A student asked me why we try to link Separate Peace to the Iliad to 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel. Fair question. The human drive to make connections represents a drive toward greater understanding of and familiarity with the world. If you move more easily through the world next May than you do now, tenth grade English will have done its job.
On a practical level, any practice, whether writing or speaking, which makes you more articulate will lead to more assured success in college. When you walk into that first semester humanities seminar at Harvard, if you can argue your point of view forcefully and articulately, you will reap rewards. Teachers hate to put this crass spin on things, but there it is. I would like to say articulate living is happier living, but you would chuckle behind my back.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Thinking through the opening quotations . . .
What is [the] end game? It is captured in the words of Terence, or in his Latin name, Publius Terentius Afer. He was a black man, born in Carthage of African descent, about 200 years B.C., brought to Rome as a slave by a master who, struck by his intelligence, gave him access to a first-rate education and later freed him. Terence went on to become the most popular playwright of Rome in his day. At one point, he wrote: "I am human. Nothing human can be alien to me."
This is the universal truth. We may never know what a tiger feels slipping through the jungle or a dolphin as it swims the ocean, but whatever another human has felt, we can feel it too. Ultimately, it matters little that I am an aging Chinese-Uruguayan in West Newton: Shakespeare's lines written in Elizabethan England, Thucydides' chronicles of Greek wars two thousand years ago, Li Po's poems from the T'ang Dynasty, Isabel Allende mourning the loss of her daughter, Ralph Ellison's invisibility in mid-twentieth century United States, all speak to me as surely as Maya Angelou's words at the begin-ning of the twenty-first. This is because we are all members of the same species. We are humans.
This is the universal truth. We may never know what a tiger feels slipping through the jungle or a dolphin as it swims the ocean, but whatever another human has felt, we can feel it too. Ultimately, it matters little that I am an aging Chinese-Uruguayan in West Newton: Shakespeare's lines written in Elizabethan England, Thucydides' chronicles of Greek wars two thousand years ago, Li Po's poems from the T'ang Dynasty, Isabel Allende mourning the loss of her daughter, Ralph Ellison's invisibility in mid-twentieth century United States, all speak to me as surely as Maya Angelou's words at the begin-ning of the twenty-first. This is because we are all members of the same species. We are humans.
--Michael Chu
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