Is Augustine in love with the act itself, the requited aspect of love? Is he in love with the feeling that loving produces in return, an intense emotional boomerang?
Since we are working in the past tense, is this an acknowledgement that this transitory love, this loving of the act of love itself is, in actuality, a type of self-love, a vain flattery? Isn’t all self-love transitional?
However, to live in the moment, to love the moment, aren’t we forced to embrace the transitory nature of our existence? Aren’t we called to embrace all our manifestations, as if the passage of time could be equated inherently with improvement, with progress?
Can I ever truly love a manifestation of myself other than the current one?
My name is Michael Sean Gallagher. I am a Lecturer in Digital Education at the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. I am Co-Founder and Director of Panoply Digital, a consultancy dedicated to ICT and mobile for development (M4D); we have worked with USAID, GSMA, UN Habitat, Cambridge University and more on education and development projects. I was a researcher on the Near Futures Teaching project, a project that explores how teaching at The University of Edinburgh unfold over the coming decades, as technology, social trends, patterns of mobility, new methods and new media continue to shift what it means to be at university. Previously, I was the Research Associate on the NERC, ESRC, and AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund sponsored GCRF Research for Emergency Aftershock Forecasting (REAR) project. I was an Assistant Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (한국외국어대학교) in Seoul, Korea. I have also completed a doctorate at University College London (formerly the independent Institute of Education, University of London) on mobile learning in the humanities in Korea.
