Unappreciated on Facebook

I posted this on Facebook. I thought it was swell, just swell. It didn't get much of a response. So I'm posting it here, too.

I am still trancribing audio recordings in which students are describing their research methods. When I admitted how much I enjoyed it everyone else on the group willingly let me do theirs, too. Ha!

The main reason I enjoy it is because I enjoy typing. (It's not so odd. Apparently Stephen Fry types pages of other peoples' text for fun.) But also, there's something contemplative about it. I mostly catch the words the first time I listen to them, stopping and starting the recording, but sometimes I have to go back a few seconds. Hearing the same recording over and over again...it's like hearing it for the first time. In a strange way, it starts to seem more real, more compressed, more THERE.

I've had the same experience when looking at a photograph or when drawing something. You SEE the thing almost for the first time, when you linger on it...I also feel this when reading poetry criticism or (sometimes) film criticism, when the critic lingers lovingly over a line or scene.

This is also part of why Groundhog Day is my favourite film. Maybe we WOULD have to live the same day over and over and over to even experience it once, properly.

And perhaps this approaches the state of mind William Blake was describing when he wrote:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.