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Lillie: The aim of a liberal education…

Katie: is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances,

Erin: to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

L: Is our story not a shared one? You can look at us all as readers. Scientists are trying to interpret and form conclusions about the world, just as readers of poetry are trying to do the same with words on a page.

K: both the author and the critic are similar to scientists. They base new writing/ experimentation upon an older tradition, whether the end result is confirming it or rebelling against it.

L: “When on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle,’ as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past in habitants of that continent.”-Darwin

E: As this class continues I find that the gap between science and literature is rapidly closing. Science is a story, literature is a tool for looking at the world; I can't lie when I say that I find all of this to be quite disconcerting.

L: Poetry is never fiction: there's always an underling truth. The poet writes from observation as does a scientist. No matter how this observation is conveyed, through verse or scientific narrative.

K: Dennet seems to suggest that we create the meaning of our acts by acting.

L: To me it is obvious that Dennett is essentially a philosopher… Could the story of evolution, in fact, rid life of its meaning? “I need a reason to live” even if their were no greater meaning, no skyhook explanation for why we are here… should we not find a crane solution?

K: I think that a similarity between science and religion is that they both require this dynamic-- to learn something, to question further, to learn something new.

E: Neither can be refuted, who can say that the world was randomly created or not?

L: poetry can easily be as abstract or non-representational as some art.

K: If art is something new, if its purpose is simply to be something new for you to experience, what good is writing about it? What good is discussing it?

L: have I come up with an answer?

E: What's the use of the subconscious? At the very least it creates beautiful works that enrich our lives and put into words or pictures the very stuff of thoughts.

K: ...writing, unlike painting, must be read in a chronological order. We read a word, then the next, then the next. We can only really "see" one word at a time. I think this is another reason that writing is less abstract than other forms of art.

E:I do see myself as a piano key, constantly being played upon by forces outside my control. The question is, if we still get to enjoy the wonder of this world, if we are still capable of creating beautiful things, does it matter?

L: We may be taking linear tracks, but we have other requirements that help us to make our own personal connections between the courses. This is the way we evolve from our classes.

L: What if the writer were the architect, the book the apartment building, and the reader the apartment dweller?

K: (about Lillie's analogy)This fits both with my experience as a writer of constructing something-- something almost tangible-- and my experience as a reader of being in a new place.

L: an image comes to mind of a wizened man on the deck of a boat suddenly having a moment of epiphany as the wind blows his hair.

E. Imagination, rather than mere intelligence, is the truly human quality" (12). Literature comes up with creative guesses (some absurd but some accurate) while science responds with even stranger theories.

K: Have you worked so hard to be original? Have you pushed away awareness of your own precursors?

E: Leaves of Grass is Walt Whitman, an extremely persuasive Whitman who (in his presentation of himself) makes sure to whisper sweet nothings in our ear in the hope that we will hear him and join in.

K: What you create is new... the combination is new and no one else could have made it and no other time could have made it

And what you create is old... its components are old and they are gathered in you from your parents and from all experience

L: Hustvedt's merging isn't quite the same… the search for answers and meaning as well as the attention to the unconscience are important themes.

E: We have the divergence of languages, the evolution of a language, and the merging of languages

L: Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-wallace Stevens

E: Either way, this enlightenment is only accomplished by depriving yourself of sights sounds, of input of any kind.

K:”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.

L: In order to understand the nothing we have to be ready to make our ‘selves’ nothing too.

K: A recent list was published of “new classics”

E: The Road , Cormac McCarthy

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling

Beloved, Toni Morrison

The Liars' Club, Mary Karr

American Pastoral, Philip Roth

L: Mystic River, Dennis Lehane

Maus, Art Spiegelman

Selected Stories, Alice Munro

Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

K:Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer

Blindness, José Saramago

Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers

E:The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez

Rabbit at Rest, John Updike

On Beauty, Zadie Smith

Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding

E: There is such a deification of science in this country that I never would have considered myself to be a scientist before attending this class but now, well, I think I'm beginning to discover that science is simply what you observe and what you get from those observations.

L: Long long ago God descended to earth and made a man and a woman out of clay.

K: The question Darwin sidesteps is whether God first created one form of life, or several, and has very little to do with current arguments over how life could have spontaneously evolved on Earth

L: And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

K; Do we contradict ourselves?

Very well then... we contradict ourselves.

E: Science and religion are both far more similar then some would believe. Two men observe a garden, they both see that it is beautiful, full of flowers, fruit and tangled weeds. Both men declare that such marvels have been created over time by an incredibly powerful, unthinkably immense force. One names this force God and the other evolution.

K: The shift in meaning of the word “skyhook” was not a blind, random process. We as a class selected with a purpose. We selected a meaning or meanings that interested us and that furthered our ongoing discussion.

E: there are always alternative stories to everything. No concept is fixed, no universal truth can point us towards the most accurate story, we must observe the world around us and make the best story we can.

L: Isn’t that something that Evolution may ask us to do? Evolution may take away our meaning or our own singular importance in the world in exchange for an understanding of the world itself.

E: Remember, we are the storytelling species, no other form of life on this planet writes dissertations or sees bulls and heroes in the stars. As long as we continue to gaze in wonder on the beauty of this universe we will write stories. And, as long as we continue to be a dynamic, evolving species, our stories will evolve with us.

K: This lack of a resolution, a definite ending, could also be related to biological evolution in that it is a process without a definite endpoint