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Paul and I are glad you're here, to share thoughts about the story of evolution and the evolution of stories. This isn't a place for polished writing or final words. It's a place for thoughts in progress: questions, ideas you had before, in or after class, things you've heard or read or seen that you think others might find interesting. Think of it as a public conversation, a place to put things from your mind or brain that others might find useful and to find things from others (in our class and elsewhere) that you might find useful. And a place we can always go back to to see what we were thinking before and how our class conversations have affected that. We are looking forward to seeing where we go, and hoping you are too.

As always, you're free to write about whatever you're thinking about--but here are three (!) possibilities for this week, in order of increasing abstraction:

• Can you do some more work w/ that puzzling passage on p. 301 of The Sorrows of an American, when Erik says, "It was snowing...it struck me as a moment when the boundary between inside and outside loosens, and there is no loneliness because there is no one to be lonely"? What's happening here, @ the very end of the story, that enables this so-always-lonely man to gain such a Whitman-like sense of "self," which is not separate from the world?
  
• What relationship might we see (or imagine?) between the "cracks" Magda describes as being "healthy," and those Paul described as being central to the practice of science? What function do the cracks "in" our personality serve? How are they like/different from the cracks "of" personal temperament that fuel the ongoing process that is science?

"We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy"(Magda's advice to Erik, p. 139).

• How appropriate is The Sorrows of an American as the final text (not the "finale"--that will be your performances!) in a course on the evolution of stories? How much "movement" is there in the novel? Cf., for instance, Katie's impatience with all the characters "stuck in isolation," with Joanna's enjoyment in seeing Erik traced his "individual evolution backwards": does that action make it "count" (or not) as an evolutionary fiction?