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Liz's avatar

I was alone when I was attacked in Florence early in the morning by a man who was trying to shove me into his car. I retain smell, color, texture and emotion from the experience. I was extremely angry and fought back while I screamed a primal scream. He dropped me and zipped away, only to circle the block later, but I had run and ducked behind cars where he could not see me, then stayed next to a man setting up a kiosk until the friend I was meeting joined me.

Anyone who adventures long enough will have these experiences which are the price we play for leaving safety. I wrote up this experience recently for a Spanish class and my professor interpreted it as a terrible thing that ought not to have happened, but to me it was an extremely empowering experience. I believe this is partly due to personality and partly due to the generational shift which values safety above experience. Now I am wondering what a different person would have retained as I wrote it up nearly 40 years after it happened and I could access very vivid memory. I could still feel his skin under my fingernails and the stale smell of body odor when someone has been drinking alcohol hours before. I can see the low slung red sports car. I am sure I was chosen for being tiny and foreign at the time and he did not expect to encounter fury.

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Charles Main's avatar

Sign of a true teacher to turn such an experience into a well-constructed 'teachable moment' for your students (and subs), not just a recounting, but a comparative analysis of sensory experience. And the way for all to 'process the trauma', made the more effective by the experience having been shared.

For me, your tale and analysis are a clear illustration of time dilation (non-relativistic :-), 'the fact of information being input across all channels...explains the sense of time slowing down', that really brought the concept home.

"if we have no model at all, new information may simply not be noticed" brings to mind the apocryphal notion that European ships were invisible to natives when first encountered, one that still seems to resurface occasionally.

'Sensory memory...is divided lyrically', though, left me puzzled. And I have to wonder why the Quito Virgin is yanking on a chain.

And one more thought--lack of a perception of shared history and of shared fate is perhaps what people are really seeking to rectify on the internet. 'That most human of things.'

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