School of Night: A Whole Lot of Nothing

OK, first there's something I need to get out of my system.

Tell 'em, Billy!

Now, back to work.

Turner's essay struck me as a very interesting account of the luminaries associated with the cooler-than-thou collective of the School of Night. With the amount of times that the concept of "nothing" was brought up in one way or another, it would be easy to peg this group propagating a nihilistic view for the sake of rubbing it in the faces of the religious higher-ups. However, such an outlook would be far too boring... the way that the School of Night embraced this Nothing is something that I find fascinating and, in a way, inspiring.

Nothing at face value is obviously a huge disappointment. Look at the reaction to the discovery of the New World--once the honeymoon ended, Turner likens the societal reality that the supposed endless possibilities turned out to change nothing to the coming of a sickness. This promise of something grand turned out to be unfulfilled. The real excitement was one that couldn't be brought back to the masses--instead, this Nothing yielded intangible wonder and discovery that only the like of Thomas Hariot could grasp. Nothing that had to be experienced to be understood.

At the risk of sounding pretentious or sophomoric, what I took away from this essay is the limitless possibilities of Nothing. What we have to work with in the mind is without shape or form, and that if we should be so bold as to harness the energy of the void to make something, then anything can result. Now, not to pull the same "You can do absolutely anything that you want!" kind of stuff that everybody mother says to her child, but in reaching outside the bounds of convention, greatness ensues.

The section on Juan Vives' fable on the gods creating living creatures to act on the stage of the world encapsulates the weight that comes with manipulating but believing in this endlessness. This imitation that we as humans carry forth day by day, mimicking the gods (theoretically) yields creation and thought of great power. Sir Walter Raleigh said that the concept of the soul was something created, but that it was no less real for that fact... Now getting into spirituality and religion is kind of a slippery slope, but I agree with the thought that our attempts as humans to justify and explain our experiences--giving the intangible a definition--adds an element to it that helps us to understand it and maybe even look deeper into it.

I realize that this may be a lot of rambling. When I blog on my own time (not very often), I tend to ramble on and on... I'm not terribly used to doing this academically but I hope that this entry wasn't a total insult to Turner's insightful writing.