[thəp]/dear first year ladison

what is the definition of art?
must it serve a purpose?
how do you define that purpose? (can art be an end in itself? can beauty? can pleasure?)
what about goodness?
what if the purpose is evil, but it's really beautiful, but it's really evil [masochistic beauty? thorny rose?]

There are (still) many things that make me feel like a nobody, a noob. It's hard to strike the perfect balance, and trying to tackle a problem by formulating the hypothesis with the word "perfect" in it probably doesn't help.

But hey, freshest source of conflict: art & utility.

I've been learning a lot about the value of [utility], as counter-posed against [art]. Yes, blah blah art is purposeful; sometimes art is all we can do to render meaning and beauty; are you saying you are a utilitarian blah blah STOP. I know it's a crude and contentious distinction, but simmer down, self, cause I'm just trying to figure things out, like most of the rest of the time(s).

So I've been learning, taking in, feeling, thinking about this art-utility thing, and mostly, it's illumination upon all the things I am clearly not illuminated about - which makes me feel hopeful that I'm at least facing the right direction. As a fourth year English major, having to read and write and say a lot of words in general, I'm realizing that a lot of my time these two semester is being taken up in the Defense of Myself/My Major/My Murky Vocational Future. And I get this. It doesn't even annoy me anymore.

Because I think I'm learning, taking in, feeling, thinking, that technical and hard-sciences knowledge is actually really appealing to me, sometimes embarrassingly so, as I flounder about in my non-knowledge and blind admiration of random Bio majors and pre-health people who seem to be doing things with their lives, but still realize that the world is utterly incomplete without its random beauty and seemingly coincidental creation of things and other Things That Seem to Have No Clear Purpose.

There is indeed a place and a time for every little thing, is gonna be allriiight.

Man. The more I learn, the less I seem to know.
So, eh-hem, dear postgrad Ladison, remember these things and try to blabber less foolishly.