a little while back i read a little article about umami, the recently discovered fifth taste. it’s sorta weird, but i believe that umami has had an impact on my everyday life, or rather learning of umami. i was just thinking in east asian religions class as the professor was talking about mengzi (mencius) and how he used taste as a metaphor for how virtue is developed. it occurred to me about how you could pin down 4 hearts/sprouts of virtue (hmm, looking for an online ver of mencius, 2A6, but can’t find it… you’d think there’d be a copy (not in chinese)) when there may be more at work. of course then it occurred to me that those moral theories were just arbitrary and i didn’t worry about it anymore. um, still trying to tast umami though…
anyway, what this whole train of thought did get me thinking about was that how things or people that you’ve never encountered or met can suddenly become really important. (no, umami is not life changing, but it’s a passable segue). it also got me thinking, do old things and people disappear just as quickly as the new can assert itself? yes, not particularly original thoughts, but still… the phenomological flux in our lives makes it hard for me to accept any worldviews that espouse permanence as a central tenet.