RE: Texan and Atheist
October 7, 2010 at 1:48 pm
(This post was last modified: October 7, 2010 at 1:51 pm by everythingafter.)
(October 7, 2010 at 12:38 pm)thesummerqueen Wrote: We had an advanced English course in high school and senior year was partially devoted to existentialism. We started with Prufrock, and I fell madly in love. To this day, I can pick up a book of his poems and they give me chills. It would be a hard race between him, Keats, and Whitman. A friend lent me Borges though, and that's been fun to dip into - a good study of Blake is next.
Biblical allusions, or any sort from any mythos, have their place in art and literature. Otherwise we'd have never had Jeff Buckley's rendition of Cohen's "Hallelujah", or Bougereau's sumptuous "Birth of Venus".I recognize the role of religion in the past, I just don't think it has any place in the here and now... except in art and literature.
Wow. An AP high school course that covered existentialism. Wish I could have gone somewhere like that. I took AP English but don't remember anything about existentialism. Had to go to college to get introduced. Stupid South Carolina (home state). I didn't really think people considered Prufrock as a necessarily existentialism poem, but I can very well see how they might. I knew there was a reason that I came to love it. Same "something" I suppose that makes me want to read "The Stranger," "Notes from the Underground" and other works over and over.
I agree about the role of religion today. As the line goes, Beethoven's music and Shakespeare's works don't prove God exists, only that Beethoven and Shakespeare existed.
Our Daily Train blog at jeremystyron.com
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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown | Till human voices wake us, and we drown. — T.S. Eliot
"... man always has to decide for himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. ..." — Simone de Beauvoir
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." — Albert Camus, "The Stranger"
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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown | Till human voices wake us, and we drown. — T.S. Eliot
"... man always has to decide for himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. ..." — Simone de Beauvoir
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." — Albert Camus, "The Stranger"
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