AND NOT JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE READING THIS BLOG.
I recognize your sincere attempts to improve and I appreciate that.
I can see the improvement, too.
If you found today's question hard to understand, know that Holden's rant was truly anti-American dream and pro-Walden and Rousseau. Who are Walden and Rousseau? I'm glad you asked.
Here is a link:
Chop wood and carry water. Sell the car.
Tonight, please read chapters, 18 and 19. They are not THAT significant so a quick read is fine. If you do find something pertinent, that I may have overlooked, post-it note it, and share it with the class tomorrow.
We will read chapter 20 closely tomorrow during class and then we only have four chapters to go.
We will finish those on Friday. This weekend, you will choose your essay topic, and pick 12 to 15 quotations to support that topic and next week, we will be writing until your wrists ache. Get in shape now!!
Our next unit is personal essays, one of my favourite units of the year.
Our final unit is the novel, The Outsider (The Stranger) by Albert Camus, translated from the French and set in North Africa during the 40s. It has been called the best book of the 20th century. It is short but compelling.
It involves making peace with the world from a jail cell.
How is that possible?
It asks us to ponder the meaning of life.
Camus has been called an absurdist. A philosophy that says that since we cannot prove the existence of God, there must be another way to understand the human predicament (that we are born as mortals who know they will die). What motive do we have to rise out of bed? To feed ourselves? To go to work?
The fact that there is no KNOWN purpose in the world, an absurdist would argue, means that we cannot FORCE meaning onto the world.
For example, you might say, well, I go to work to feed my family and to help students learn to read.
No! the absurdist yells.
Work has no meaning.
You go to work because you go to work.
HMMM. Think about that!!
Camus believed that going to work for the sake of going to work or living for the sake of living was heroic and that attempting to force meaning onto situations was unheroic.
A lot to discuss and a great way to end your high school English career.
I think you will (if you haven't already) realize that you need to keep reading and reading and reading and reading to examine the imaginations of great and not-so-great writers and thinkers so you have something to which you can compare your own ideas.
You are never alone in the universe with a good book.
The universe does not care about you, the absurdist says.
