Uterine to Saturnine OR Unwillingly Born

The past four days have been quite strange - the first four days I spent away from Georgetown without knowing when I would return to the Hilltop. What I felt was a pairing of confusion and nostalgia until I came upon a curiously apt description of my situation in a biography of Salvador Dali.

When asked about the beginning of his life, Dali claimed he could remember his time in the womb, saying "It was divine! It was paradise!" He recalled intra-uterine dreams, often of "fried eggs on a plate without the plate." His words, not mine. If that sentence does not make sense to you, perhaps this painting of the same title will.

Dali's comments on birth as a traumatically confusing, rather than renewing event, mirror my feelings on leaving Georgetown. Getting on that flight out of Reagan (which cruelly flew over campus) was like "passing abruptly from that ideally protective and enclosed environment to all the hard dangers of the frightfully real new world."

So, like a newborn, I am sitting at home, eyes open, waiting for whatever comes next.


Salvador Dali, on life and birth -
"...It seems increasingly true that the whole imaginative life of man tends to reconstitute symbolically by the most similar situations and representations of that initial paradisaical state, and especially to surmount the horrible 'tramatism of birth' by which we are expulsed from the paradise, passing abruptly from that ideally protective and enclosed environment to all the hard dangers of the frightfully real new world, with the concomitant phenomena of asphyxiation, of compression, of blinding by the sudden outer light and of the brutal harshness of the reality of the world..."