Over drinks the other night, Katie shared with me her lesson to her 9th graders – Humanities v. Science. She explained to her class that the humanities were subjects related to ideas and culture – more of the gray matter. Whereas the sciences dealt with fact and trying to get to the truth of the matter. This was her example:
Maybe it was the cadence with which she spoke, or maybe the very beautiful simplicity with which she explained – but that phrase hit me. It started to transcend so much more than what she was relaying. It began to permeate into my recent thinking on reality v. virtual life. The virtual life, for all its magnificent imagination and creativity – it does not equal six. It will always be five just by its nature of being virtual.
Madden NFL 2007 recently came out – with a whole lotta hoopla in the gaming world. Jeff MacGregor, wrote a fantastic column on this in SI 21 August 2006:
“Take the violence out of football, erase the pain given and taken, reduce the grunt and the struggle to the push of a button, eliminate the magnificent inconsistencies of the human heart and it’s capacity for courage or cowardice, and the game, the war, is no more than fast-twitch exercise – a battle fought without personal cost. It is cause without effect, a victory only for technology and opposable thumbs.”
You can win at Madden 2007 – but you’ll never feel the beating, you’ll never taste the blood and you’ll never sweat the win.
That’s a whole lot less than six.
This translates on a personal level with me. I seem to continually be in a pattern of making a case for five. I can whip you up a fantastic story of love and romance – I can write words that will make you quiver and blush – but my words do not make a relationship come alive.
Still, truth be told, I am the Atticus Finch of number 5.
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