Ye Olde Tablets

      In the tale and tragedy of Oedipus Rex, or hero exemplifies the dilemma of self-discovery. There is first a great yearning for self knowledge, and then a great regret and horror after such a discovery. I'm sure Oedipus would have rather lived on in ignorance. But would that have whisked his problems away? He still would have married his mother and have already killed his father. Ignorance is bliss, but is living in bliss really the answer? Or must we confront our truth and suffer under it. If we yearn for ignorance we are rendering ourselves weak, taking away our agency in our lives.     To know oneself really is a virtue that we must all strive towards, because it shows that we have taken full agency of ourselves in our lives. It shows that we refuse to live on the easy path of ignorance and acknowledge the consequences of our selfish and fearful actions. When I was reading the novel "Dune" something stuck out to me that I recall now. It was after a test ...

          Once tasked to relate it to the story of First Man, it doesn't take much detective work to figure out the allegory within Dickinson's poem for Eve and Adam's departure from Eden. The two of them "saunter" away from the offered paradise of the garden (which is the "old-fashioned house") in the ignorance of their disobedience against God. Only once they commit the act and reject the rules, they come into a new form of self-awareness. Now the bliss of ignorance of Good and Evil is gone, only to be replaced by shame and sorrow. Even as they stand their among the trees of Eden, the garden is lost to them.             The poem tells the story of people leaving and old-fashioned house that they had lived in all their lives, sauntering from the door smugly and unconscious of the fact that they would ever return. Dickinson uses the words old-fashioned specifically to show how their dwelling place is an ancient home f...

    As our time on earth comes to a close, all of us must come to face the impending fact of our mortality in a way that we have never done before. In saying this I can clarify that what I say in this blog may not stay the same by the time I reach that period of my life. These are only the words of a naive seventeen year old boy who has seen less of the world than the average goose, so take them with as many grains of salt your heart desires.     During my seventeen years of experience on this earth, I have thought many times over the value that life holds. About why we even care about the things that happen around us. The people we meet, the sights we see, the rides we seek. Being raised as religious, I have had the luck of not being faced with a seemingly meaningless void that a god would fill. However, I still think about why God exists. Of course, from there you get the answer that God would be existence itself, but the barrier for human understanding ends t...

    Honestly, the statement "there is no permanence" by Utnapishtim is largely unproblematic with my view of the world. The fact that humans have limited lives before being cast into the infinite has had no issue for countless humans in our history, and I believe that the reason for that is simply the opposite fact that death gives living life meaning. For those who believe in an afterlife, our existence on earth is all we have to prove ourselves before judgment. For those who don't believe in an afterlife, our existence is all we have, and so we must cherish every second of it, making the best of it.     The religious, specifically those who believe in eternal life after death, don't actually believe that the eternity would be the "life" we know on earth. They believe that it would be a permanence outside of time and the dimensions, a unity with a higher power that is existence itself. The one way to get around Utnapishtim's statement on "there is ...

       All of these stories have two things in common. They all follow the hero's journey as illustrated by Joseph Campbell when he first cam up with the theory, and they all have a male protagonist. The hero lives in his ordinary life with a semblance of comfort, and problems arise or peak. The hero then is drawn into the unknown through an inciting incident, beginning his trials. The trials slowly grow until reaching a climactic point of conflict. From thereafter the problem is resolved and the hero returns to society or a place of comfort with newfound knowledge, acquisitions or skills (or an amalgamation of multiple).     This formula is followed in Beowulf , The Odyssey , The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , Star War s, Indiana Jones , Lord of the Rings , and many, many more. It is the formula that can be rinsed and repeated with nobody having any problem with it, particularly because it is so flexible. Can anyone say that the stories listed are the sa...