Quora Is. . . a Real Mixed Bag

Unlike Q/A fora that focus on one topic or are strictly information-seeking-and-sharing boards, Quora features just about any question anyone can come up with, which means it’s a site that has just about everything from serious questioners with folks making serious attempts to answer such questions to trolls baiting others and then “flinging monkey poo” at anyone who attempts a serious answer, to those like the dumbass who asked the following question:

“What’s one song that always gives you the feels?”

Anyone who uses the term “the feels” deserves no response other than raucous mocking. It’s a vague, stupid nonsense term that only self-made idiots would even contemplate (if contemplate they could) using. The Urban Dictionary (though that should be in “scare quotes” *heh*) tries to describe the term thusly:

“A word used to describe something that is intensely emotional on a level somewhere between you feeling empty and you on the floor in a ball weeping uncontrollably.”

In other words, it’s a term so broad and vague as to be meaningless, and yet this questioner wants to know,

“”What’s one song that always evokes vague, undefined, essentially meaningless emotions in you ranging from ennui to agony?”

#gagamaggot

OTOH, the stupidity of gargantuan proportions the question represents nevertheless did not prevent my mind from fleeing to a momentary wish that I could somehow know the tune Kipling had running through his head as he composed “The Last Chantey.”

The Kipling thought was for two reasons:

1. Kipling’s “. . .editor on the Civil and Military Gazette also recorded that ‘when he had got a tune into his head, the words and rhyme came as readily as when a singer vamps his own banjo accompaniment’.” and others have recorded their experiences of Kipling having a tune–usually old but sometimes one from his own imagination–he would go around humming until words came to him suiting the tune.
2. Tuneless, “The Last Chantey” never fails to choke me up and put a tear in my eye (and a smile on my face) as I consider what God was willing to render as “heaven” for the sailor-folk, and what that said of Kipling’s own ethos.

As a childish youth, I experienced a momentary affection for the affectations of e.e. cummings and his ilk, but now I recognize those childish affections as silly. Consider the comment of Vasant A. Shahane concerning the contrast between Kipling and “modern poets” as standing for a part of my enduring appreciation of Kipling and those few who could be considered of his caliber:

“A modern poet is inclined to say, ‘If you do not understand me, so much the worse for you,’ whereas Kipling would assert, ‘If you do not understand me, so much the worse for me.'”