Preface
“Muchness: the innocence and imagination that appears in the hearts of young children. As the children grow older, they become more mature, and gain responsibilities. They lose their muchness.” - The Urban Dictionary
Dear Reader,
As you are reading this last issue of the NUKS for the academic year of 2019 2020, I hope I showed you enough muchness. This is important for me because a muchier person has imagination. And who even wants to hear Tim Burton’s version of the Mad Hatter tell them “You used to be much more…MUCHIER. You’ve lost your MUCHNESS.” Does this make sense? I hope it does, because down the rabbit hole all things sound like that. At least in the rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland. Maybe the lovely NUKSers have managed to give you another version of what it’s like to go down the rabbit hole? Who knows? This academic year, it was a great pleasure for me to get the opportunity to lead the NUKS committee and design the magazine. I hope I managed to visually convey my muchness through it. Hopefully, whoever takes over that task next academic year, continues to convey their muchness. But we will not worry about that for now. Because the future, as Tennessee Williams said, is called “perhaps,” which is the only possible thing to call the future and the important thing is to not allow that to scare you. Let us focus on the present. With this final issue for the academic year, we want to give you a blurring of the wearisome lines of what is acceptable. We want to look at reality through an honest lens that makes us all slightly uncomfortable with that whimsically, wacky, eeriness that suggests the world we think we live in is not the world that is. Because, if you think about it, each one of us lives in a different world from everyone else, right? I was in class once and my lecturer blew my mind when she asked me what my culture is. I replied that I am Bulgarian. She then said “No. I mean what YOUR culture is. Your Bulgarian culture is different from your mother’s Bulgarian culture for example. Because you encountered different things, went to different places and you are influenced by different knowledge.” So what do you say? Would you venture down the rabbit hole between the pages of this last NUKS and find out all the other worlds, cultures and worldviews?
Head of the NUKS committee and Designer, Tatyana Dimitrova
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