Tuesday 8/27/13: Present

* Open

* New Notes

• "For mythology is the handmaid of literature, and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness" (Bulfinch vii). 
• G. K. Chesterton notes that mythology is a shadow of the truth--so long as you remember that a shadow represents (but is not in fact) the true object.  Some people want to lump the historical truth of, say, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ into the same category that holds the mythological shadows such as the rebirth of Hera via the disgorging of Cronus.  Here is Chesterton from The Everlasting Man, Part 1, Ch. 5:
• "We may truly call these fore-shadowing; so long as we remember that fore-shadowing are shadows. And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit very exactly the truth that is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape but not texture. These things were something like the real thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were different. Saying something is like a dog is another way of saying it is not a dog; and it is in this sense of identity that a myth is not a man. Nobody really thought of Isis as a human being; nobody really thought of Demeter as a historical character, nobody thought of Adonis as the founder of a Church. There was no idea that any one of them had changed the world; but rather that their recurrent death and life bore the sad and beautiful burden of the changelessness of the world. Not one of them was a revolution, save in the sense of the revolution of the sun and moon. Their whole meaning is missed if we do not see that they mean the shadows that we are and the shadows that we pursue. In certain sacrificial and communal aspects they naturally suggest what sort of a god might satisfy men; but they do not profess to be satisfied. Anyone who says they do is a bad judge of poetry.

* Writing Sample: You have 15 minutes to respond to the following prompt:

• Defend the following statement (or defend the contrary) : Doors are better than windows. 
• Handwrite
• Single space
• This applies to per. 3 and following; per. 1 will suffer under a different prompt tomorrow; bru, ha, ha!

* Poster Presentations

HW: Improve your Notes