Pastoral

There's a page in my journal that says only:

What is REPRESENTATION?

What IS place?

What is MAN vs. NATURE?

I hadn't thought about these things since then, only subliminally if at all, but I find myself in class and  talking about the abstraction that is nature - everything but what is us. Then again, today, I was thinking that almost all of mankind isn't me... with only the tiniest margin of error, everything in the world is not me. And if I'm to take the skeptic's route (which I often do, since it seems like most arguments need it) not even my own body, not even my own mind...

And then I find myself reading, and the first chapter is titled The Crisis in Man's Knowledge of Himself, and I see that the author had previously written on semiotics... and I want to write about semiotics. So on the one hand the shrinking of self makes me feel terribly terribly alone, but on the other, larger hand being reduced to one unobservable (or at least unobserved) atom of the universe puts me in the same league as everyone and everything else, and there's a strong sense of community in that.