"The River"

1987- An example of this from “The River” is how the preacher is saying that the river of Jesus’ blood will wash away your sins and cleanse you.

1988- This relates to the story because the river is representing the Holy Spirit taking Henry to a new life with God through death.

1989- This relates to the story because after Henry was baptized the preacher said that he was changed now and that he now “counted”.

1990- This relates to the story and how the river washes away the sins of those that seek forgiveness and healing.

1991- This relates to how the preacher was saying that you had to believe that the river would heal you and have faith that it would.

1992- This relates to how the preacher was calling it the river of Jesus’s blood and that all rivers come from it and go back to it. He was saying that only the river of Jesus’s blood could cleanse you of your sins and link you to the kingdom of heaven.

1993- This relates to the story in how the preacher asked Henry if he wanted to be baptized before he did it.

1994- This is shown through the way that even Henry knew that the baptism wasn’t something to joke about even though he has been treated things as a joke his whole life.

1995- This relates to the story because Henry wasn’t changed on the outside. He was changed within himself through Mrs. Connin and the baptism.

1996- An example of grace in the story is how God healed those people and cured them of their sins through the river.

1997- This relates to how Henry “counted” and go to heaven after his baptism.

1998- This relates to how the preacher says that they have to have faith in God’s power and the power of Jesus’s blood if they want to be healed. He also says that it’s not the river itself but its Jesus’s blood and sacrifice.

1999- This relates to how God forgives the people through the river and that the preacher says that all rivers of purification come from the original river of Jesus’s blood. All healing comes from God.

2000- This relates to how the preacher is dedicating his life to help people become purified which is a sign of grace.

2001- This relates to how the rivers leave the main one and go back to it.

2002- This relates to how the preacher says that the people have to choose freely whether they want God’s grace or to worship the devil.

2003- This relates to how the preacher was able to heal people through grace.

2004- This relates to how the preacher says it as his responsibility to bring people to God because he had grace.

2005- This relates to how the preacher said that you couldn’t experience God through seeing miracles but by having faith that they can happen.

The Man Without A Face

            Throughout his life, Chuck was misunderstood and teased for who was. Everyone saw him as an idiot and even his friends teased him. He is an outcast among the outcasts and troublemakers. Suddenly he met a man that an outcast too. The man believed in him and helped him while everyone else told him to give up.   When the man proved to want to help him, Chuck began to trust him and open up to the man. From there Chuck got to know the man behind the scars and lost his fear of him and that was where their friendship started to form.

             When Chuck asked McLeod to help him in the first place, I think that he sensed that he wouldn’t tease him like everyone else. I think that he saw that McLeod was just as alone as he was. They were fellow outcasts of the town and Chuck sensed that McLeod might be the one person that could understand him. It all started with him seeing the trophy in McLeod’s house. When Chuck saw that trophy, he saw an opportunity. He saw a way to get help from someone that knew what they were doing without everyone else knowing. He knew that McLeod didn’t talk to anyone so there would be no way for him to tell anyone just how stupid he was. He saw McLeod as someone to exploit to his own gain but things didn’t go his way at first and that made him angry. He, in a way, trusted McLeod to teach him enough for him to pass him exam but felt let down when he kept telling him to dig holes and write an essay.

            He started to trust McLeod when he started to teach him. There was still fear but he trusted him to help him with his goal. It was then that he saw that McLeod was helping him all along by using the holes to help him with math problems. He also used different, unique methods to teach him vocabulary and Latin. He taught him Latin and poetry through things he knew that Chuck would get into to or connect with. Chuck also started to trust McLeod more when he asked him to tell his mother that he was having lessons with him. After that he trusted McLeod not to hurt him. After he learned to trust him, he stopped fearing him.

            Over the course of their lessons, Chuck saw the man underneath the scars and lost all of his fear of him. It started when he saw McLeod bring in his dog while he was hurt from the porcupine. Chuck saw the sensitive side of him in that moment and a layer of his fear melted away. The second moment was when he saw the picture of McLeod with students of his in the picture he found in the poetry book. He had a glimpse into McLeod’s past and that helped him to lose his fear even more. The third thing was the acting out of Shakespeare plays. Chuck saw the fun, creative side of McLeod in that moment. Chuck lost his fear as Mr. McLeod became less of a mystery to him.

            The major moment where Chuck lost his fear of McLeod and trusted him more was when he asked him about his past and what he did for a living. It started when Chuck got up the courage to ask if McLeod wrote porn. From there he learned that McLeod painted for a living and that he got his scars from a car wreck where a kid died. From that, Chuck learns about the man behind the scars and loses his fear of him. Despite what he learned, he still trusts McLeod and doesn’t ask any further questions. They grew closer together the more that that knew about each other and it led to a relationship of trust and friendship.

            The relationship between Chuck and McLeod certainly was a weird one. It started out with them both mistrusting each other but also needing each other in their own ways. McLeod needed Chuck because he needed to see if he could still teach a good student. Chuck needed McLeod to teach him how to pass the exam. In the end they each began to trust each other and became close friends. The more they knew about each other, the closer they became. That is why it made sense that as time went on; Chuck lost all of his fear of McLeod. He now only sees the man behind the scars and has a connection with that man. 

What is knowledge?

            We say that we know something but it can still surprise us. We say that we know something but then someone can prove it wrong. Our knowledge fails us all the time. So how can we say that we have knowledge? How do you prove it?

It is very correct to say that you can’t fully know something or someone. So how can we say that we know things? We can say that we know things because we aren’t saying that we know all the possibilities and functions of those things. We are saying that we are familiar with that thing. That means that we have seen it, had an experience with it, or someone told us about it. We have familiarized ourselves with that thing enough to be able to reasonably predict its function or actions. The way that we familiarize ourselves with something is by testing it. You know that a chocolate chip cookie tastes good because you tested the taste when you ate it. Testing leads to an experience of that thing. This leads to knowledge.

When you know something you are familiar with it. You have some kind of interaction with it either it was direct or indirect. If you look at knowledge this way, we know a great deal of things. We can know things that we’ve heard about or read in a book and still call it knowledge because through that person or book, you experienced that thing. That is knowledge. 

"Cathedral" Questions

In this story the narrator is having his wife’s blind friend, Robert, over for a visit. His wife used to read to Robert for money and they have kept in touch over the years through audio tracks. . Robert is visiting the narrator’s wife because his wife recently died. The narrator is uncomfortable with Robert coming over because he doesn’t know what to do with a blind man. After Robert comes, it is very awkward for the narrator but over the course of the night, the narrator grows comfortable and starts to like and respect Robert. He turns on the TV and a show about cathedrals comes on. Robert asks the narrator to describe a cathedral to him but he can’t do it well so Robert suggests that he draw it. The narrator draws the cathedral while Robert follows his hand and then Robert tells him to close his eyes and continue drawing. After the cathedral is done, the narrator doesn’t want to open his eyes.

1.      The narrator was not looking forward to the visit because he has never been around a blind man and doesn’t know what to do with him. Everything he knows about blind people comes from television and he didn’t like what he saw. These feelings of unease shows that the narrator is naïve about the blind and very single-minded.

2.      It is possible to read that part as her being “seen” by Robert since he felt every inch of her face. Her writing poetry is related to her desire to be seen in the way that it shows how important it is to her. The narrator said that she wrote poetry after something important happened to her and that she tried to write a poem about Robert touching her face. This means that being “seen” by Robert and her desire to be seen was very important to her. Her attempt at suicide also has to do with her desire to be seen because she did it because she was lonely. Someone who wants to be seen doesn’t want to be alone.

3.      Receiving another’s friend means to make them as your friend as well. You do things with them that any other friend would do and make them comfortable and happy.

4.      I think that Robert saw Beulah as a person, emotionally and not physically. The way that Robert sees is deeper because anyone can look at a face but Robert knew Beulah well enough to know what she looked like on the inside and knew that she was beautiful.

5.      The narrator overs the dope because he feels that it would make him more comfortable and relaxed and Robert takes it because he hasn’t had it before. This reveals that they want to fit in together and not be so awkward around each other.

6.      The cathedral reveals that the culture thought that God was a great king that deserved a huge, fancy house to dwell in because if they didn’t believe that, they wouldn’t have spent all that money and labor into building cathedrals.

7.      The narrator has a hard time describing a cathedral because he only saw the physical aspect of it. When describing something, you need more than just a look sometimes. You need to describe what it feels like and how it makes you feel. The narrator can’t do this because he looks at everything on the surface and never looks deeper than that. What he sees with his eyes closed was freedom from material things and the world around him because he no longer felt as if he was inside something and was in complete openness.   

Extra Credit: Moment of Freedom

            One moment when I felt free was when I was on a roller coaster. The ride had no floor so your feet dangled throughout the whole thing. I personally am not very fond of roller coasters but I went on this one twice. When I closed my eyes, it felt as if I was flying. I felt free from life, the ground, and the world. I felt as if nothing had to affect me anymore. I was truly happy on that ride.

Wonder

Toy Mouse:

1.)    Wonder in my experience is when you try to find out all of the aspects of something. You wonder about its past, its future, its life, and its purpose. If I was six years old, I probably would have come up with a whole secret world for the toy and acted it out either in reality or in my mind. I would have done this because the actually reality of the toy is a lot more dull than the one I could come up with. The toy’s real reality would not have entertained me.

2.)    I think that we are less capable of wonder and imagination as we get older because we know more about the world. A lot of our questions get answered and so we lose that wonder of our surroundings. For example, kids wonder about the stars but adults don’t because they know that they are just swirling balls of gas in space.

3.)    I think that this means that concepts are ideas that we believe are true because we came up with them. As a result, we worship them because we think that they are true knowledge though they could be wrong. Wonder is the greatest knowledge because it supports the fact that we can’t know everything about everything which is the highest knowledge. I find this true in my experience because there are many things in life that people thought were true but turned out to be false. For example, people used to be absolutely certain that the world was flat. It was a concept but turned out to be wrong. 

Kenyon Address Essay

            In his speech, David Foster Wallace is saying that most humans make their decisions automatically based on themselves. Everything we do is on our “default setting” and because of that we become dead and like robots. In this speech he also states a solution to this problem with society. He says that we all need to look at things without simply thinking about ourselves. We need to put ourselves in the shoes of those around us and consider their lives. If we do that, then we might stop getting so angry at the world when it doesn’t do what we want. What was most important is that he said that it was our choice to accept his method or to keep looking at the world through ourselves. I completely agree with this idea because if we can consciously decide how to act around people then and how to view them, then we should be able to change how we view the world.

            I find this as a very credible idea because even though it would be extremely hard, it is possible to look at the world without putting yourself in the center. Many times when you get upset with someone, someone will tell you to put yourself in that person’s shoes so that you can understand where they are coming from. It’s basically like that but on a broader scale. Not only do I think that you could do it, I think that it could work. Your mind opens up to new possibilities when you put yourself in someone else’s shoes and that’s a lot better than getting mad at the world.

            I will admit that I never have even thought to look at the world this way. I have always been on my “default setting” and looked at the world as if it revolved around me. It really is the easiest thing to do since we don’t actually think about doing it. However, I will try this method of looking at the world and see if I can pull it off. It will be a lot of work since my thoughts usually come first before others and I like my thoughts. I’ll try this method because I like the thought that maybe I’m the only person in the world that’s feeling these negative feelings and act on them. The students could have had a negative or a positive reaction to his idea.

            I think that there are two possible reasons why the students clapped when Wallace was basically insulting them. The first possible reason was that they were in denial about what he was saying. They heard what he said but didn’t fully process it as towards them as an insult. The other possible reason is that they acknowledge what he is saying as true but don’t actually feel insulted by it. If everyone does it, then there’s not really a need to be upset. The human race has faults and we shouldn’t get upset when people point them out. This is indicative of the fact that some of the audience is already caught up in the world that he is talking about and that some might still look at the world and see things that are wrong.

            The way that you reacted to what was said by Wallace really depends on how much you think about the world. It’s a great idea to look at the world without seeing yourself as the center. Even if you don’t think that it would work, it could still be a good exercise for the mind. It is our natural instinct to look at the world with us as the center. I see it as a kind of challenge to stop thinking that way all the time. I think that this is a credible idea and I will be trying it from now on.