Spirit of the times
by jonathanlimes
Over the previous week I had a chance to attend a couple of seminars and dinner talks by faculty both in and out of Virginia, and they have been pretty inspiring. I should develop a habit to document things right after I’ve experienced them, but time is ever the eternally scarce resource and attention is begged for in many other areas. No excuses though, writing things down secures memories that might otherwise just leave you forever.
At the first Second Year Dinner Series dinner session last week, the College of Arts and Sciences Dean mentioned, among a whole lot of other thought-provoking points: “There will be a person who comes out of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, takes full advantage of it, runs with it, and makes from this present a future that none of us could imagine.” I was intrigued, because more often than not we tend to think of revolutionaries and great leaders as people who resist the waves of society, and against the tide fight and prevail, and in the process open up more possibilities and new ways of thought. But these great people could be riding on these societal waves, just embodying the full culture of thought of the times and expending their full energies on the present, hence being a wholesome representative of what it means to be the definitive person of this era.
She was talking about Steve Jobs. And she went on to say that any single individual on this earth could be the next person who comes out of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, and manifests it in its whole. I have no idea what this very spirit or culture could be, but perhaps I don’t need to know about it to have been operating very comfortably within it. We all did, and we all still do.
