Wed, July the Second

After class on Wednesday the 2nd, I learned a hard lesson on the dangers of walking the line between facetiousness and sarcasm. If you will recall during the class Prof. Sexson told us to carry our Wallace Stevens books on our persons, while I doubt this was serious, I decided to oblige for fun. Things were going swimmingly for a while as I was driving around with my friend Hannah, until my jokes overstepped the boundry of jocularity and plummeted into the cutting world of sarcasm. With great authority she snatched my copy of Stevens and held it out of the window of my moving vehicle, daring me to repeat my comment. Now I have never been a good gambler so I called her bluff, and in a single instant my book was out the window. In a state of mixed horror and shock I pulled to the side of the road to retrieve my fallen comrade. As I walked cautiously up to the blue book I noticed the jacket flapping mangled in the breeze like the feathered body of a broken bird. Though the book itself remained fairly unscathed, the jacket serves to remind me of the dangers of sarcasm. I am also sure that if Hannah had read Ex Libris, more specifically "Never Do That To A Book" she would have understood my dismay and utter contempt for her actions. When Professor Sexson explained to us the meaning of Mythos and Logos meaning story and truth, I realized something, all stories while fiction still contain truth. To some of us myths are little more than archaic fairy tales written by lost people, and to others including the people that wrote them they are sacred texts full of truth. The Bible is a very popular collection of mythology, and I know to some that seems offensive to some but to me they are stories that contain within in them truths specific to the people who read them. As we began to read Arabian Nights a few more of these "truths" jumped out at me. Firstly the theme of infidelity and the anguish it causes is indeed truth. All of us at some time in our live's have been betrayed and understand the desire to chop someones head off with a sword. The next truth I observed was the fact that a brain trumps beauty in the long run nine times out of ten, in the story of Shaharazad, and how she kept herself alive using her cunning and wits. We then wrapped class up with a view of the convict scene from Great Expectations. All in all a good day minus a few small problems like the defiling of my book.