As per Ram Dass's injunction, my goal is to "see myself from above" as a hypothetical God may see me.
Learning Record: Final
May 8, 2006
Here it is -- my very last assignment for this class, E603B, World Literature. This course has had many unifying themes, but three that spoke to me particularly were the themes of nature, freedom ("The truth shall set you free"), and the hammer ("Hammer your thoughts into unity"). In considering my response to these themes, I hope to evaluate my progress in this course.
FREEDOM
The words, now commonplace, originated in the Old Testament: "Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, 'If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.'" [NOAB, John 8.31-32] The Jews were nonplussed: "What do you mean by saying, 'You will be made free?'" [NOAB, John 8.33] Jesus clarifies: he means freedom from sin and its enslaving influence, and the truth in question is the Christian truth. In order to be free according to Jesus, you must believe in the Christian God.
Is this the freedom the builders of UT were referring to when they inscribed "The Truth Shall Set You Free" in an imposing gothic font on the Main Building? Did they intend to free the students from sin, as Jesus did? This seems unlikely, as the University of Texas was founded as a primarily secular institution, despite the occasional Biblical reference. Personally, I do not find the Christian truth to be particularly freeing. Generally, being "free from sin" involves having to follow a bothersome set of rules for behavior. The founders must have interpreted "the truth shall set you free" more broadly, as a call to freedom from ignorance and the pursuit of knowledge. In keeping with that ideal, it seems reasonable to me to examine my own search for freedom this semester in light of the knowledge I have acquired.
Many of the books we have read this semester involve a search for freedom, successful or otherwise. Stephen Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is oppressed by Catholicism. At the beginning of the book, as a child, he has difficulty understanding his surroundings and expressing himself -- he is trapped inside his own head. Finally, Stephen experiences an aesthetic epiphany and achieves freedom by becoming an artist. The "truth" that Stephen discovers is the girl on the beach, who seems to him to be a "strange and beautiful seabird" [Joyce, 171]. The beauty of the girl causes in Stephen an "outburst of profane joy." [Joyce, 171]
In my case, like Stephen's, some freedom has come with experience. I used to write nightly in a journal when I was in about third grade or so. My day-to-day thoughts were simplistic: I talked infinitely about my mood and the injustice of my parents. (The journal ends with, "This is no longer a journal! This is now a SPY NOTEBOOK!!!" I'd just read Harriet the Spy.) Instead of understanding what was going on, I wrote pages of vitriol about my family's move to Michigan from Ohio. I had no idea how limited my thinking was! I suspect I will look back on this essay ten years from now and feel the same way. Perhaps the most important truths I have encountered on my pilgrimage have been simple ones about how the world works or why people act the way they do -- ideas that would have been completely incomprehensible to me ten years ago. In my opinion, truth is most freeing when it is experiential truth. Since third grade, I have learned about the periodic table, synecdoche, integration. But the most freeing truths I have learned have been through experience.
Jude in Jude the Obscure and Sarah in The French Lieutenant's Woman are both trapped by their social status and lack of fortune. Their positions severely limit their options and determine their actions to some extent. Even Fowles' wealthy characters cannot escape the obligations of their station. Ernestina's prospects, for example, are limited to aristocrats and wealthy businessmen. In contrast to A Portrait, however, freedom from class constraints is not a positive development in The French Lieutenant's Woman. Sarah is a modern woman in that she sees through the class prejudices of her time, but she is ultimately a tragic character. (Based on the endings in which she spurns Charles, which had always seemed most realistic to me.) Charles sees a union with Sarah as impossible, but when he finally overcomes his class consciousness and admits his love for her, he fails to achieve happiness and instead causes the misery of others. Sam and Mary successfully transcend class barriers and scrounge out an existence as members of the lower middle class, but this transformation is only made possible by lies and deception. When she was a maid, Mary had "infinitely the least selfishness," [Fowles, 75] but after her rise to the post of mistress, Mary is no longer free from sin: symbolically, she wears the brooch Sam stole from Charles [Fowles, 424]. Implicitly, Mary and Sam were more free when they were poor. In their case, entrapment is caused by Sam's desire to become more wealthy, which forces him to lie to and deceive Charles.
I have little in common with the class-obsessed Victorians. As a middle-class college kid, I have nothing to complain about. Probably I will attend graduate school, buy a nice apartment and an expensive laptop, and live out the rest of my life without really caring about the price of gas. Unlike Sam, I have been lucky enough to start out in a position of power. I could even make Stephen's choice and live a starving artist's existence without suffering much from class. In these modern times, birth and money are no longer guaranteed passes to virtue. I suppose we are lucky to be free of such superficial concerns, but the trade-off to longer feeling obligated, as Sam does, to better oneself materially is that it no longer obvious what the right course of action is.
What to do? The Sarte-reading friends I have tell me that my business major will cost me my soul. The S&P-obsessed ones wax lyrical about Michael Dell and Jack Welch, and don't see the point of all this theory. I'm torn between being a well-heeled professional and buying my dad the BMW he's always been too pragmatic to treat himself to, or adding to the sum total of culture by creating for a living. One truth I have found is that either option -- intellectual or professional -- is valuable. In terms of a "vision for the future," my strongest belief is that we are free to decide. Mundane though it may seem, the greatest point on tension in my life is in this career decision. Both routes seem acceptable to me. According to Ram Dass in The Witness, it is more important to find peace and to be aware that "we are free simply to be" [155]. Nice though this sentiment is, I can't say it appeals to me much. Perhaps if I were more skilled at meditation, I could simply exist at peace with myself, discovering a new self instead of striving for one. [155] But I have never been able to keep still.
Even if they manage to escape the constraints of their class, Fowles' characters are limited by the culture of Victorian society. Ernestina feels such a strong sense of duty that she quashes all sexual thoughts, having evolved a "kind of private commandment" -- "I must not." [Fowles, 29] Ernestina may be free in the sense originally meant (free from sin), but she is constrained by her sense of duty and societal pressures. Duty precludes her from having sinful thoughts, but she also fears "a bestial version of Duty" [Fowles, 29], a necessary component of marriage. Much like Ernestina, Charlotte Bronté's Jane Eyre has trapped herself. She sees herself as small, pale, and ugly, and as a result cannot conceive of a better life for herself. When leaving Lowood, she initially desires liberty, but then offers "a humbler supplication" for "a new servitude." [Bronté, 99]
Societal or psychological constraints seem the most dangerous to me, since they cannot be identified and thus fought. We are now freer than we have ever been politically, socially, sexually. Nonetheless, I am sure future generations will scoff at us the way we look down on the poor, repressed Victorians.
When I first read Jane's supplication for a new servitude, I discounted it as self-defeating. However, Jane's words point to a larger truth: that absolute freedom is impossible or even detrimental. Sarah, the modern woman, has the ability to see through the artifices of her time, but she also seems to be free from concern for Charles' well-being, and acts cruelly. I am reminded of a discussion in TC125K, Perspectives on Creativity: it was said that some constraints on creativity, such as the sonnet form, actually help the creative process. It seems very human to find some limitations comforting.
Considering this, my goal in life is not to achieve absolute freedom. Intellectually, I want to be as free as I can -- to know as much as I can, and to be liberated from false assumptions, like Jane's and Ernestina's societally-imposed conceptions. However, my "vision" is not that of a true free spirit. A truly free person could live almost randomly, picking and discarding ideals as they serve his desires. Such a person would probably be hedonistic -- and much like Sarah. But I cannot discard all ideals.
NATURE
Perhaps the most central theme of this course has been the idea of nature, which has woven itself into our ideas of architecture. During class, we have gone on nature walks to Japanese gardens and even held class outside whenever possible at the "Undercliff." The reigning sentiment seems to be an echo of Ruskin: "We find all men of true feeling delighting to escape out of modern cities into natural scenery." [216] In class, we have always tried to get closer to nature.
This inclination towards nature has not really come easily to me. My laptop doesn't do so well in direct sunlight, and I've run out of screen cleaner. Ruskin would undoubtedly say that I am not a "man of true feeling." Well, I am not a man, and I cannot say I always prefer nature to civilization. Even more incriminatingly, I have consistently preferred modern architecture to the more "naturalistic" Gothic.
According to Ruskin, "Naturalism" is one of the component elements of the Gothic style [218]. In mimicking the turn of the leaf with stone foliation, the Gothic craftsman is showing his love of nature and his preference for natural forms. However, in my opinion, the Gothic imitation of nature is not imaginative. Simply recreating the forms of nature in stone should not be considered innovative or revolutionary, as Ruskin believes his favorite type of architecture to be [208]. Ruskin also believes that in Gothic work, the workman is "set free" [214] -- and then goes on to list several required forms [230-231]. No, the Gothic style is not a radical, powerful one -- it is limited to imitation. Furthermore, the Gothic style is fundamentally dishonest. The Mont Saint Michael is considered a Gothic triumph of naturalism, but it is obviously a man-made work, jutting inharmoniously out of the green peninsula on which it is built.
The Gothic style pales in comparison to a truly organic, modern structure -- the work of Frank Gehry. Without trying to imitate the unimportant details of natural structure, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is effortlessly organic, exemplifying an architectural style greatly preferably, in my opinion, to the Gothic.
Though this course has caused me to appreciate nature and Gothic architecture more through observation, experience, and the works of Ruskin, I remain a staunch modernist.
THE HAMMER
We have been taught from the very beginning: hammer your thoughts into unity. That phrase, from Yeats, reminded me of something I had read in Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols, which is subtitled "How to Philosophize With a Hammer." [Nietzsche, 1]. Nietzsche's idea of "philosophizing with a hammer" refers to the use of a hammer as a "tuning-fork" to sound out the hollow or rotten interiors of the "eternal idols" Nietzsche is combating. [Nietzsche, 4]. As Yeats had an interest in and was influenced by Nietzsche, it seems plausible that our course theme of hammering our thoughts was probably influenced by the Nietzschean creed. Throughout this course, we have tried to sound out the false idols, from perfectionism and spell checkers to the separation of man from nature. This semester, we were asked to hammer out our own selves in writing about a vision for the future.
My "vision," such as it is, is to become a lawyer. My dream is to spend the rest of my life arguing with other people and speaking publically. This dream is unlikely to inspire others, in my opinion, and doesn't really translate well into a t-shirt slogan. But the reason law appeals to me is because, in pursuing it, I can pursue a closely-held ideal: self-improvement. As a highly competitive field, law appeals to me because I know it will challenge me.
It might seem strange that I want to spend my life doing something so cold and unaesthetic, having spent most of this essay talking about the transformative power of knowledge and the aesthetic. However, I don't think that I would have to abandon literature and art in order to practice law. Ideally, I can retire early and spend ten years touring Italy. I'm not interested in having an impact on future generations. John Maynard Keynes once said (to quote him out of context) "In the long run, we'll all be dead." I would rather have the respect and admiration of my peers, and more importantly, of myself.
In the pursuit of unity, I would like to consider the goals I have had to maintain for the entirety of the course, and my effectiveness at meeting them:
THE COURSE
Overall, I have enjoyed this course, particularly its internet aspects. However, I feel that it could be improved by a more traditional approach to literary analysis. To date, I have written three projects in this course. The first two were both on Alduous Huxley, from whom I feel I learned a lot, and the third was a discussion of modernism in sculpture from the perspective of Jessie Otto Hite, the Blanton curator. I also did an extra credit project on Jane Eyre. Though these four projects combined must have amounted to over 5,000 words, I feel that I could have gotten much more out of them. Since we were encouraged to make bots, much of our writing was choppy, taking the form of a conversation. As the bots were primarily biographical, the writing was fact-filled and informative rather than analytical or persuasive. I do not feel that working on the bots improved my writing very much. In fact, the best writing I did all semester was in journal form. However, the point distribution was such that the optional journals (in my opinion, the most productive and difficult kind of writing) were worth only 8 points each, much less than the projects or bots, though it was more difficult to do the considerable reading and then shed light on it through a journal. Despite this, a extra-credit bot (only twice as many words as a journal) was worth 100 points, though most of the writing involved in a bot required little analysis and was highly research-dependent. I feel that optional journal writing should have been encouraged more with higher points, and project guidelines should be less bot-dependent and instead more persuasive. My favorite was the first project this semester.
Works Cited
Bronté, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Penguin, 2003.
Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant's Woman. Back Bay Books, 1998.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York, NY: Penguin, 1977.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Ed. Michael D Coogan, et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
E603 Course Anthology. Ed: Professor Bump. 2005.
E603B Course Anthology. Ed: Professor Bump. 2006.
Nietzsche, Freidrich. Twilight of the Idols. Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.
Image Sources
Seeing myself from above - original image.
Meditating - taken by Prof. Bump
St. Michel - http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/%7Ebump/
The Guggenheim - http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sven/publctns/binopps1.html