Throughout my life, I have been taught that there is a purpose for everything, each action has a reaction, and all is ruled by an overarching divine plan. My flaw, as I have realized only recently and that has been reinforced by Watts’ article, is that I saw these actions and objects connected in a linear sense, that God created man, man cultivated Earth, man created civilization, etc. That the history of the world is connected along a string one can follow back to the beginning of time. Along those lines, each object and action is separate but connected by their common causality. My flaw in these ideals arose from my blindness to the objects' and actions' constant interactions with each other and their environment. I sometimes wondered how my perception affected the reality of what I observed, but I often dismissed these ideas for I found too difficult to grasp, that I would never have a firm hold of something I felt was right and true. What I really needed to do was to "drop the idea of causality and use instead the idea of relativity" (Watts 915).

            I’ve sometimes doubted the purpose and foundations of this class, as I asked a few weeks ago if we will ever actually read any “World Literature” as the class name implies. However, as the semester has progressed I have begun to understand that it is not the books, the authors, or the words themselves that are important; it is not the understanding of Proust or the recitation of Shakespeare that instills intelligence—it is the understanding that all these works, these objectified books, these ghosts of the past, are one. They exist because we read them, and we read them because they are written with the intention of being deciphered. Without this mutual relationship, they fail to have meaning. Our perception of them, of the ink of the text, the smell of the paper, the language of the words, is what makes them real to us, for, as Alex mentioned in her DB, “Apart from your brain, or some brain, the world is devoid of light, heat weight, solidity , motion, space, time, or any other imaginable feature” (Watts 916). Its an astounding, revolutionary, and almost frightening concept that “the universe implies the organism, and each single organism implies the universe,” (Watts 918), and that to see this all we have to do is widen our vision.