Welcomes, Whys and Wherefores

Hi

Welcome to my little corner of the internet.

The first question is; why should you read it? I hope that all of my posts will be interesting, most of them intelligent, and some of them entertaining. I aim to cover the wide range of topics that I am interested in, from poetry to pure mathematics. I will discuss Mozart's Operas alongside Godel's Incompleteness theorem (much more on this later). In addition I want to give some representation of what life is like as student in Cape Town, the most beautiful city in the world.

I aim, at this ambitious early stage, to make this a collection of essays, narratives,diary entries, poems, ideas, links and so on. Their unifying characteristic being that they are drawn from my experiences and thoughts. So essentially "Ex Rudis" should eventually take on a mosaic like form. When viewed close up, each post may be self contained, direct, perhaps even fragment like. But I hope that, as the collection grows, it begins to resemble, in its entirety, a representation of the way I see the world.

So, why the name "Ex Rudis"? Rudis in Latin means rough, uncultivated, raw. So this blog is about being "out of" the Rudis. This represents my desire to take what I see, feel and think about the world and refine it through writing. On a deeper level though, the word erudite comes from "Ex Rudis", and so this blog reflects my deeper desire for erudition (more on this later). In contrast, is my faith in the aesthetic, the purely sensory, the beautiful. I want to also share my experiences in this regard. So in essence then, this blog is about documenting my continuum between the Rudis and the erudite often through the interlocutor of aesthetics. From the emotional to the aesthetic, from thought to knowledge, from the the poem to the theorem. Ex Rudis is about placing little markers on the map of what is outside the wild dark cave.

-Z