Saturday, March 31, 2007

Something new

Tonight I decided to create a new blog. I am not getting rid of my old one; rather, I'll keep posting in it as usual and just as often. But I felt the desire to create something new, that would have a different theme than my regular blog, which contains personal stories, day-to-day events, etc. This site will be different. It will be viewable to everyone and contain a more philosophical and thought-provoking set of posts. Sometimes I'll post several times a week, and other times there may be weeks without anything new. But often I'm inspired to write about a movie, a book, a conversation, a specific musing that has no connection to anyone I know, and thus seems irrelevant to post in my blog. This will now be the outlet. I especially want to discuss books I am reading -- currently I am in the midst of Reading Lolita in Tehran, and two works by C. S. Lewis: The Four Loves and The Business of Heaven (an edited collection of his religious philosophical writings, one for each day of the year). So discussions of those works will definitely be forthcoming. I hope this is of interest to some people -- and at the very least, I will enjoy writing freely about intellectual topics for a minimal audience of one: myself.
Finally, I'd like to note that the title -- "The colors of our dreams" -- was inspired by Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar Nafisi mentions a conversation with one of her former students, in which the young girl spoke of painting the colors of her dreams. Nafisi ponders, how many people actually have the chance to paint the colors of their dreams? The theme of colors vs. black and white is prominent in this novel, and I am only in chapter 2 thus far. But we live in a world of colors, of vivid images that are emblazened sharply in our minds, of memories that endure. Dreams differ from one individual to another, and the colors are not uniform. But we all have dreams, whether we acknowledge them or not, and we all see the world through a multi-dimensional spectrum. Sometimes, though, recognizing the seemingly most simple properties of our world -- the colors -- can be an experience in itself. The foundations of beauty are found in colors, and if I could, right now I would plant myself at the shore of the ocean and drink in the soft blues and mellow greens and warming yellows and nurturing pinks. For today, for this very moment, those are the colors of my dreams.