To the End

The FINAL EXAM for Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy, affectionately known as 'LitHum,' for first-years at Columbia University in the City of New York, will begin in T-2 hours, at 12:30pm EST Friday, May 6, 2011.

It has been a pleasure blogging my reading. I've tried to refrain from stating the obvious in my posts, so hopefully this compilation of disconnected, random thoughts have added new insight to the conversation on literature and philosophy.

Above all, thanks for reading; maybe next year I'll have another blog for Contemporary Civilization, or 'CC.'

What a glorious, sunny day it is.

"To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf (pt. 2 of 2) and incoherent ramblings

The lighthouse. Like the thought of summer, it beckons in the distance, that shining beacon of endless possibilities and opportunities; the buzzing of cicadas, droning of the lone biplane overhead, and the smell of dried grass. I close my eyes every now and then while reading this book. Thinking about summer makes me yearn for a distant past, of a past that haunts my hopes of summer and peace. A door slams. I step out of my room into the hallway, and from the lounge at the end of the hall, the grating babble of a sports commentator suddenly washes over me, disrupting a moment of peace I had found. No; a paper to write--two papers. Have I heard back from that summer job posting? What did I forget?--No, what is the use of thinking, worrying, always chastising myself for not being the best I can possibly be. But what is the use? Yes; we are here as students. Our sole task is to absorb knowledge, learn about new ways of thinking, and maybe have a little fun. Like hampsters on a hampster-wheel, we push forward in repetition; unthinking; unfeeling--so we beat on.

Notice The Great Gatsby reference in that last line. The last line of that book was so powerful I inadvertently committed it to memory. It goes something like: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Okay so maybe my attempt at stream-of-consciousness writing pales in comparison to Virginia Woolf's talent, but we can start to see why To the Lighthouse is sometimes referred to as one of the greatest books of the twentieth century. Woolf enters the sublime (whatever that means). Think about it. Try to catch all the thoughts that pass through your mind. Each thought may have a specific topic, but collectively, all your thoughts are an incoherent mess--only white noise. Woolf, however, has been able to catch these thoughts, and even set them down in words.

To make a profound statement, Lily's painting can be recursively interpreted as Woolf's writing: an attempt at depicting reality--things as they really are--requires an immense amount of effort and concentration. Reflection. Introspection. Meditation. And no, not hippies and yoga.

But Virignia Woolf is too real for me. I noticed that I started looking for run-ons as I was reading, trying to find that glitch in her sentence. At any rate, Woolf is great. I think I will read the book again; let the glorious waves of nostalgia wash over me. And perhaps reread The Great Gatsby while I'm at it.

It's 1:00am. Good night.

"To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf (pt. 1 of 2)

I've come to appreciate To the Lighthouse the same way I found F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby a memorable book. Virginia Woolf is able to weave spectacularly strong imagery into her stream-of-consciousness writing, creating an interesting atmosphere of a dreamy reality; there is a nostalgic feeling that comes with the mundane description of nature. I haven't quite been able to put my finger on why Woolf's writing is so powerfully evocative, but her writing creates a sense of disconnect, detachment, or even separation between individuals. This separation, I believe, is much like the separation of individuals today; that is, this modern (if not, postmodern) movement toward fierce individualism. Although technology has connected disparate parts of the world, this close connection is taken for granted and, I believe, has also added a new element of separation (for instance, social media or virtual reality websites). Maybe that's why Woolf struck such a powerful note with me.

The first section, "The Window," was similar to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. There are similar themes of the family, of love, and of marriage. Although there were some interesting moments in this first part, I was really hit by the transition to the second part, "Time Passes." For instance, I began to understand why Mrs. Ramsy thinks that her son James, when told that they won't be going to the lighthouse, "he will remember that all his life" (62). What I had taken for granted in part one was suddenly taken away from me in the next section; as time passed, relationships wavered, and people died, the vivid contrast between part one and two suggests the major theme of this novel: change.

I will now go ahead and make a cliched and cheesy interpretation; with change, comes hope. In the distance, there is that lighthouse--that shining beacon of hope. Similar to the green light at the end of the dock that haunts Gatsby, the beacon of hope always stands against the backdrop of our everyday lives; the distant blurry silhouette of the lighthouse. Maybe that's just an obvious simple-minded reading, but the themes of change and hope are undoubtedly universal themes of humanity. Change is our only constant (cliched, I know); and if it were not for hope, why would we bother get out of bed everyday?



[note: this post has not been in anyway funded by the Obama campaign]

"Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Intense.

That sums it up, especially when reading alone late into the night. The forces of madness slowly creeps into the mind as silently as the plague, almost becoming real. I fell asleep reading the part where Rodya deliriously asks for his socks. I woke up around 3am only to find myself fully-dressed, stumbled about my room looking for my CU ID, and heard myself say, "Where's my socks?" For just a split-second, in the bleak fluorescent light of my dorm room, I thought I was in Rodya's grimy St. Petersburg room, and that I might have clubbed an old widow to death, and split her half-sister's skull in half. For the briefest of moments, I had entered Rodya's subconscious.

True story. But to regain my sanity, I sauntered down the hall to find a friend who--from reading Crime and Punishment as well--was in a similar state of morbid despondency, or as Joseph Conrad would probably say, a "brooding gloom" (Heart of Darkness).

The point is, these Russian (and Polish) authors really know how to get into your head. The collective emotions of Russia in the late 1800s, coupled with social tensions introduced by the Industrial Revolution and movement towards modernity, came to fruition in these powerful works of literature by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, and the likes. The inescapable filth of the citys' roads, and utter loss of moral judgment in individuals, create an altogether grim depiction of human nature: murder, prostitution, bankruptcy, alcoholism, domestic violence, and so on.

There is too much to talk about in Crime and Punishment, I feel like I won't be able to do it justice in so such a short post. I'm slightly delirious and rather exhausted right now, I'm positive I've gone mad already. But if I were to pick one thing that stuck out to me, it would be the strong parallels with Notes from the Underground. The Underground Man is essentially identical to Raskolnikov; they are both immensely spiteful characters. They are very rational people, but their hyperrationality has come to border the irrational. They are neurotic. In other words, they can function as normal human beings, but there is a glaring emotional imbalance. After committing his crime, Raskolnikov is repeatedly described as a "hypochondriac," he easily faints, and his health in general deteriorates. Since Notes preceded Crime and Punishment, there are similar themes of power and control. Both men seek control and power. Raskolnikov, for example, terrorizes Sonya and his family, and likens himself to Napoleon. When Porfiry questions him, Raskolnikov thinks he is control when he thinks he doesn''t fall for a trap Porfiry had set for him; he's also paranoid.

So of the numerous themes in Crime and Punishment, power and control are two themes that really stood out to me.

"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen

I have seen no more than five minutes of Gossip Girl or Jersey Shore, but based on what I have seen and heard, I conclude that Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is an 18th-century version of either one of these.

I also don't think I've ever yawned as much reading a book.


[Update 4/10: Just finished Pride and Prejudice in its beautiful entirety. Am feeling warm and fuzzy inside. I think I have a tear in my eye...what a beautiful ending. *sniff

No, just kidding. So maybe my initial reaction may have been too rough. When I told someone that Pride and Prejudice was similar to Gossip Girl, I was received by a glaring scowl.]

Nevertheless, of the interesting cast of characters in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth, Darcy, Mr. Bennet, and the Gardingers are characters who would be interesting to meet in real-life.

Elizabeth, as the protagonist, is a remarkably dynamic individual operating within a very static society. For instance, recall the one scene where she trudges through muddied paths and over stone walls to visit her sick sister Jane. By climbing over walls and finding the shortcuts to the Bingley's place, Elizabeth asserts her ability to transcend preconceived societal norms. She travels alone, and arrives at the Bringley residence disheveled and dirty--but she does not seem to mind at all. While the other ladies comment on her appearances, Elizabeth immediately tends to her sick sister.

There are two notable implications of this scene: Elizabeth's complete and utter disregard for social and gender norms and her ability to see past the superficial. That's why, as readers, we are generally inclined to side with Elizabeth.

Perhaps a better way of stating the issue presented in Pride and Prejudice is that social norms are superficial. The norm is to consider all things that concern surfaces; that is, there is tremendous weight placed on the appearance of clothing, apparent wealth, apparent relation to big names, and so on. Like Elizabeth, Mr. Bennett doesn't take such superficial matters so seriously. In response, he talks very little, makes fun of the women of his family, and retreats to his library. And speaking of library, the concept of books and reading is a recurring motif throughout the book. There is one scene where the Bennets, Bringleys, and Darcy retire to the living room after a massive banquet. Both Darcy and Elizabeth separately decide to while the time away by reading (while Miss Bringley, trying to flirt with Darcy, eventually gives up pretending to read).

Elizabeth, Darcy, and Mr. Bennett are all portrayed as avid readers, which attests to why they are such interesting individuals. They are critical readers, as well as critical thinkers. In a way, Darcy and Elizabeth's relationship represents that of individuals who see too much beyond surfaces. In light of the outright shallowness of their social norms, Elizabeth and Darcy struggle to figure out what aspects of their relationship are shallow (i.e. the marriage of Charlotte and Mr. Collins) and actually not shallow (i.e. not being attracted to the social stature of a person, but to personal, intrinsic attributes).

Really, I think Mr. Bennett is the most modern character of the novel. I really like him because he really doesn't give a flying hoot about anything. But that also makes him less interesting and less relevant in terms of what this book intends to do. He is cool, but is too far out. So, in terms of highlighting the major issues raised by the text, Elizabeth appropriately plays the protagonist because she can see through the superficial, but cannot quite extract herself from it. She is limited in so many respects: as a woman, a daughter, as a marriageable woman, and so on. Thus, these different roles she must cater to create a multiplicity of tensions that stretch Elizabeth in all dimensions.

And so after writing this post, I suppose that if I could look beyond the superficial--just like Elizabeth--then things start to become very interesting.

[Here's a clip we watched in class. Elizabeth explicitly asserts herself an equal to Darcy, effectively enraging Lady Catherine.]

Selected Poetry: Keats and Wordsworth

I like poetry. I honestly do. There is a strange connection between the physical representation of words, rhymes, syntax, and so on, and the abstract feelings that are universal to all humans; joy, sorrow, passion, desire, madness. Poetry, as opposed to prose, involves a very personal and ceremonious communication of our world. The poet meticulously chooses each word. The brevity of this genre of literature provokes us to reflect and to introspect; to unplug from whatever we are wired to; to hit the pause button. Poetry, hopefully, inspires us. By kindling new feelings or introducing new perspectives, poetry provides us an opportunity to reevaluate ourselves and the world we live in.

Maybe if everyone read poetry, life would be pretty good.

But enough of my abstract musings. I like two of Keats poems: "When I have fears that I may cease to be" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

"When I have fears," if I remember correctly, was actually on the passage analysis section of the 2008 AP English Literature test. I don't recall what I wrote, but reading this several years later, the poem's last lines still stand out to me:

 Of the wide world I stand alone and think,

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

 

Keats eloquently describes the impermanence of our world. In the first part of the poem, he describes all of his worldly ambitions as a poet and as a lover, but ultimately ends with these final two depressing lines.

The fear of death, I think, can be conversely described as an anxiety about freedom. Keats laments the fact that time limits his ability to reach a full potential; mortality is a deplorable human condition. Can there be hope, can there be freedom, when humans are unable to achieve what they can before they die? I do not think that this is a depressing question at all, rather it's entirely relevant to our knowledge of what defines us as humans. To turn the question around: what will we do, what choices will we make, to maximize our potential given this limited amount of time?

On a separate note, the last lines of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are perhaps Keat's most famous:

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'; that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

There are numerous interpretations of these last two lines. I honestly think that these last two lines are annoyingly cryptic partly because Romantic poetry never intended to be concrete or straightforward. Instead of reading too much into what it means, I think it can be agreed that all other interpretations are just as valid as any other. One interpretation could be that Beauty is the same as Truth, and the implication is that we should stop dwelling on the Truth aspect; if we live life happy, then Truth can be understood and attained. Or another interpretation would be that Beauty and Truth are the same, but the pursuit itself of Truth limits our understanding of Beauty--which is in fact precisely the opposite of what Keats is demonstrating by describing the Beauty of the Grecian Urn. Or perhaps we can apply the same reading we did to "When I have fears," that Beauty is impermanent, and so Truth becomes superficial and irrelevant. Thus in a postmodern sense, although Keats posits that Truth and Beauty are impermanent and superficial, the events depicted on the urn are frozen in time, permanent and worthy of poetic reflection.

Reading poetry is an immensely private activity, but at the same time, poetry contains universal themes and issues everyone can relate to. Each person views the poem through his or her own narrative lens, while the poem itself is in fact representative of the poet's narrative lens--hence its element of novelty comes from being a lens within a lens. However, the poet's lens is rigid and unchanging, while our personal narrative lens are always in flux as long as we are conscious. At any rate, poetry lets us discover shared human perspectives through the poet's narrative voice, and with each new reading, we invariably gain deeper insight into our reasons for being.

Tatler/Spectator Selections

Quite frankly, I am unsure what to make of this reading.

These selections are similar to Montaigne's Essays because of their ridiculous amount of interest in mundane topics (On Polite Conversations, Criticism, Good Taste, Rakes, etc.). However, I suppose that Steele and Addison use these mundane topics as proxies for understanding human nature; as the introduction describes them, "The papers probe human nature not to reveal its bedrock depravity but to expose a common core of reason, sense, and sentiment" (pg. 44).

Occasionally,  their attempt at being honest (like Montaigne) made me question their motives. For instance, in Addison's discourse on Criticism, he posits, "A true Critick ought to dwell rather upon Excellencies than Imperfections" (381). A few paragraphs later he states that in his next paper on Milton's Paradise Lost, "I shall just point at the Imperfections, without endeavouring to enflame them with Ridicule" (382). This seems blatantly contradictory because he implies that he will make a petty critique, as opposed to a 'True' critique, by pointing out the "Imperfections" of Milton's writing.

At the same time, however, such inconsistencies are reminiscent of Montaigne's frankness. That is, Addison chooses to write a raw, unedited version of his thoughts and opinions. Thus staying true to the periodical's ambition of describing things as is, of treading the fine line between objective news-reporting  and  'libelous scandalmongering" (41).

Having said that, I am quite convinced that the Tatler and Spectator could be accurately described as: painfully insipid 18th-century transcripts of The Colbert Report and The Daily Show.

Wouldn't you agree?