The Victory of Don

When Don, the wonderful cad, he, decided to save the captured "maiden" as he thought was being kidnapped by the monks on horseback, drawing her carriage he was accosted and challenged by a very unusual foe. This is a very important encounter as it is the first that Don Quixote doesn't completely fail at. Not only does he seem to be an apparent equal in combat, Quixote, though by chance and folly, ends up defeating this man, and leaves his fate to the "rescued" woman.

Not only was this man a proper challenge to Don, he is also somewhat distant from reality. He attacks Don at the insistence that he is, indeed, a gentleman. He defends his honor in a way that reflect the same chivalrous values of Quixote's delusional world. Significant and strange it is that the first person who seems to share similar values to the wonderfully confused Don his first true success, especially in Quixote's mind.

Nature, Ahoy!

I think it could be sufficiently argued that a major theme of this course would be nature, or how man deals with nature and mankind's own relationship with it. The natural world is constantly emphasized, either as a pastoral scene of the romance mode or as something no longer being the container but the thing contained or the tight relationship between innocence and the themes prevalent in nature (especially in children's literature) or as something poets aspire to imitate through mimesis or the personified envious tropes exemplified in Wallace Steven's poem. The Mythos of Seasons is a perfect example; the conciseness with which the analogies are aligned show perfects a direct and significant relationship between literature and nature, which I think can be found in just about everything we've discussed thus far and remains to be the underlying idea behind this class—that nature an literature may indeed be inexorably bound to one another.

Touchstone.

For my "keystone" passage, that I often find myself coming back to is a little poem by Robert Frost called Desert Places from a collection of works known as "A Further Range."

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Mostly it is the last stanza that interests me. It means a lot to me because it holds tight to many of my personal thoughts, of the divine and the common, the intrinsic and extrinsic, internal and external, inner-human thought and capacity versus the outer possibilities of the stars. It both marvels and recoils at the ambivalent duality of nature, the apparent horror and ecstasy of nature as it occurs in the world (Earth) and eventually muses the stars themselves for inspiration. The poem has a tone of both admiration and discomfort towards the solitude and isolated state of nature, and finally sets the gaze of the poet inwards, reflecting that for all the wonder and unpleasantness of nature external, the inner workings of the human mind will always be the more complex and worrisome.

Plot, Character and Negative Capability

Having so recently become a writer, I have been struggling with creating action, tension and a forward-moving plot. Today we touched on negative capability, negating or losing the sense of self as an author so that the work "speaks for itself." I only recently developed a new method of writing. I used to write with plot at the forefront and choosing characters to act out the plot I intended, but it made a lot of my characters simple, one-dimensioned and easily exchangeable with no unique qualities. Now I have been writing by developing the characters first, outlining a plot, but rather than having a 100% set outline, I have a series of events I desire to take place. Now I simply but my characters who I have created with their individual characteristics and personalities and try to honestly convey how I feel the characters would react to that situation, based on who they may be.
This ability to remove my personal affections and supplant the text with only my characters', I may dissolve myself in the story, giving all rhetoric, actions, motivations and philosophies live through my characters only. I have been putting parts of myself in each of my characters, but hopefully the remainder of their conscious selves will overpower the few quirks of my own that I have spread throughout my cast. It is hard to distance myself from my own writing as I find more and more of myself in my works or more and more of my works manifested in myself, but I feel that being able to take no preference and look objectively at the themes and ideas present within one's own writing helps let the characters take control of what is being expressed and meant, not the authors. To reiterate, as said in class, it is not Shakespeare who said anything, but his characters.

Lies

I just slayed a dragon. Then I flew around the Earth and defeated China. That is, of course a lie. Why would I do that? Because in everything (especially literature) the truth is generally not as exciting as a fib. It is not a lie that attempts to detract from the truth, soiling its user with filthy guilt and unceasing moral decay, that I speak of, but the lies I tell every day to my friends to make them laugh. Did that hilarious coincidence happen or did something like it almost happen, and I merely chose to embelish the reality with a little "interest cusioning." It may not be that what I could have claimed happened, but in tweaking the facts of event, I can make people laugh at an otherwise pointless story, or enthrall people with the wonders of an amazing occurrence when, in actuallity, it never did occurr. When do we take these lies to be good? When is ever any lie, whether it has malice or entertainment as its intention, good?

I regret to say I cannot remember the name, but a movie with a lying old dying father and his son coming to terms with his father's death and the seemingly inability for the father to stop telling tall tales details the wonders of the imagination over the simplicity and uneventful nature of reality. Reality is only as real as we make it out to be. For all intents and purposes, lying makes things better in this manner; the truth may be more didactic, but the genuine interest in reality is minor in its appeal. Like Don Quixote, the world within a lie, even a delusional one, is far better than the norm. And, like Shelley, I would argue that a lie is even greater than the truth in that our sullen, sod-like sad state of this brazen world is far inferior to the would-be myth of the Illiad, graphic novels, faerie tales and other golden works of beautiful dissemblances.

The Renaissance

I think what Walter Pater is trying to convey is that human experience is the base of all discovery and joy. He says that "every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end."
What I think he means by all this is that it is the instant of human connection, that point of interest that we may discern or uncover something, the moment of discovery, that we find so compelling, and not that the fruition of our philosophical meanderings or passionate observations are what drive human motivation to learn, but that the process of experience is what we most hope to attain and what we may gain the most pleasure from obtaining.
This advocate of "art for art's sake" goes on to say that "to burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." The point of life, he says, is to experience, and from out that experience we are formed as individual personalities who need do nothing more than experience and expand the realm of arts, poetry and philosophy.

Irrelevant

Here I sit and type,
With far greater things I could be doing.

I could invoke the muse,
A noble aspect worth pursuing.
Yet here I am, devoted to this screen.
An unworthy hobby if ever there has been.
Much rather would I save my time for games or play
But what else am I gonna do today?

The mouse was clicked with uncertain resolve, and his eyes scanned the screen for the immediate hint that his post had been published. He felt the old fierce pull of blood exacting the general human condition upon him. He knew his post was only as permanent as the internet, an outdated mode of communication by universal standards. It was only a matter of time before the lines crashed, the servers gave in to ruin and the internet as he knew it was little more than an archaic waste of plastic and metal making up the momentary structure that was the World Wide Web.