the spirit of inquiry

(or how to burn else be burnt)

Lately I’ve been in the company (or supervision, really) of an engineer at this department who’s been constantly bombarding me with questions and ideas regarding this field. Unlike all the other engineers, who really do nothing but to manage and direct people, or choose to ignore me entirely, he actually has to carefully weigh each decision, and do all that analysis and calculations and stuff. Which usually involves millions of ringgit and a bunch of shady old contractors with their safety helmets and mobile pouches. So off we go and watch the array of people you need to go through in order to power a building. A tedious affair, really.

So questions, ranging from the harmless Ohmic equations, to what it really means. It apparently isn’t enough to just say V=IR and assign what they represent, but you must go into the heart of things, of why they even exist in the first place. I, who have apparently decided to go on automatic mode and breeze through electrical engineering by carefully memorizing and understanding only the key things at only most important times (like all of us, no?), try to scramble through the vague memories of my first years and found out I understood nothing. (or maybe we can just say we forget). Naturally this annoys him. Says if you can’t really explain something, a concept, a theory, to an engineer, let alone an outsider, to the point of understanding, to the point where they go ‘Aaah’ which is of relief and not more puzzlement, then I have failed.

He then reminds me to the Sejarah textbook, of what drove the Europeans to Enlightenment and propel them into the Renaissance era?

It is the spirit of inquiry. The quest for truth.

Ach, I say to myself.

Suddenly, I could see a fifteen year old version of Maisarah loathing me entirely, indulging in such trivialities, pursuing cheap attractions that do nothing but distract and waste your time from the more important things.

I always view myself in such terms, because if we could compare myself then and now, (back then) I would find myself more angry, boorish, critical, but yet more passionate than any other period in my life. there i was, trying to study Latin, German, and attempting to understand Nietzsche and his will to power, learning new vocabulary, and whatever Greek gods and goddesses in every sort of myth, poring over suicide notes and journals of school shooters, occupying myself with encyclopedias and dictionaries of world history and philosophy in trying to make sense of the world. i would read Crime and Punishment in two days while stuck in a hotel, and ponder whether murder is justifiable, whether god existed, whether life is necessary.

Yes, I was pretentious as hell (I still am), and very depressed. Now that I think of it, it’s like Dwayne out of Little Miss Sunshine (minus the silence, though I did have my share of muteness). But to cling/marvel/reminisce on past experiences shall get you nowhere. The thing to do is to look forward and forge/discover new things. I realize I am getting older, thus more

But now i can see myself receding slowly into passivity, where I am no longer interested in new things, except the occassional dip into Persian Poetry, or Rilke’s quest for truth, Ghazali’s sciences, Kierkegaard’s despair, Jung’s psychology, Thoreau’s wilderness, James’ psychology of education, the feminine mystique (as always), french-arabic lessons.  The large corpus of literature and philosophy i think i shall never have time to read all of them. All this without ever having any concrete understanding on them. I amass ideas and understand none. The most I can do is to blurb a sentence or two that is incoherent and insufficient. Thus, I lay claim to nothing and declare myself a hypocrite.

Of course, in this situation, what is to be done?

Perhaps things have taken a very different direction, or that slowly I am crawling towards things without much enthusiasm or guidance. All this done amidst all these engineering studies, which I doubt myself having as much passion as I have in… everything else. Apparently I can’t even answer why does Reactive Power exist.

Rilke once wrote to Lou that although he thinks himself sufficient (superfically, with a home, a wife, a daughter) he stills wants “to be real among real things”. Now I am sitting in the office where in front of me, a large header for a board is titled X-tream (how extreme), with a table with ten different manuals for the operations of transformers, switchgears, circuit breakers so that you, the reader, may have lights in your homes, a laptop to type all this and to refer to the different textbooks of electrical theories, and finally a cup of coffee which shall no doubt make me lose sleep once again tonight. I must work, and finish my report soon. At home, the numerous books that I plan to read at the beginning of summer still remain unread, as the case with most of things Maisarah plans to do during the break. With three more weeks left in this country, so we strive to accomplish everything.

At the moment, such is our pursuit for realness.