excellent final sentence

by Wylie Shambles

Posted to Utterances on 2002-12-15 00:24:00

Parent message is 340537
Well put, Ms. Harris, concisely & amusingly.
I wrote an essay in high school on Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat. Being at a judgmental age, in a conservative point in history, in a redneck city, in a Catholic school, I guess it was natural for me to write about how the book was about a bunch of drunks and what’s the point?
The teacher (a black suited brother) wrote “yes, but what does it say about life?”
Whoa! I got engaged on the field of ideas, not semicolons & grammar!
So naturally things got confusing after that, and 3 or 4 years later I couldn’t tell the difference between a communion cracker and a peyote button.
I’ve got it all figured out now, but still it requires an ongoing case-by-case judgement to decide whether the work is important on it’s own, whether what you know about the author weighs in, whether the temporal context of the moment of writing vs. the moment of reading are important, etc.
The peace you find through art is the peace of one who has a great deal of experience with disturbance.
And, though I am no longer religiously dogmatic, there does seem to be some purpose in our lives to work out our salvation, to improve our karma, to find ladders to transcend our fallible selves, and many do that through works that are better than they are.

Also, thank y’all for adding another word to my collection of fine distinctions on a certain topic:
“arrogance” joins “egotistical”, “egocentric”, “narcissistic” and “solipsistic”. Oh yeah, plain old “selfish”, & “self centered”.
Got any more?



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