How Google Contrasts with Poetry

       In Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," he argues that the internet, especially Google, makes us stupid because it no longer forces us to spend time researching and reading long articles and books. Instead, we type in a few words into a search engine and find what we're looking for within a couple minutes. This was shown with the study done by the University College London. They studied the ways in which people researched by reading only the first one-two pages of an article, then looked up another resource to continue looking for answers. He also compares the effects of the Internet with the effects of the invention of the printing press and Taylorism. He concludes with proof from scientific studies that the fast ways of knowledge are actually making us stupider, or changing the way we think not only psychologically but also biologically through the new formations that the neurons make to adapt to the new ways that humans live and attain information.

       On the third page of Carr's essay, he explains how the internet essentially is everything that we used to use separately but in one. For example, it is a calculator as well as a typewriter, a typewriter, a radio, and others. He writes, "When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net's image. It injects the medium's content with...digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with content of all the other media it has absorbed....The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration" (Carr 3). This relates to poetry because poetry is the different expressions of thoughts, emotions, and feelings. It recreates the image of whatever the poem tries to convey, yet the Internet and poetry contrast in a great way. While the Internet scatters our attention and diffuses our concentration, poetry is supposed to do the opposite. Poetry causes us to meditate more on what is being argued or depicted in hopes that we have connection, not a disbandment.

Did Nietzche ever go back to the style that he wrote in before the printing press or caution others about the dangers of writing by the printing press?

A Wave of Self-Reliance

       Emerson portrays the differences between man, the mind, and society in "Self-Reliance". He says that genius is when man believes his own thoughts about himself and the application of this truth to the rest of man. Man learns things about himself in solitude, but they become inaudible as he enters the world. "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members" (Emerson 2). He doesn't want man to conform to the world, but live by his own thoughts. When he comes to this understanding, he shouldn't pay bits of charity because he is sorry that he lives in the world. The purpose of man is to live in the world, so that he can become one with it by his own accord. When all men do this, society will be like a wave. The wave represents unity and oneness but the energy of the wave continues, leaving the pasts of men behind and acquiring the lives of men to come.

       In "Self-Reliance", Emerson continues his fancy and depiction of the unity of mankind through the soul and with the Supreme Cause, the One. He writes in the first paragraph, "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius" (Emerson 1). This is similar to the arguments found in Walt Whitman's poems, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "Song of Myself". In "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", Whitman finds a connection between him and others through their thoughts and experiences on the ferry. Similarly, but more physical, Whitman connects men with each other through the atoms that make men up in "Song of Myself". He starts the poem saying, "I celebrate myself, and sing myself,/ And what I assume you shall assume,/ For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" (Whitman 8). He used the knowledge that men are all made up of the same matter to connect them and find truth within each other.

Emerson writes, "What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is harder, because you will find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it" (Emerson 3). Doesn't this destroy his argument because he is telling us what he thinks our duty is (to be self-reliant)?

Purification and the Panopticon

       In his essay, "Panopticism", Focault describes a town that becomes more orderly and discipline through chaos, in the form of disease. The people of the town are always being accounted for and cannot move from their home unless they are a guard or appointed official. There's only one doctor allowed to give remedy to the sick, and he only has permission to tend to the needs of certain people that the magistrate allows him to. Ultimately, the magistrate has the power to let the sick die if he so chooses. Then, Focault describes this concept in one building, the Panopticon. It allows one person to watch all of the inhabitants, who are separated from each other, at once, but they cannot see him . Focault shows how the knowledge of someone watching a person intimidates and controls them in a way that the inhabitants will behave because they know they are watched. He relates power and knowledge in this utopia to show that more order can come to society with an understanding that people are always being watched.

       The infected town described by Focault undertook many of the precautions and mindsets as the Puritans did when they settled in New England. The infected town closed off all ways out and into the city. Even individual homes were closed off and weren't to be left or else a person would receive the punishment of death. Purification took place without leaving the town and with order. This physical purification is much like the purification and mindset of the Puritans. They viewed the outside world and Native Americans as evil, so they built up a wall around their city to separate themselves. Purification took place within a person, so that the community as a whole would be pure. They were advised not to leave the community so that they didn't have contact with evil, but they were allowed to leave in order to extend the boundaries of the community, purifying more of their evil surroundings.

How does the Panopticon work in society, if each individual isn't separate from each other because they continually live in contact with each other?

Brooklyn Ferries and Songs of Tradition

       Walt Whitman wrote many poems within Leaves of Grass and other books of his. Within poems from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," he described the beauty that man sees, makes, and is a part of in Brooklyn and Manhattan Island. He addressed Emerson's claim that beauty and truth is found in Nature by making man part of Nature. Because truth can be found in man, it can also be found in what man makes. In "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," Whitman shows that beauty isn't found in man trying to make Nature understandable by his own terms; he wrote "When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,/ How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick" (Whitman 6).

Instead, man can watch Nature in awe and find beauty in things like fire and smoke from a man-made chimney; man and Nature work together to be beautiful in the presence of each other.

       In the seventeenth poem found in "Song of Myself," Whitman described his thoughts as not original.  The first line of the poem argues a similar statement to that of T. S. Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Eliot explained that tradition isn't conforming poetry to the form of other poets' poetry   or to write in a similar style. Tradition is writing about some truth known to all in a way that has never been written before. Whitman continued summarized Eliot's tradition in one line: "These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me" (Whitman 11). In his poems, Whitman writes about the thoughts that have been thought by all, but they are expressed in original ways.

What is the meaning of "Song of Myself: 1"? It seems to have no connection from stanza to stanza.

"Experience" and Melancholia

"Life is a train of moods like a string of beads"

       Ralph Waldo Emerson writes about the mystery of the experience or perception of Nature, rather than the mystery of Nature in "Experience". Although humans don't understand Nature, it doesn't mean that Nature is mysterious; instead, man's perception is limited. "Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue,and each shows only what lies in its focus" (Emerson 570). In other words, man is not limited to only see one thing, but he is limited to see whatever the focus is of his mood of perception. An example he gives is self-inflicted suffering for a hope of reality and truth. Through this mood, man learns one thing and finds one reality: that grief is shallow and it leads a person to nothingness except death if life-long. Then as man moves out of this stage, he approaches the next bead on the string or next mood-car on the train. The experience will teach him something new but won't be a perception/view of all colors (knowledge).

       Emerson describes moods "in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth" (Emerson 569). He writes that this mood is painted on by a person, meaning that it isn't his true feelings. It isn't true but superficial. The mood he describes is a close description of melancholia, which Edgar Allen Poe incorporates in "The Raven". In the poem, the man burdens himself with continuous grief because he feels guilty for falling asleep while trying to grieve the loss of his lady, Lenore. He brings the suffering upon himself, as Emerson describes in "Experience" in order to to find the reality of what he thinks should occur when someone loses his love, even though it teaches him nothing.

What does Emerson mean by writing, "all our days are so unprofitable while they pass" on page 568?

Reasonable Rebellion

       Yesterday in English class, we discussed whether man was reasonable or not and his relation to Nature on the reason totem pole. Henry Thoreau introduces his argument in "Resistance to Civil Government" with this discussion about the reason of man. He explains that for any man it's reasonable to rebel when your rights are being infringed upon. "I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but outs is the invading army" (Thoreau 855). He goes further to say that a group of people should fight the injustices within its same group of people, so that a change is brought about. He says voting against and signing petitions against injustice isn't enough; in reality, it's nothing. He uses Luke 9:24 as his example and stimulant to urge mainly Americans to act in issues, like racism, much more actively than signing a petition.

       Thoreau implored in this essay that Americans' not do the least possible to stir up trouble for themselves. "The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies" (Thoreau 854). Americans are like robots who know how to do and choose, yet they don't use their consciences when they fight for the country. This idea, as well as Thoreau's observation of a paradox of America's foundation, are also found in Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America. American's tend to be lazy instead of thinking for ourselves, so we act in whichever way we are told. This includes the way we treat others, especially regarding to race, since the country is founded on freedom, yet (according to Thoreau) one sixth of the population was still enslaved. Both authors address these problems in their writings, and even today America still deals with laziness and racial barriers.

Would Thoreau be considered a Christian Transcendentalist? And are those really possible without being heretical?