Good Morning

So it's Thursday morning and I am sitting all by myself in the East Lounge in Rackham Graduate School. I am trying to revise the ethnicity list for the new version of the Comparative Prelim, but I am finding it difficult, nay, impossible to concentrate. A friend of mine in college (I suppose we were friends... definitely on friendly terms, hung out a couple of times) died. He was badly burned in a fire in Seoul and his family was raising money for his medical bills. I contributed and was looking periodically at the facebook page reporting his status. Last night, while working in the Ford School, I checked it and to my utter surprise, he passed away. I never entertained the notion that he wasn't going to make it. His sister uploaded a journal entry he had written. It was much more profound than anything I've jotted down in my moleskin notebook (or on this blog, which goes without saying). He was utterly alive and aware that he was living. I am often torn between the concepts of living for the day and living for the future. Too much emphasis on the here-and-now can, on the individual level, lead to disaster for the future, and on the aggregate level, a hedonistic culture. Yet continually planning for that day that will never come robs life of all of its spontaneity, and, inevitably, some of its beauty. In his journal entries, it seems that he had a perspective on the world that I sorely lack. He knew he was part of a bigger thing. He saw the failings of society, but he didn't linger in his pessimism or freeze in the futility of individual action, something I do. I am saddened that the world lost such a reflective and intelligent individual.