Thankful for Peers

I really am thankful for the classmates I have and have had throughout my time in school. Every one of the ones I’ve known, even those that never became more than acquaintances or those that I have ceased to be friends with, has played an integral role in shaping my development as a student and even more as a person. I am certain that with a different cast of classmates my entire schooling would have been very different, and as a result of those different experiences I would be a very different individual. I am very grateful that I have had the friends I’ve known, I do not take them for granted. I know that a school is a profoundly lonely place when in isolation, and there are many students that never quite come by acceptance, so I’m lucky to have found it. As well as being able to talk to someone in school, it’s nice to be able to have people to spend time with outside of school, even without any particular objective. Having classmates allows someone to grow as a social being, to develop skills necessary to understand those around them and sympathy for fellow humans. Such an association opens doors for every student; it allows them access to the culture of their generation and allows them to play a role in shaping it. The impact of the community on an organism is significant, and should the organism be out of contact with the community, the community cannot possibly exist. Our day to day associations and friendships play a role, however small, in setting the tone for all human interaction.

Crime and Punishment (of Candide)

I’ve avoided this entry because I have no idea how to fill 250 words with my answer to the question of whether or not Candide’s punishments fit his crimes. They very obviously and intentionally do not. Voltaire specifically makes Candide suffer comically disproportional consequences for his minor wrongdoings. He went for a walk and was therefore a deserter of the Bulgarian army and deserved the execution he narrowly escaped from by pardon! My original plan was to play along with Voltaire’s comedic theme by justifying everything that happened in the story, but I found myself uninspired, and I still doubted that would fill the word requirement. Did Candide’s punishments fit his crimes? Of course not.

My Open Letter to Cormac McCarthy

Dear Cormac McCarthy,
I have recently read your novel, The Road, and I must admit I was fairly disappointed. Aside from the Pulitzer Prize and other accolades your novel has achieved, I’d heard good things from friends. Contrary to their recommendations, I thought it was very much overrated. I will acknowledge that it was significantly more enjoyable than the movie based on it, but that is only because the book lacked everything that would allow for a good movie adaptation. Movies are very dependent upon character and plot development. Your novel was almost entirely devoid of both. I understand that the purpose is to convey complete bleakness and pointlessness in the post-apocalyptic world of the novel, but it just doesn’t make for good literature in my opinion. While it is possible, if unlikely, to get by on excessively elegant and lyrical prose, you did a poor job of this as well. While there are a few good examples of adept use of language, they are few and far apart and are in no way justification for your story’s lack of story. Also, just to make it clear, utter neglect for syntax is not a stylistic choice. A fragmented sentence is almost always simply incorrect, and while they do have a unique impact when used sparingly, your merciless use of them leaves the reader desensitized to that impact. I’m sorry you found quotation marks and apostrophes injurious to your creativity, but they do play important roles and any novelist that intends to have their work taken seriously should use them. I also found the formatting of dialogue and superfluous spacing between paragraphs strangely disingenuous, as if trying to conceal the actual brevity of what is actually probably a novella by some standards. However, that’s really not an important or very serious criticism, as I acknowledge that probably wasn’t your intention at all if you even played a role in the formatting. I hope you found my criticisms somewhat constructive despite my perhaps more malicious intentions in writing this letter.
Regards,
A reader

Poet Defense!

“Go to Tibet

Ride a camel.

Dye your shoes blue.

Grow a beard.

Circle the world in a paper canoe.

Subscribe to The Saturday Evening Post.

Chew on the left side of your mouth only.

Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a straight razor.

And carve her name in her arm.

Brush your teeth with gasoline.

Sleep all day and climb trees at night.

Hold your head under water and play the violin.

Do a belly dance before pink candles.

Kill your dog.

Run for mayor.

Live in a barrel.

Break your head with a hatchet.

Plant tulips in the rain.

But don't write poetry. “

- Charles Bukowski

I find myself unable to defend Charles Bukowski, as he has broken his own dictum of abstaining from writing poetry. This poem was intended to be friendly advice to a lot of young men, but instead it appears to be a schizophrenic to-do list. However, it is genuinely hysterical, so perhaps this bizarre advice is permissible. Really, it seems very few people take him seriously in my experience. I haven’t read much of his writing at all aside from Dinosauria, We, but based on that, I would imagine he doesn’t actually warrant the kind of disapproval he seems to get.

A Direction for the Class to Be Directed in By Direction.

Before deciding what direction is appropriate for the class, the goals of the class need to be clearly defined.  Because everyone intends to gain something different from the class, setting a direction for the entire group and expecting everyone to follow is impractical. The unified goal of everyone in the class would most likely be to pass the class, but since that can be done without meeting the goals of those in the class that intend on learning something, perhaps it isn’t the best goal on which to base the direction of the class. On a more serious note, I would enjoy going over more of the schools of thought of the Age of Enlightenment as well as classical and Eastern philosophies. I think that the more modern (or even perhaps futuristic in regards to thoughts on a post-apocalyptic world) thoughts we’ve gone over need perspective only granted through knowledge of such things. On a less serious note, I think the direction the class most needs is left. Left is a good direction. 

Father & Son

Honestly, I genuinely do not understand paternity. Not to say I do not have a reasoned knowledge of what it is or of its existence. Rather, I simply cannot apprehend it in a visceral sense. This can be really troubling at times as I cannot be certain of my ability to compartmentalize my interactions; to keep that relationship separate from every other association I keep. It seems to me that friendship was substituted for that relationship in my life, and as such I often find myself questioning my capability to clearly discern which is which. It isn’t that I think of every friend so closely, but more so that paternity has become meaningless, common and insincere. When I see characterizations of such strict gender roles, nuclear families, it really doesn’t make sense to me. I wonder if that outlook is common among those in my generation. It must be the case that stereotypical families are comically inaccurate for nearly everyone, but I wonder how many of my peers are so terminally detached from the paradigm that when they see depictions of what the relationship should look like they cannot intuitively grasp it. I really doubt my sense of apartness is in any way uncommon or even severe by the standards of most, so I wonder how such archetypes can even possibly continue to exist in a world where so few can truly understand them. 

How Do I Know What I Know?

The question of how one knows what he or she knows is one of definition. Objective knowledge is unattainable in nearly every matter, as knowledge is essentially subjective. In these terms I think, like Descartes, that the only thing any consciousness can be fully certain of as an objective truth is its own existence. However, for this question, I define knowledge as a very high degree of certainty of belief in a given thought. Defining it as such, there are myriad sources from which I draw said beliefs. Ethical truths are drawn from biological, evolutionary history of the human species as well as societal expectations and norms. Such ethical truths, as well as other basic things, are the basis upon which an individual operates in society so it’s natural that they are believed with a very high degree of certainty. The other basic things would be simple thoughts that just occur throughout life, from things told to us in school, by parents or other authority figures to the things that we see in the world, on television, the things we read in novels and in text books. I think the only way to adequately describe the source of knowledge for living things is ascribe it to life itself. Basic as it may seem, to be any more specific would be to preclude exploration into every possible means by which beliefs and knowledge are formed. So how do I know what I know? I know what I know because of what I have lived to experience (not to say knowledge is anywhere near strictly experiential.)