Optional Journals
When I begin to think about unity it seems to be so simple of a concept. It only requires me to put the pieces together. It should be such a simple thing to do. I should have to “Only connect!” and then “Live in fragments no longer” (848). This simple concept has already proven difficult for me to put into practice. Since our class on Thursday I too have become preoccupied with the same words that Yeats has thought of all of his life. I have found myself here at UT as two different minds trying to “hammer [my] thoughts into unity” (843), often struggling. Currently, I am planning to do Plan II and business. One emphasizes education for life and the other practical vocational training. I have cultivated friends that want to party until exhaustion and friends that just want to play a game of Risk.
Thoughts about unity have occupied my mind since I started thinking about college a year ago. In high school I found several things that I loved to do. The two most enjoyable things for me to do outside of school were to play music and experience nature through camping, hiking, backpacking and other activities. Last summer I chose to spend the entire summer performing music with a drum and bugle corps which didn’t allow me to go backpacking or camping once. While having the summer of a lifetime, I did miss the outdoors terribly. Now I only hope that when faced with similar decisions to make in the future that necessitate choosing between seemingly opposite choices I can make a choice that appeals to and fulfills both of my wants – unity through decision. The problem is that now that I am in college I seem to be making choices that further separate my life into different paths. How do I get these many paths to intersect and become one?
I don’t quite know yet how I will reconcile these oppositions in my life. Through this reading though, I was reminded of the course to take that will lead me to a solution eventually. I must go forward using what I will learn in both programs cooperatively. I will use my right brained Plan II education to “begin with global possibilities, which reveal new details” (223). This will allow my left brained business education to “persevere in its task… given those creative choices to work from” (224). The clustering activity in the reading reminded me of how it is possible to achieve unity and “perceive a pattern in the seemingly random spilling of associations” (226). While clustering, I was randomly reminded of an idea I read about and was intrigued with almost five years ago regarding webs and how they connect people together. This thought helped me reconcile the problem I was having since moving to Austin concerning making time for people in my life. I realized I have to set priorities. I can’t expect to spend as much time as I did with my friends and family while trying to form new friendships in my new environment. Seemingly random thoughts I jotted down during a clustering activity led me to an idea from years past that helped me solve a problem I had today. How’s that for unity?
While reading Professor Bump’s internet article, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that I was being pulled to either side of the argument. This is exactly what strong writing should do, except that I feel that there is a middle ground that was not sufficiently addressed. Jerry Mander suggested that “the brain of someone watching television was akin to one in which the right hemisphere had been cut off from the left” (3). This is fine and good. I agree that most television programming does debilitate the brain through the mindless entertainment it provides. When producers make sitcoms that are predictable, simple and contain jokes that are explained by the other characters and then cued by prerecorded studio laughter, the brain does function at a lower level since both hemispheres are not being engaged. What about the other programming on TV though? Even some TV series nowadays have plot sophistication that engages the analytical centers of the left hemisphere while catering to audiovisual creative centers of the right hemisphere. My favorite examples of this type of programming are “Star Trek” and the “Simpsons”. These shows provide entertainment on several important levels – mindless, dramatic and intellectual.
Even though I do think that TV does have important education value as a creative form, I do still maintain that print text is very important, if not the most important source of learning. This is not to say that hypermedia does not have its place, but its place should be one of a supporting role to expand on the already studied print sources. I do not think I agree with the statement “that while abstract prose in print facilitates intellectual reading, it can impede emotional response” (14). In my experience any piece of literature can and should be approached in a way that stimulates the right hemisphere and solicits an emotional response. Literature should be taught in a way that it comes alive through its print reading. Students should read the literature in its print form as well as explore the environment in which it was written through other media as to attain a better understanding of the work itself.
In his conclusion Professor Bump states that “Advocates of online literacy may well have to rescue and re-integrate aspects of print literacy” (33). I agree with this statement wholeheartedly. The bottom line is that all genres and forms of media when created and taught correctly can cater to the left and right hemispheres concurrently. It is not enough to say we must use a specific form of media (hypermedia) to cater to both parts of the brain. All types of media can cater to both sides when approached with this goal in mind. I guess I am just a product of the “postmodern” world. This would probably explain the difficulties I have in recognizing the same problems that the authors cited in this article see, because I have grown up in a postmodern world and have seen media of all types that appeals to both of my hemispheres.
Sept. 13 University: Goals and Purposes
As always with the readings that Professor Bump has selected for us so far, I am left with a medley of emotions and thoughts including intrigue, bewilderment, hope and despair. We are presented with several concepts of what our experience in the next four or five years should encapsulate or at least be modeled upon. Our education through discovery learning should challenge us more than any of us have been challenged in the past. Some of our classes will be taught with “the belief that knowledge can be constructed by [the student] rather than received from a higher authority” because the “student is taught the best who is told the least” (332, 334).
That is a fine approach for some students, but I don’t think it can practically be applied on all educational levels. What about students that lack strong self motivation? There are some people that when faced with the prospect of taking ownership of their own education will collapse under the demand of this on taking and cease to learn. It is not to say that these are not strong, capable individuals, but just that they were never challenged in this manner in the past and do not know how to cope with its demands. I have seen it happen before in an AP Calculus class taught by a teacher educated at the University of Texas that was evidently familiar with discovery learning methods. We were sitting in class taking notes when he asked a question we should have been able to answer. No one in the class raised their hand or made any attempt to answer the man’s question. We sat silently in this matter for the next thirty minutes until the bell rang and class was dismissed. He did not seem to mind that this happened in his class when I asked him about it weeks later. His was reply was that it was a good experience for us all. When the students went home that night they had to struggle even harder to get through the homework, and when he, the teacher, went home that night he struggled to find even better questions to ask us, even better ways to make us learn for ourselves. That was the first teacher that ever truly challenged me. Discovery learning conjures both hope and despair inside of me because I am hopeful that it will continue to challenge me. I feel despair though because I know firsthand the number of people that are turned off by the enormous amount of work involved in the discovery learning process.
I have to echo May’s sentiments when she says in her journal entry “I feel that the University of Texas generally does not give the average student the empowerment and community atmosphere with which to seek a truly rewarding higher education.” I know many people that have come to UT and felt swallowed up in the vastness of this university. Now I only wish that they were able experience the university as I have through Plan II. Then they would understand the reasons why I already feel such a strong attachment to a place I have only been a part of for less than three weeks. Carnegie’s 10th principle says that “Larger universities must find ways to create a sense of place and to help students develop small communities within the larger whole.” Plan II has done this for me, but what about the rest of the students not in any of the individual college honor’s programs? Or does it even matter that not every student will feel this sense of community?
Newman says that the only practical end of a university “is that of training good members of society” and it “aims at raising the intellectual tone of a society… and refining the intercourse of private life” (313). I think that the university will still be able to do this for all of its graduates. I also think though, that the university should aim to do something more. It should, as Professor Bump told us, aim to establish the University of Texas as our ‘alma mater’ which in English means ‘nourishing mother’ (OED). The only way that the university can do this is by fostering a sense of community where “a habit of mind is formed which lasts through life” (309). I remain hopeful though because after only being here three weeks and witnessing the changes in my own mind I do think that the university will do this for me. I think it is safe to say that many years from now when asked what the formational experience in my education was I will reply that it was my years spent at the University of Texas and more specifically in the Plan II program.
Have you learned to think for yourself?
It seems like these days creativity is extremely valued by everyone. I have already noticed in several of my classes at UT that professors are approaching creativity as a key to success in all disciplines. My management information systems class has thoroughly discussed the emerging role and importance of knowledge workers. Knowledge workers and members of the creative elite are the reasons why America will stay ahead of other emerging countries like China and Japan. Their engineers, scientists, programmers and accountants will be as good as or better than ours. But they won’t be creative! We already touched on this topic earlier in the year in this class. Daniel Pink instructs us to “go right, young man and woman, go right” (327). Our goal should be to do “something that fills one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age” (327).
I’ve heard that my entire life. My teachers have been instructing me to be creative since I was in elementary school. They even concocted competitions focused on ‘creative problem solving’ like Odyssey of the Mind and Destination Imagination to cultivate the creative faculties. So what happens when creativity can be cultivated? Is it turned into a commodity? Something to be bought, sold, or traded like is done now with energy? I can see the headlines now: “Executive Scandal in the Creative-Energy Brokerage Industry Causes Many Creative Powerhouses to Collapse”. Creativity and innovation are already being brokered in the form of a consulting company. I think though that this type of creative energy is different from the creative energy being expressed by the author of the “Wild Mind”. We are still “[giving] all our attention to that one dot” (180).
My problem seems to be then with a society that thinks it is the last bastion of creativity on this Earth when in fact it is not. It seems to have forgotten the lesson of humility that Einstein learned when he said “that we are but a speck in an unfathomably large universe” (184). My concern is that when a society extols creativity but limits it to “that one dot” it will drown out existence in the realm existing outside of the dot. We will at that point be among “the mass of men [that] lead lives of quiet desperation” because we will have forgotten what is to be “like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into [our] ken” (193, 194). I can only hope that this new wave of ‘creativity’ doesn’t in fact kill real creativity – the writers, the artists, the poets.
Sept. 20 Liberal Arts and Plan II
This is the first journal that I am able to actually write in confidence. The question, “Why are you here?” is a much easier one to answer than “Who am I?” or “Have you learned to think for yourself?” I can confidently say that I am here to learn and, as Anush put it earlier in the year, become the person that I want to be. I do not know what the final product of my years at UT will be except that I will be a different person one way or another.
I am here to grow intellectually and socially. I am here to “create over time a conversation that, laden with a passionate commitment to values and reason, becomes civilization” as Giametti put it in his address to the freshmen at Yale in 1985 (320B). We are all here to create the world that we want to live in. He does warn us though about how we should approach this creation of a future. “What I wish you to avoid, as you continue your journey, is the desire to try to arrange all of the future now. I want you to hold yourselves ready but not rigid (320B).” It near impossible for us at the moment to know what this future is that we wish to create with any certainty. Despite this, it is imperative for us all to realize that actions we take in our education now can affect the rest of our lives dramatically if we allow them to.
All of the selected readings push a liberal and balanced education in order to achieve the growth that Giametti explains. They focus the importance of college not on specifically learning a certain subject matter, but instead, learning how to learn. Arthur Goldberg explained that “the greatest value of an education is a strong sense of curiosity” (323). Paul Woodruff articulates this idea as “a baccalaureate education that lays the foundation for a future of self-education – and feeds its graduates’ curiosity so well that most of them will make learning an essential part of their life-plans” (338).
My purpose in attending the University of Texas is to cultivate my mind so that it is always learning, expanding and seeking the truth. By doing this I will prepare myself to be “at home in any society” (313). I will be prepared to take any path that I choose. This is the most exciting thing for me because I know that I will have trouble making up my mind, just choosing one path among thousands that my life may take. Now I am confident that no matter what path I do end up taking, I will be prepared to take that path and be successful. That is why I am here at UT.
I think this journal entry is going to be harder to write than many in the past. How am I supposed to compare my ‘college experience’ with that of Hopkins’ experience at Oxford? I’ve only been in Austin now for about six weeks. Hopkins writes of how his “love for the city grows more ‘sweet-familiar’ with each passing term (417)”. I can’t attest to the love of my city growing with “each passing term”, but I do know that I have increasingly enjoyed walking around campus and exploring its many buildings. After visiting The Hall of Noble Words with this class, I find myself returning there to its large tables and inspirational quotes whenever I need to read (that means daily).
My favorite quote from the Hall of Noble Words is the one by F.G. Donnan, “The mystery of life will still remain … Science, truly understood, is not the death but the birth of mystery, awe, and reverence (302)”. It encapsulates so much about my own life view, the themes in this class and Hopkins’ own thoughts as an ordained priest that once struggled with the reconciliation of his own vows and his love of writing poetry. Just like Hopkins’ rejection of dualism and “simple dichotomies” (501), the Donnan quote asserts that there is more to be understood about the nature of the relationship than simple dichotomies. Science does not destroy mystery, it only deepens it.
My college experience will consist of growth, change, rejection, innovation and stagnation. These qualities are not mutually exclusive; instead, they are all characteristics of the same process. I remember listening to the child read “The Mystery”. This piece is a much better representation of what my college experience will be about it than my own description or the quote by Donnan. It espouses the mystery “of how everything is but nobody knows what it really is or how it came to be (186).” No matter how much I learn about the world in my classes causing me to think I have it all figured out, I will always remember that what I really know is nothing compared to what there is. By knowing nothing, I will remember the ‘mystery’. This humbling statement is good to remember during my college experience at an institution of higher education such as UT.
I think Hopkins felt the mystery in some way or another. Maybe this is why he insisted on watching things for hours on end and making outline sketches of them. Hopkins drew nature utilizing the inferiority of his medium to reaffirm the beauty of nature as seen by the naked eye. “It is precisely in its expression of this inferiority, that the drawing itself becomes valuable. It is because a photograph cannot condemn itself, that it is worthless. The glory of a great picture is its shame; and the charm of it, in expressing the pleasure of a loving heart, that there is something better than the picture (490-491).”
Looking back at what I have written, I realize how scattered my thoughts have been concerning Hopkins, my college experience and what we have discussed thus far in this class. Despite this, I will leave them unedited because Joyce is starting to influence me.
Oct. 13 Hopkins vs. the "Disappearance of God"
I found today’s reading to have some very interesting thoughts regarding the presence of God in our world. The reading suggests that since God is no longer immanently a part of our world, we find ourselves “alone and in spiritual poverty (902)”. Miller proposes that the absence of God in our world goes hand in hand with the advancement of human civilization. “Though it is impossible to tell whether man has excluded God by building the great cities, or whether the cities have been built because God has disappeared, in any case the two go together (901).” I have often felt that the further we advance human civilization through science, technology, education and new political institutions the further we distance ourselves from God as humans. It is not to say that God can’t survive in a world where we have laws of motion or have named the infinitesimally small particles that make up quarks which make up atoms which make up molecules which are the basic building blocks for everything in this world. I am just saying that as our knowledge of the world increases, we attribute less things to God but instead to an overall concept of ‘nature’ causing ourselves to feel distanced and less important in the world as individuals.
Miller proposes that “we are alienated from God; we have alienated ourselves from nature; we are alienated from our fellow men; and, finally, we are alienated from ourselves, the buried life we never seem able to reach. The result is a radical sense of inner nothingness (903).” I feel this alienation in the world around me. I have over 150 people on my buddy list. How many of them do I feel that I actually still know? How many of them do I talk to regularly? The same thing applies to the over one hundred friends at UT I have on my Facebook. We have invented all of these devices and created maps of our own artificial social networks in order to enrich our lives. Often these human inventions just make us realize the almost depressing situation we have made for ourselves because they “designate an absence, not a presence. They point to something which remains somewhere else, unpossessed and unattainable (902).” Our human creations can not ever be a replacement for the natural creations that we are forgetting. This is the process that lends to us forgetting The Mystery. When we as humans believe we have done something that in the past only God could do, we diminish the immanence of God and usher Him out of our world. Some people will rejoice in this realization. They will celebrate it as the victory of reason over blind faith. I, on the other hand, will be saddened by the exit of all faith and Mystery from our world.
“The mystery of life will still remain… Science, truly understood, is not the death but the birth of mystery, awe, and reverence.” – F.G. Donnan (302)
Neil Gaiman wrote a book about this very subject called American Gods. His story had a world where the gods of the old world – Odin, Thor, and others – were being replaced by new American gods: credit card, sex, television, technology. In the story, the old gods and the new American gods had to battle each other because they could not coexist in the world. They had to fight for the minds of men in order to stay alive.
Oct. 27 Landscape Architecture: Waller Creek
When I first read the article about the “Battle of Waller Creek” I laughed and thought to myself that the students were doing a good thing. Then I realized the implications of what Jones was saying. The riot had given the creek “more visibility (statewide and national) in a week than it had received in the previous forty-odd years of University occupation (and neglect) (671).” Where were these students the past forty years? I bet they were the same students that littered the creek with “plastic beer cups (Brand X, with blue map of Texas) (666)” and “high-visibility translucent bluish plastic bags – like Portuguese-men-of-war on a Gulf beach, but not biodegradable (666).” They probably also ignored those signs by the storm drain on campus that say “Drains to creek” and threw there trash down the storm drains because they were more convenient than the trash can across the street.
It’s a great thing that the creek finally did get some attention, but I am tired of people becoming activists for a week after a lifetime of apathy. They focus their anger and rage over the destruction of nature in an unproductive way. I am reminded of those eco-terrorist psychotics that think they are helping their cause by burning a car dealership’s lot of hummers. What I found amusing was the study afterwards that said by burning the cars, more toxins were released into the atmosphere than the car would ever release during use for several hundred years. They sure did a lot of good for their cause.
Now, I think the “Battle of Waller Creek” did eventually benefit the situation of the creek by bringing attention to it, but I would rather have seen this done by other means. I think the restraining order by students and the Sierra Club of Austin was more appropriate than students and professional protesters disrupting the physical acts. If organizations, like the Sierra Club or other environmental causes, want to affect change on a broad scale, they can only do so through strictly legal means. They must convince people that harming the environment is inherently wrong rather than turn people off to the environmental movement through radicalism. If more people in positions of power are supportive of environmental causes, than there will be less pure destruction of our natural environment for profit. I see this as the only way to change things in the long run.
Coming back to Waller Creek and away from my thoughts on the various environmental movements, I think that college campuses and cities in general should have more natural settings like Waller Creek integrated into their urban setting. Natural settings like Waller Creek are the “unique or unusual physical features that give a city its special character (664).” Many cities that I have visited seem to lack a personality. Many of the ones that do seem to have a personality are negative in my mind. Natural settings and more emphasis on the importance of place could help to establish a unique personality for a city. There are usually three things that I hear people discuss when they talk about why Austin is such a cool place: 1. The University of Texas at Austin; 2. The local music scene; 3. The situation of Austin in the middle of the hill country providing a unique outdoors experience. More cities should do like Austin has and use the people and the environment to create a unique personality for the city.
Nov. 17: J Hopkins' "terrible sonnets," and the disappearance of God
All of this talk about God disappearing from our world and the ‘modern problem’ is boring me. Society has changed immensely in the past one hundred years and humans are still trying to deal with it. Whether we are in a modern world or a post-modern world or we label ourselves a humanist or an existentialist, we are just labeling a phenomenon of the human condition. We have come up with a myriad of explanations for our condition that, in my opinion, all fall short. I do agree with this statement: “When God vanishes, man turns to interpersonal relations as the only remaining arena of the search for authentic selfhood (908).” The problem that I have with this statement is its application to our world, noting the first part, “When God vanishes.” I’m not really convinced that God has vanished from this world.
I do understand where this concept of the disappearance of God comes from. It stemmed in the massive societal and technological changes of the industrial revolution. We built cities where we were surrounded by thousands of people but found it even harder to feel human companionship. Hopkins laments, “To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life / Among strangers (911).” I’ll stop at this point, not wanting to bring up many ideas brought up in past journals and discussed in this class. The main idea is just that society has changed tremendously and people are reacting to it in different ways.
Some people look at our society and say, “God has disappeared.” I don’t think that this is the right conclusion to draw. Maybe a better analogy would be to compare the changing human society to an individual human’s development. This massive societal change (creation of industrial cities) can than be likened to a child moving away from his family into a wider community, like college. When a child moves away from his family, his parents and memories of the past have not disappeared. No, they are there, but the child must now look for them out of his own will. Similarly, I do not believe that God has disappeared from our world. One must now look harder for His presence, but He is still there. God is still an active force in our life although we now operate without Him approving of every decision we make, just as dad is still one phone call away but not present to make sure we make it home before midnight on a school night. We now possess more freedom. With this new freedom comes a greater responsibility to guide our life as we see fit. Now is the time when parents let us make our own choices but are still available to assist us if we ever ask. God is still present in the lives of those that want Him to be.
Without much prior knowledge of the Pre-Raphaelites, I can begin to appreciate what they did and what they stood for after reading this section and more importantly after examining some of their paintings. Professor Bump characterizes the Pre-Raphaelites as painting with a “special sensitivity to crisp detail, sharp edges, brightness, and rich colors … revolting against the drab ugliness of industrial England (319).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Rosetti-persephone.jpg
I will focus the rest of this journal entry on Rossetti’s Persephone. The story of Persephone is of the Greek God, forced to eat the pomegranate and doomed to live one third of her life as the Queen of the Underworld. I think the actual painting is magnificent. Even though it may not be as bright and vivid as some of his other paintings, the level of detail that he worked for is there. Persephone’s flowing garment is shown fold for fold as it drapes down off her shoulders lays on the tabletop in an innumerable amount of folds and creases. For a painter that is bent on naturalism, I can’t help but comment that Rossetti has trouble painting a curve. Certain folds in the arm of the garment just look awkward, but maybe that’s how they really were.
The most magnificent thing of this and all the other Pre-Raphaelite paintings I looked at is the depiction of like. The skin tones are some of the most realistic I’ve seen in a painting. Most painters spend all of their time on the subject’s face, but Rossetti brings this level of detail to all aspects of the female that he paints. The hands, holding each other, have tone, depth, character, life. Of all the things in this painting to examine, my eyes are drawn to Persephone’s hands. They demand my attention as if I could reach into the painting and feel their warmth.
I appreciate the rebellious nature of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and have been happily pleased with an introductory look at some of their works tonight. I can just imagine the group of young artists painting their own murals, espousing artistic philosophy, playing jokes on each other and having the time of their lives in an old Oxford building in Victorian England.
“What fun we had! What jokes! What roars of laughter!(301)”
Month St. Michel View 1
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/%7Ebump/fr/MtStMichel/view.JPG
The first thing I notice in this picture is the central location of the cathedral. It is surrounded by water on almost every side, itself an island physically as a land mass and as an island in its details. Built during the middle ages, the cathedral is given the effort bestowed upon no other buildings. It is the one building of vast detail and importance. Situated on the highest hill of this island, our eyes are naturally drawn to this cathedral with the high outer castle walls protecting it and its spire pointing its way towards heaven. It is only when we glance down to the smaller, surrounding buildings that we fully appreciate the immensity and importance of the cathedral.
Chartres – Gothic Images
http://www.newyorkcarver.com/chartres5.htm
By far the most impressive thing about Gothic architecture to me is the dedication to intricacy and detail that adorns entire buildings. The level of detail in this image from Chartres is unduplicated in today’s world. We no longer build buildings that are meant to stand for thousands of years. No, today’s buildings (houses included) generally have a useful lifespan of thirty years before they need to be remodeled. Even then, they are not built by master craftsmen who spend years or their entire lifetime on one building. The Chartres cathedral is an example of detail that I could easily get lost in. I look at each individual sculpture and think about the sculptor who poured hours of his work into it. What was this person’s life like? How did they live? How did they view their work? What motivated them to create such beautiful work? It is through this detail that I feel connected to the past. It is as if each individual sculpture tells its own story. We don’t do this anymore. We build humongous buildings that are functional, that have a purpose for the immediate present. Five hundred years from now, what will people think of our skyscrapers, our stadiums, our cities?
Before this class, I had never read anything by any of the Brontes. I could even tell you what Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights was about. I could probably make an insidious guess and come up with some derogatory statement about ‘those women upstarts,’ but that was about all I could do. Now, after sampling some of their writings and learning more about the entire Bronte family, I feel I can comment more freely on them. This time my comments will be well founded and more positive.
It is certain that the story of the Bronte family is an unusual one (or, atleast unusual to me). The poor Irish father who “attended Cambridge University with the sponsorship of a local clergyman (382)” is the first clue that this family is unique. How many poor Irish attended Cambridge? I would guess not many judging on what I have learned about the elitism in place at Oxford which I assume is a very comparable university. So, the father is special and his children turn out to be too.
Some of my classmates have put an emphasis on the collaborative environment that the Brontes grew up in where they created “an imagined African kingdom called Glass Town (386)” that they all took part in and added to. My question is, though, how vital was this collaboration to the development of the Brontes? If they had lived independently of each other, would they have been as successful as they were? I think that the answer to this question is yes. I really do not think that the collaboration between the brothers and sisters were as vital as many people would like to think. By saying this I am not demeaning the Bronte family. In fact, I am praising the ability of the individual members of the Bronte family.
The Bronte siblings lived apart from each other for long portions of their life whether they were at school or working to support the family. I think that the important source of their creativity and writing ability wasn’t necessarily each other, but more the circumstances they had been born into. They were all gifted as can be seen from their writings and by looking at their father as I mentioned earlier. Their tendency to create an imagined world is natural I think to any child who has lost something great in their own world. In the case of the Bronte’s, this would be their parents and two oldest sisters. It is these circumstances that drove the children to be creative, to create their worlds. I definitely think that this creativity would have existed in the individual Bronte without the influence of the other remaining siblings.
While I would be in error to say that the collaborative nature of the Bronte family had no effect on the writings of the surviving Bronte siblings, I do think that people assume it is much greater than it really is. These children were gifted and probably would have written these books if they had grown up alone without any other siblings. In fact, there is a good chance that the books could have been better if this were the case, because the Bronte siblings would have more of that “passion, that rehabilitation of the extra-rational, which is the historical office of Gothic (380)” to write about.
After reading this section, we receive a better understanding of the role of architecture in the history of the world. I now also better understand Professor Bump’s idea that a world literature class is more than just reading books. “During the first six thousand years of the world’ history, from the time of the pagoda of Hindustan to that of the cathedral of Cologne, architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race (401).” Architecture, then, can and should be studied like any book would be. It gives us the same insights.
While studying architecture, though, we should remember the advice from Robert Coles. We should “respond to the call of stories” where “we may find ourselves talking more about characters and their choices and less about the construction and deconstruction of texts (884).” By focusing on the story of the architecture, and not a critique of its details, we may “take literature to heart (884).”
It is in this manner that I want to focus on the cathedral of Notre-Dame. It is described as a cathedral full of life during the times of Quasimodo. When Quasimodo dies, though, the description of the cathedral changes. “To those who know that Quasimodo did exist, Notre-Dame today is empty, lifeless, dead. They feel that something has gone out of her. That immense body is empty; it is a skeleton; the spirit has quit it (404).” We learn through this that Quasimodo was in fact the spirit of the cathedral of Notre-Dame. When he dies, “the spirit has quit [the cathedral].” In a sense, the cathedral’s God has disappeared from the world. The modern world has again turned its back to its fantastical elements and again we are left with nothing, a vast cathedral with no spirit. Without its spirit, the architecture loses much of its meaning. We look at a façade that “presents a symbolical meaning, absolutely unconnected with the worship, even hostile to the teaching of the Church (402)” and are unable to grasp its full meaning unless we imagine the spirit. Then, meaning is elucidated.
I keep going back to the disappearance of God. It just pops into my head whenever we read anything from the 19th century now. The last line of Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” is “And yet God has not said a word (880)!” Again, we are reminded of the disappearance, the lack of the spirit that allows the lover to be murdered. This time the disappearance is in a mocking tone, rather than the melancholy absence felt in the cathedral. This poem is a challenge to the disappearance, just begging to responded to in any form – just so that the author may again glimpse the presence of God. The poet is no longer at the point of pushing God out of his world. No, instead, he is trying to pull the spirit back into the world, trying to invoke an incomprehensible power that he knows is missing. Maybe if that power was again felt, the world would right itself and the vast cathedrals of Europe would once again be brought back to life.
