So back to the question of love - I really feel that this passage expresses all kinds of love.  It is parental love and intimate love.  This passage makes me cry because I have a physical link with it, my grandmother and her passing, and also an emotional link (obviously if it makes me cry) by being in love now.  I know Tristan talks about being in love in his online journal and how much it means to him.  I think my life has a lot of meaning because of the love that's in it.  Not just romantic love.  Only a little bit of that love is romantic love.  Sometimes just translating that meaning emotions into words is what makes literature what it is.  And I think that's one reason that we have literature and that we keep it around because it gives us meaning.

"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else.  The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly."  -Wallace Stevens

Sublimity: Dante's Levels applied to a stanza of Countee Cullen's "From the Dark Tower" "We shall not always plant while others reap The olden increment of bursting fruit Not always contenance, abject, and mute. That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap Not everlastingly while others sleep Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute Not always bend to some more subtle brute We were not made eternally to weep 1. At a literal leve this poem is about people being oppressed.  2. At an allegorical level, this poem is about the black man's struggle in a white-dominated America.  Cullen is speaking out against the oppression of the African American especially in the historical sense of slavery 3. At a moral level, this stanza shows the oppression of slavery and a person's need to be free.  (not so sure on this one, I'll think more on it) 4. I can't even wrap my mind around the anagogical so I'm not even going there yet.

This is Countee Cullen, not Wallace Stevens

People want to remain ignorant because they have too much sadness in their lives already.  People want to reamin ignorant because they don't know what's out here.  People want to remain ignorant because they don't have anything better to do.  People want to remain ignorant because the television told them to.  People want to remain ignorant because they're too lazy to be smart.  People want to remain ignorant because they think that if they read about violence they'll want to commit violent acts.  People want to remain ignorant because everybody else is doing it. One I stole from Jaimie: People want to remain ignorant because they're afraid to find out that everything they know is wrong.  FOUCAULT would say: People want to remain ignorant because structures of power confine them to one discourse about wanting to remain ignorant.

Go Home to the Lit Crit Index

For you non-French speaking swine (just kidding) it says: You think culture costs too much?  Try ignorance.

NEXT!!

I have slowly but surely trying to read other people's journals and find things on which to respond.  Dustin wrote in his journal that we should aredy know what we are reading before we read it - as in Plato saying we have knowledge before we are born.  But I disagree with this.  Why do we need to know what we are reading before we read it?  Doesn't that take the mystery away from everything?  It's like knowing the ending to Sixth Sense before you see the movie.  I rather like to prescribe the Nietzschean way of thinking that, yes I may have all the knowledge in the world when I die but when I come back and live this life again and again and again, I forget everything.  I am only here to enjoy my life again for the thirty-seventh time.  I forget everything to discover something again for the first time.  I like the way that sounds.  Discovering something again for the first time.  More on this on the next page.

Discovering my love for Gauguin again for the first time