Humanities

     As people, we can tend to be pretty poor at knowing where exactly our skills, and especially our flaws, lie. This is because we might overestimate our abilities in some places and underestimate them elsewhere. Because we are dealing with ourselves, it is naturally quite difficult to objectively measure us. In my experience the really tricky part about knowing your own flaws is that you have to be careful not to exaggerate just how bad you are at something. Underestimating is not better than overestimating, they are both bad in their own ways. Both can result in low self-esteem and hurt your chances at trying new things. The buzzword for finding out where you excel, where you fall short, and where you are pleasantly mediocre is introspection; however, I do not think that it is as easy as sitting down and trying to sort through the cobwebs in my brain to get to the truth of who I am. In order to find where your strengths, weaknesses, and average talents lie is unfortun...

    In the poem "Eden is that old-fashioned House", Emily Dickinson discusses the similarities between leaving the comforts of a nostalgic, "old-fashioned" house and the perils Adam and Eve faced after being banished out of the garden of Eden. She describes Eden as a place where they are sheltered from the rest of the world, unaware of good and evil. By drawing this comparison, she is able to highlight how they are able to live in ignorance of the issues they would otherwise face in the outside world. Dickinson does this by referring to it as an "old-fashioned house" which elicits a feeling of comfort and security. Perhaps the best example of Adam and Eve being unsuspecting of their garden home is the speed with which they eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. By saying "Unconscious our returning,/But discover it no more" Dickinson is referring to how after eating the fruit and gaining the knowledge of what good and evil are,...

"Does my life mean anything?". For pretty much all people it is the most complicated yes/no question we can be asked, and many of us simply do not have the time to ask it of ourselves. In the modern world everything moves so quickly that, in the immortal words of Ferris Bueller "... if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it". When I have to evaluate whether or not my life has value, I immediately think of my close friendships. That is my answer to this question because if I were to find that my friendships were more fragile than I realized, it could mean that I am not making the right decisions where it counts. If I cannot make the right decisions now when it matters, it is likely my life will not have any real impact.  The reason it is so difficult to answer this question is because to do so we have to be able to accurately evaluate ourselves. This is not something us humans are good at. To give an example why, when I write an essay I...

      Utnapishtim's declaration that "There is no permanence" means for humans that our world is never constant, and we are always forced to adjust to it. This is because nature is always changing (this can be seen with the ice ages and the climate change that enabled agriculture to develop), and we need to adjust to nature or else we will die off as a species. As people our minds are always developing and our bodies are always changing to fit the new demands of our environment. Our world illustrates this impermanence in big ways like the consistent changing of language and in smaller ones like how no two days are exactly the same. Even Enkidu, who was created by the gods as the only creature who could challenge part-deity Gilgamesh, had to leave the earth and die.     How people get up and go about their business with this knowledge of impermanence is certainly not an easy question to answer. I think a lot of people consciously ignore the fact that they will di...

     While I have not read all of the literature mentioned in this question, there does seem to be a common thread among the stories that I am familiar with. In stories like The Odyssey  and Star Wars  (glad I finally have an excuse to reference these next to each other) the lead character or characters that the audience follows is in search of some sort of peace. Whether it's getting home after a hard fought war, to fight a war for freedom against an evil empire, or even to find and acquire the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis ( Raiders of the Lost Ark ), they are all seeking some concept in their minds they think is worth fighting for. Even when it is something physical like in Raiders of the Lost Ark , it represents something much bigger like a direct connection to God. They are also fighting against a mostly invisible, indominable force who is always present in the minds of the characters and audience. The force is not often in contact with the character...