Simple, perfect, progressive, perfect progressive, past, present, future, active, passive and all the combinations possible (24 possibilities, I think?) and I can tell you what the verb or group of verbs is. BAM. Not really that difficult, actually, it's just something I had never officially learned and now I have. The grammar exercises I just did were fun. Sometimes I love editing and grammar and all that jazz.
Ok, I take it back - I love it all of the time :) I'm so on the right career path.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Literature is Life
I just got out of my British Literary History class and I had all these thoughts floating around my head, most of which I've lost now that I stood in a line for 15 minutes waiting for a computer. But I'll try to compose them anyway.
Literature inspires me. We were discussing John Keats today, and deciding whether or not his poetry is as wonderful as anthologies have made it out to be. I would argue, yes, yes, it is. We mostly centered our conversation around his poem, "To Autumn." I would type it out, but it's long enough to make this post look huge and be annoying to type, (but not too long to quickly read!) so I'll just include the link: http://englishhistory.net/keats/poetry/toautumn.html
Poets' lives are generally very interesting, and Keats is no exception. He died at 25 of Tuberculosis, he and Fanny Brawne were completely, madly in love, and he was barely 5' tall.
The year and a half before he died was when he wrote his best poetry. I guess all I want to say, to keep this short, is that this poem exemplifies how he learned to fill his life with so much richness when he knew he had little time left. Do we live like this? Do I? I would suggest I have a lot to learn from him. "To Autumn" taught me that nature becomes most beautiful before it dies, and I believe life can too. He lived that way, found the fulfillment in every day, and at the end of his life, like in the third and final stanza of the poem, he was calm and serene. Dr. Frankenstein didn't find this same fulfillment. He didn't live with his responsibility over his creation, nor did he show any compassion toward it and he died discontented. I don't want that to be me.
Some say that reading literature is a waste of time, but I believe it helps make the rest of my time spent living more rich. My professor Steven Walker, a thoughtful, brilliant, 70 year-old man, told us that he was living in London when the Lord of the Rings came out. It found immediate success, and he was very skeptical to read it because, as he told us, he thought anything that popular just couldn't be that good. He picked up a copy, started it one evening, and didn't eat or sleep until he had finished the trilogy late the next day. He nearly wept because there was no more to read of the books that he realized had just changed his life.
Let us let our passions change us for the better, inspire us to greater ends, make our days far richer.
That is all.
Literature inspires me. We were discussing John Keats today, and deciding whether or not his poetry is as wonderful as anthologies have made it out to be. I would argue, yes, yes, it is. We mostly centered our conversation around his poem, "To Autumn." I would type it out, but it's long enough to make this post look huge and be annoying to type, (but not too long to quickly read!) so I'll just include the link: http://englishhistory.net/keats/poetry/toautumn.html
Poets' lives are generally very interesting, and Keats is no exception. He died at 25 of Tuberculosis, he and Fanny Brawne were completely, madly in love, and he was barely 5' tall.
The year and a half before he died was when he wrote his best poetry. I guess all I want to say, to keep this short, is that this poem exemplifies how he learned to fill his life with so much richness when he knew he had little time left. Do we live like this? Do I? I would suggest I have a lot to learn from him. "To Autumn" taught me that nature becomes most beautiful before it dies, and I believe life can too. He lived that way, found the fulfillment in every day, and at the end of his life, like in the third and final stanza of the poem, he was calm and serene. Dr. Frankenstein didn't find this same fulfillment. He didn't live with his responsibility over his creation, nor did he show any compassion toward it and he died discontented. I don't want that to be me.
Some say that reading literature is a waste of time, but I believe it helps make the rest of my time spent living more rich. My professor Steven Walker, a thoughtful, brilliant, 70 year-old man, told us that he was living in London when the Lord of the Rings came out. It found immediate success, and he was very skeptical to read it because, as he told us, he thought anything that popular just couldn't be that good. He picked up a copy, started it one evening, and didn't eat or sleep until he had finished the trilogy late the next day. He nearly wept because there was no more to read of the books that he realized had just changed his life.
Let us let our passions change us for the better, inspire us to greater ends, make our days far richer.
That is all.
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