THE EXAMINED LIFE

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” —Socrates

(for my students in Personal Writing)

Socrates’ words above have long been a motto for philosophers, those “lovers of wisdom” who feel summoned to ponder human experience and to make sense of and find meaning in what would otherwise remain baffling and daunting.

Human beings—given our marvelous brains and the languages we have devised to represent our experiences, to process them and to communicate our comprehension to others—we can do what no other species can accomplish.  We can examine not only the world and each other, but ourselves: physically, socially, mentally, and spiritually.

An implicit motive in our Personal Writing course is that you will take the opportunity of addressing one or more of your essays to the challenge of examining aspects of human experience intriguing to you, with the hope of “wising up” through your efforts to articulate a more considered and cogent understanding.

In your first essay, “Me10”, and in your final essay, “The Good Life According to Me,” you will quite directly be examining your own life, both your personality and your prospects.  Likewise, when you later reflect on the indications resulting from your Myers-Briggs Type indicator (MBTI) test, which you’ll take during the term, you’ll examine the distinctive proclivities of your personality.

Personal essays as a genre, however, include many more motives than self-scrutiny, and thus you will write about much more than yourself.  Personal essays are personal chiefly because they permit you to show whatever topic you select from your own viewpoint: subjectively, rather than objectively represented.

Of this, I think Socrates would approve, because you will be using language to express clearer understandings of what cannot be grasped and examined well until composed in prose.

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ASSIGNMENT: THE GOAL OF COLLEGE

The other morning on 90.7 FM, our public radio station, I heard the slogan of Stetson University, one of the station’s underwriters: “Stetson, where students dare to be significant.”  Rollins, by comparison, challenges its students to learn to become “responsible global citizens.”

How about you think for yourself and try to decide on a motto that designates your own best idea of what your collegiate experience ought to make of you?

Let the essay you write reflect the course of your ruminations as you consider one or another possible slogan, encapsulating what you believe is the upshot of a collegiate education in the liberal arts and sciences.  See what motto you can devise; then unpack that slogan at length, elaborating on its implications.

For instance: “A Rollins liberal education teaches you to think well for yourself.”

The two notions implicit here are (1) thinking well and (2) thinking independently.

(1)    Presumably, it takes training and practice to think well, an ability that’s not innate but a function of exposure to many examples of clear, rational thought processing, of many kinds: you can learn to think in many ways about many subjects—in the sciences, the social sciences, the arts and the humanities.  More fundamentally, you can learn the science of rational thought itself: logic, to discover what is cogent and what is fallacious.

(2)    Then you learn to think for yourself, rather than to follow the herd or the urgings of some powerful or persuasive manipulator who wants to make up your mind for you.

Take it from here yourself.  Devise a motto that captures memorably the aim of your collegiate education, as you now see it.  Then explain it.

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PROPER WORDS IN PROPER PLACES

                    My mind is like a hummingbird
                        That flits from flower to flower,
                    Not hunting nectar but a word
                        To give my verse terse power.

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WHY STUDY GREAT LIT?

What good motives can you think of for reading and studying bygone literature, as we do in English 201, British literature from 800 – 1700, from Beowulf to Milton’s Paradise Lost?

Here are some that come to my mind:

•    Bygone literature is a window on long-ago worlds, letting us imagine how people lived, behaved, thought, and spoke in days of yore . . .

•    . . . which can give us a better perspective on ourselves, by comparison—what we’ve gained since then, what lost, how changed, how remained the same.

•    It exposes us to changes in our English language over the centuries: to words, syntax, figures of speech now defunct but once colorful and distinctive—some worth reviving or simply quoting—Shakespeare, for instance, forsooth.

•    It exposes us to mastery, to the issue of why, of all things written, only a few come to be regarded as masterpieces of literature and do not fade away into obscurity in later years.  To learn to appreciate, admire and enjoy what’s great and artful is to honor what human beings at their best have achieved, setting examples for others—perhaps us—to follow.

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DOG-A-DOODLE-DO

               Before the sun has shown its face,
               Though in the sky there glows a trace
               Of morning now about to be,
               Our little pup instinctively
               Lifts up her snout and sets about
               To yodel—leaving then no doubt
               The sun will shine again today,
               And we’d best rise so she can play.

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 PERSONAL WRITING

Personal Writing is a course to encourage you to write personal essays.  Personal essays (sometimes called “familiar essays”) allow you to write from the first-person viewpoint—to say “I think,” “I feel,” “I believe,” “I urge,” and so forth.  You get to speak your own mind.  But not as you might in a diary or journal, because you write personal essays with an audience in mind, a readership of others to whom you address yourself.  You are not only expressing yourself but communicating to others.

In this course you will read an anthology of such essays, written by both professional writers and by students like you.  Those essays will illustrate the range of opportunities that the genre of familiar or personal essay opens you to.  Whereas most of your academic composition requires you to write impersonally and objectively, here your personal point of view is paramount as you convey your observations, attitudes and opinions engagingly to your readers, showing them this or that aspect of the world according to you.

When I was in college I never had or heard of such a course, but I think it is a course in which I would have flourished, one that would have started me far sooner doing a kind of writing that’s vital to my well-being and useful for sharing my self with others.

Doing personal writing, I make up my mind because I don’t clearly know what I think about something until I verbalize the diffuse and incoherent notions buzzing about in my brain or in my gut: “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”  That seemingly silly sentence is the motto of our course.  Although attributed to “a garrulous and scatter-brained old geezer,” that sentence recognizes how thought takes shape as it finds apt language in which to emerge and manifest publicly.

“Making up my mind” suggests another aspect of personal writing, one that fashionable women who wear makeup will readily recognize: for your mind to go from schlepping around in a daydream to dolling itself up to impress others in public introduces the element of artistry into your writing.  In Personal Writing you dress to impress others with well put-together sentences and paragraphs in an ensemble that pleases both writer and reader.

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LEARNING TO FLOURISH

for Daniel R. DeNicola

      Are we humans half empty or half full?
      A race of oxymorons, we’re wise fools
      Or doltish sages, subject to the pull
      Of appetite and passion, flouting rules
      Of reason and decorum on a whim,
      The urgings of perverse or selfish drives
      That make the light of righteousness go dim,
      Without which nothing wondrous ever thrives.
      For human beings to flourish as we ought
      We need to cultivate the wisdom in
      Our hearts that may be either taught or caught,
      Since wisdom is the way beyond our sin.
           For only when we fully realize
           Our sapience will Homo saps grow wise.

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