Word: inward
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...newspaper column—to some extent, any creative effort—is a solitary practice, an attempt to take an internal impression and document it. Regardless of the subject—ourselves, our families, strangers, nature—the process of creating turns our focus relentlessly inward: to pinpoint, as precisely as possible, the dimensions of this impression, the color and the shape, so that we can faithfully reproduce it and our creations ring true. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that all this time I’ve spent staring at my computer screen...
...rests more on the works themselves than with the effort that we put into them. Whether one of my written pieces delivers meaning concerns the piece itself, not all the work I employ in finding a message and trying to express it. I’m still left looking inward, studying myself...
Perhaps, to varying degrees, this is indeed egotism. But perhaps this inward focus is also an integral part of what we are supposed to do in college: ground our identities firmly, so that we can recognize where we end, where the world begins, and how we and the world are connected. Perhaps my creative writing can be an exercise in navel-gazing—but the creative process, like our studies, can be self-orientation as well as self-study: not only a means of expression, but also a way of fitting ourselves into a larger system. If these...
Europe these days is a curiously inward-looking place. Its political class is preoccupied with the time-consuming process of building the European Union. Young Europeans, meanwhile, are enjoying the borderless, happy and comfortable world that is their own continent. I couldn't prove it, but I suspect that Europeans are both less interested in and less knowledgeable about the U.S. than they were 20 years ago. They increasingly form their views of the U.S. from the sort of European journalism that stresses American weirdness, as if every American were a Botoxed, snake-handling cowboy Holy Roller, and that...
...course, China's newfound maturity in the foreign-policy arena might prove fleeting. China watchers forecast similar changes before the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests and the 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade?only to see China turn inward again. Even during the heralded manned space mission, there was a reminder that the central government remains authoritarian and insecure. China refused to air the liftoff live, lest state TV broadcast a midair disaster. But, for now, the rest of the world seems willing to share in the internationalist spirit that inspired astronaut Yang to hold up that...