Questions FEB 17

FEB 17 Be Mine 172-266. Presentation: Amanda...

1. Coming soon. Go ahead and post your thoughts and questions... and begin thinking about what you want to do for your FINAL report presentation. You'll be selecting either a novel of your own choice OR an author whose work you want to introduce us to (or elaborate on, if it happens to be one we're all reading).
2. 
   

Limited & narrow

"One thing that Bad Bunny's performance exposes is that most Americans have such a limited, narrow worldview. We're the ones who aren't bilingual or multilingual. Overall, we are wildly ignorant when it comes to globalism and geopolitics, and it's a big reason we're behind in almost everything — economics, education, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. Citizens abroad are more educated on our politics and history than we are."

Conditions

"To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy is to set your own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances, instead of being conditioned by them."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Descartes’ “I think” is overrated

An epoch after Descartes scarred us with the disembodied "I think, therefor I am," Humboldt invited us to read the poetry of nature and think about science in a lovely way best described as "I feel, therefore I understand"

 https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/10/16/humboldt-cosmos-nature/

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Questions FEB 10

1.  "Dying is the last of [Paul's] life's great escapades and the last he would want to undertake with ill-fitting spirits. In this way he aspires to be full of life more than anyone I know..." Does he have the right attitude? Is it possible to approach death as a great adventure, even if you don't have faith in a supernatural sequel? 89-90
2. Have you heard of Orlando Cepeda? 92 (Just curious. He was a hero of mine at age 10--alongside Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock--when he led my favorite baseball team to a championship season in '67. Didn't know then that he'd ever be tainted by association with the drug trade. Is it best not to look too closely at our heroes? Should we teach our children to be wary of heroes in sports and entertainment? And more generally?)
3. "That guy Engvall. How come he's Black? He's a dunce." 93 Why do you think Paul says this? Are you satisfied with Frank' response? 
4. "The winter can take a toll on you." 95  And yet, as George Santayana said: "To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring." Do you find winter a necessary and even ennobling season? Or would you flourish more in a tropical zone? And less literally, what (if any) important elements of life does winter symbolize for you?
5. "Only full awareness of death makes one able to appreciate the fullness and mystery of being... Out in the gloom you usually find some lights on." 97 Do you agree? 
6. Do you miss the days "when jokes were legal"? 98 Do you share Frank's nostalgia for such jokes (or days)? 98
7. Have you ever driven or ridden in a vehicle like the Windbreaker? Is it a practical mode of travel? Or is practicality beside the point? Why do you think Frank seeks a "Flying Dutchman affiliation" in his choice of transport with Paul? 99
8. "An optimist, I've read, is a person who believes the inevitable is what's supposed to happen." 103 Or is it the other way around? By this definition, is Frank an optimist? Are you? Do you define optimism (and pessimism, and meliorism) differently? How is it possible to sustain optimism in the face of acknowledged human mortality? 
9. What do you think Frank would say about Bad Bunny's Superbowl performance? What do you say?
10. "There is no was. There is only is." What did the "scrofulous old faker Faulkner" mean? Why is Frank so hostile to him? 104, 121 and passim.  (The more familiar quote: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”) And wasn't his Nobel speech marvelous?) 
11. What do you make of Frank's "needs" and "relationship" with Betty Tran, the massatherapist (who's working on her capstone, btw)? Is it a harmless fantasy, or even a constructive one?
12. "It doesn't take much, it turns out, to improve one's attitude." 107 Has that been your experience?
13. Should love and "much of life" be scare-quoted? 109
14. Is Betty a meliorist? 110
15. Are "three house moves the psychic equivalent of a death"? 111
16. "All who wander are not lost." 113 Are Frank and Paul lost?
17. Do you agree that "unexpected, unexplained feelings of well-being never be questioned"? 114
18. Have you ever had a Proustian gustatory moment? 117
19. Did you go to High School with a "certifiable female"? 118 Is there any excuse for people of Frank's age to long for attachment to women of High School age? Does that make him feel appropriately "still alive"? 119 Does it lend his life "authenticity"? 121 and passim
    
20. Are men really "no longer allowed to say we simply like women? Is Frank a sexist? 122
21. Is "the Michelangelo effect" a thing? 124
22. Comment? "The closest anyone can go with us to death, the poet tells us, is not very damn close." 132 (Extra credit if you can identify the poet.)
23. What do you think of Nietzsche's view of discourse and happiness? 134
24. Comment?: "Not that anyone ever does die happy. The idea of choice in most things is of course a feathery lie of western philosophy." 144
25. What does it mean to say "the business of business is always business"? 135
26. [Twenty pages without questions from me...]
27. Is "spiritual insulation from too much bad and too much good" another name for stoicism? Is it a wise approach to life? 157
28. What do you think of Frank's views on aging? 159
29. What do people misunderstand about the "symbolism" of confederate flags? 172
30. Post any of your own comments or questions...

The magic of literature

"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary."

- Boris Pasternak

---

Literature doesn't shout.

It sits quietly in the light,

opens itself page by page,

and teaches us how ordinary lives

hold extraordinary depths.

A chair by the window.

A book left open.

Sunlight resting on words

that know more about us

than we ever admit.

This is the magic—

not escape from life,

but a deeper return to it.

https://www.threads.com/@litloverusha/post/DUd2j2cDQy5?xmt=AQF0OY3E3YpxSGiDY7zq7qlLbNeWtwCnbLpCMsyLEs5NEc0BbxGovhKvu1gqZJby1KeEJ710&slof=1

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

The experience of being someone else

Novels change us...