The Art of Love

The Art of Love

There is a connection between love and war. People will use the same tactics in both, yet in slightly different ways. “Love like war is a toss-up”(pg 295) I thought that it was interesting when it talked about love can drive people to do things and can almost control them when it is powerful enough. Love is truly powerful just like weapons. Men in the war will continue to tread on through struggle if they are making their way towards their love. It doesn’t even have to be a woman, men will travel many miles if they know there is even a hamburger waiting for them at the finish line. I realize that there was s story here, but not quite sure what that was. All I know is that all of a sudden he’s on a bed and there’s a naked girl there. I’m pretty sure this man is sleeping and this is a dream, because that doesn’t happen in real life. “Oh look at that! Magically a naked girl appeared in my room, I sure am one lucky man!”

Song of Songs

Sidney Rogers 3rd

Song of Songs

                I would describe this as three things. Confusing, detailed, and what I imagine to be romantic if I were to understand it. I related it to what I was talking about in the Intro. How to describe something that cannot really be seen people use other objects to describe it, as beautiful as a rose in bloom. Yet in this poem, these metaphors made it even more confusing. Such as “My beloved is like a gazelle, like a young stag”. Now if someone said that to me I wouldn’t know whether or not to be flattered or appalled. “Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes as they come up from the washing.” See I imagine a bunch of white feathered emu’s by a water’s edge scrubbing their undies, so romantic. 

What is Love?

Sidney Rogers 3rd

What is Love?

Helen Fisher

                The general argument made by Helen Fisher in her work What is Love? Is that love is a chemical reaction in the brain. More specifically Fisher argues that is has nothing to do with your heart like most people believe and that your brain is in charge of making all of the emotions people feel when they are in love. She writes, “Romantic love is a universal experience deeply embedded is the human brain. (Page 335)In this passage, Fisher is suggesting that men and women’s brains react differently to stimuli, such as men are more visual based and their brain is more active when they are shown a picture of someone they adore, while women are more memory based. Her research shows that this is evolutionary and instinctual. Men chose women based on their physical health and ability to bare young while women were attracted to men who could provide and protect. In conclusion, it is Fisher’s belief that love is strictly connections made in the brain and that it has been proven that emotions create certain activity in the brain.

                In my view, Fisher is right because as much as I want to believe that love comes from the heart or that it is a spiritual experience that people have, I think that it only makes sense that it all is created in the brain. For example, some people say that when you in love your heart starts beating fast because the love is in your heart. But in reality, your brain is more active so it tells your heart to start beating faster so your brain has more blood to function. Therefore, I conclude that it must be true if she had discovered this in such extensive research and has proof of what she is talking about.

Budism and Tao Summary

Sidney Rogers 3^rd

The Buddha’s path to enlightenment

This story is about a monk and his discovery of enlightenment. He is telling a story about his life and the steps he went through to find enlightenment. He describes it as a path because there were somewhat of different phases in this story. He first talks about how when people are subject to something that is usually negative, and they see others going to the same fate they are about to face if they haven’t already, it can be horrifying and humiliating. He uses aging, illness, and death as an example of this.

                He has lived his life in a palace, with servants and workers. He had three homes and never had to leave them because everything was done for him by his servants. His next step is going away from all of that luxury and went forth into homelessness. He went out on his own and discovered the country side and villages. Suddenly three similes appeared to him. He compared how different wood weather it is dry, wet, sappy, or near water would make a fire. He states that when trying to use wet, sappy wood that’s laying in water to make a fire you will feel weariness and disappointment.

                His next step is trying to crush his mind with awareness, clenching his teeth and pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth is thought to do the trick, but the pain he feels does not invade his mind and does not remain. He receives the same fate when he stops breathing, a lot of paint but does not crush his mind with awareness. His next attempt is to go without food. Yet he is convinced to not go completely without food, but just a hand full a day. He soon becomes very emaciated. He decides to start eating solid food once again due to the fact that any priest or contemplatives feeling pain could not be any greater than this that he feels. By giving up his exertion, five other monks were disgusted in him and left him alone. When other monks heard of this they made a pact not to greet him or help him, but upon his arrival  they could not keep their promise and had good hospitality towards him.

                In the section the elephant simile he talks about how the majesty told him to gather all of the blind together and show them and elephant.  He showed different parts of the elephant to different people and when the majesty asked them what the elephant was, they al described it differently depending on what part of the body they were shown. This is a really good example of how everyone sees things differently and it is hard when you only see one part of a big picture. I can relate to this because of my job. My manager is pretty strict that the store does well and makes a lot of money. She expects a lot out of us girls and we are always trying to do a good job and impress her. My manger bases how will we do on our numbers. No matter how hard we are trying to up sale customers and make the numbers better, the numbers don’t lie. And if the numbers aren’t good, we are terrible employees. I was reminded of this from the elephant situation because she only looks at part of the big picture. And that is the number, and how much money we are making. She doesn’t see how hard we are working and how happy all of our customers are when they leave our store. Another part of his story that I could relate to my life was the part where he is greeted by the five monks, and although they said they would not speak to him, when he was actually there they could not be rude. I am not the type of person to be aggressive and tell people what I really think. If I am mad at someone and they confront me about it I usually act as if nothing is wrong. This had been a problem for me is the past because any hard feelings I have are not resolved. I feel this is what happened in the story. 

Tao Te Ching

                What I got from all of these little poems is that everything is a connection, yin and yang. From one person to another, one emotion to another, and one idea to another. In order to recognize something, you have to know the opposite of it. In order to know the feeling of having something, you need to know the feeling of absence.  I also thought there was a lot of talk about how to much of something can be bad. I liked the part when it says “keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt, keep hoarding gold in your house, and you will be robbed”  I liked this section of over fulfillment because that is so true. You see it in real life all of the time. People get so much of something valuable, money for example, that it eventually becomes meaningless. People love to look like they have a lot even if it leaves them with nothing. I can relate it to a time when I stayed at a gorgeous house. It was huge and expensive. But I also noticed from my stay that they couldn’t afford name brand cereal, any kind of shampoo that wasn’t from Wal-mart or double ply toilet paper.  I think these people really sacrificed every day things, so they could appear to others as being rich and luxurious.

Easters End

Sidney Rogers 3^rd

Easters End

Jared Diamond

                The general point made by Jared Diamond in his work Easers End is that many years ago Easter Island was almost a paradise where people thrived and had a very good society of people and somehow their civilization just vanished. More specifically Diamond argues that this civilization was developed enough to sustain its one life with no outside help because there was no evidence that the islanders had any contact or even knowing of anyone else’s existence, they were completely secluded and had no acts of others could have affected the.  Yet all of a sudden they crashed and burned.  He writes “Are we about to follow their lead?”(Page 426) In this passage, Diamond is suggesting that our society now is somewhat how theirs once was, and because of carelessness they ended up extinct in a way and that if we don’t change out careless ways we can end up with the same fate. In conclusion, it is Diamond’s belief that we have to make sure that we learned from those before us and from their mistakes because is obvious from their giant statues and other things that they had a thriving society, at least for that time, and that because they didn’t think about the things they did and how they effected them, they ended up finishing themselves off and that with the way people are living today, we are doing the same thing.

                In my view, Diamond is right because I have noticed that people are caring less and less about what’s important. For example the things that we need to live, such as nature, animals, water, and other things that we rely on. People take advantage of all of them because they don’t know what it would be like if one day we didn’t have it anymore. In my neighborhood we use to have a bunch of trees that lined the street. They provided a lot of shade in the summer and blocked the street from rain and snow in the winter, but because the leaves from the trees were too messy, everyone chopped them down. No one thought about the fact that now all of our plant is our yards burn up under the hot sun and our grass is never as green. They didn’t think about how snowy our street would be because its rare a snow plow comes down our way, and didn’t think about how much uglier our street looks without them, but hey, the gutters are a little cleaner, that’s all that mattered at the time. This is what I think Diamond was trying to say; people don’t realize a lot of what they do and how it can affect other aspects of their lives. Although some would think that we could never let ourselves get that bad that we end ourselves because our technology is too advanced but I maintain that it is the people that think it can never happen to them that it ends up happening to. Therefore I conclude that It is important for people to use what we have sparingly and take little extra measures to ensure we don’t end up like the people on Easter Island because they were probably thinking the same thing we are that it could never happen to them.

Fable for Tomorrow

Sidney Rogers

3^rd

A Fable for Tomorrow

From Silent Spring

Rachel Carson

                This text talks about a town that use to be a very nice place. Lots of things go on here and everyone is happy. There are animals and farms were prosperous. The story is how this happy place all of a suddenly starts spiraling down. The birds no longer chirp because they are all dead, farmers can no longer raise their animals because they die soon after they are born, there are no bees to pollinate fruit trees and once roadsides lined with vegetation are now lined with dead withered plants. Her main point of telling this short story is to show how this can start happening and there have been cases of it. She says “I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortune I describe.” That being that although these things don’t all happen in one place at one time, they have happened in deferent places all over the world and especially out country. There are places were the animals and plants are so unhealthy they start dying and there are places were fruit and vegetation is harder to grow due to a bad environment. She is also saying that when it is just one aspect we don’t notice because we don’t think it directly affects us, but if we were to live in the town she speaks of I think all of a sudden people would start to change.

Hudson River School

Sidney Rogers

3^rd period

Hudson River School response

                 Before the Hudson River School, most famous painters would paint historic events, or use there painting to tell a story. Every painting would have a different meaning and would portray a different emotion. The Hudson River School changed the way people looked at nature and the art it self. Thomas Cole was one of the first to paint wild life and nature, and because of this, painters who followed in his foot steps where called the Hudson River School. The school wanted to portray a fear free environment, so there was usually no people and no animals. They wanted to expand on what people thought wildlife was and what it looked like. These paintings were unique because they showed dramatic scenes with sunsets, high mountains, flowing waterfalls, and rainstorms.  The purpose of these paintings was to show how nature was beautiful because people were afraid of the wilderness because they had never really experienced it before. The paintings were made so realistically that people didn’t believe that this was what it really looked like when in reality they painted exactly what they saw.

                                                                                            The Oxbow

Thomas Cole (1836)

                                Thomas Cole was the founder of the Hudson River School. When He began his career he did portraits, yet soon realized he was very unsuccessful at it. When we moved to America he realized that he would be better at painting real life scenery, and successful he was. His choice to do this was what started the Hudson River School in the first place. Many people were awed by his art and his ability to portray nature in such a beautiful way.  The Oxbow painting shows a violent rain storm and a peaceful riverside of the Connecticut River all at once. This shows two extremes of wilderness, bliss and chaos, while still remaining beautiful and calm. This portrays nature as being something that can change at anytime, and that you can see and experience so much more from a different perspective.

               

Twilight in the wilderness

Fredrick Edwin Church (1860)

                Along with Thomas Cole, Fredrick Edwin Church and the many other painters of the Hudson River School, their paintings had very much in common. Although all of their paintings are widely different and each portray a very different message and set a different tone, they all seen to include a few of the same things. For example water, sky and earth. Like this one and many of the others, the paintings are dramatic scenes of wide open skies, mountains, trees, waterfalls, rivers or lakes. This picture was meant to capture a wide range of scenery. It captures both detailed wildlife in the foreground yet faded, far away mountains in the background. This picture is also portraying nature as being dramatic yet simple. Fredrick did this by painting a vibrant sky with tons of color and texture, but he didn’t include any people or buildings, just wildlife.

Valley of Yosemite

Albert Bierstadt

                Albert painted many different landscapes during his journey of his westward expansion. One important aspect of his painting, especially this one is the romantics of the glowing lighting. This used to create that sort of scene that amazed people with its beauty. One interesting thing with Bierstadt is that he included animals in his paintings, while most others didn’t. His paintings include the other aspects I mentioned earlier, water, sky and mountains all put together in one dramatic setting at pulls everything together to form a stunning picture of wildlife. The purpose of these paintings were to show people that nature was nothing to be afraid of because so little had experienced it before, and many had the wrong idea about it. Be removing any people or animals from the paintings it creates a more peaceful scene. Yet, Bierstadt was still able to incorporate the deer and still achieve the same goal. That is to make real nature and wildlife look as beautiful as it truly is.

Sources

                http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/20010844

                http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hurs/hd_hurs.htm

                http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/hudson/intro.html