is reasonable to hope for? Do reason and hope ever share the same fishbowl?
