Our Stranger Meaning

Albert Camus said "You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.  You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."  This is something I struggle with a lot but agree with wholeheartedly.  It is exactly what troubled me throughout Siddhartha.  It always seemed to me that enlightenment had less to do with finding something than with being content with what you have.  It seemed strange how desperately he was always searching for something beyond what he knew and had to find enlightenment.  Even though his motives were not material-based and he was not searching for something external, it seemed to be that the constant desire for more, no matter what that more consists of, is the opposite of what it means to be enlightened.  Then again, I often find myself over-thinking everything and spending way too much time considering what would make me happy instead of just living my life and making the most out of it.  I think the whole idea of searching for something is kind of counter productive because if we are dead set on searching it can be difficult to know when to stop searching because I don't think there is one meaning for life we could suddenly "find" and be happy with.  The search for the meaning of life is one that has no end because I think it is something that is completely personal and subjective.  So we can go on independent journeys on our own to find what our personal meaning of life is but I think this will just get in the way of leading happy lives and ever being in the moment.  I do tend to tie "the meaning of life" up with the after life and the idea of "beyond," and the idea of constantly thinking about the after life terrifies me because it is so unsure.  It just seems to high a risk to put everything on what may come next when we have something here and now.

Thankful for a Classmate

First of all, I would like to say I am very grateful for our entire philosophy class.  It has been one of my favorite classes I have taken in my five previous years at Whitney and I think our class has a great atmosphere that makes it ok for us to all have open and interesting discussions.  But I am particularly grateful for Gabby Afable, and while I risk boosting her ego too much by being the second person to write about her, I am lucky to have her in this class and as a friend.  Gabby has been one of my closest friends for most of my time at Whitney Young, and I think, above all, this is because we really understand each other, and also because our shared sense of humor is so strange when other people are around us they probably think we are insane.  In class, when Gabby does speak, it is well articulated thoughtful comments that I usually could not agree with more.  We always manage to have fun together, whether we are theater hopping for an entire day or intermittently talking at each other in a cafe while one of us tries desperately to get some homework done.  We can quote the most obscure Community lines to each other and she is one of the few friends I have that can spend a solid 48 hours with me at a time and maintain her sanity.  Sometimes I feel like she is the only person that consistently puts up with me, so for that thank you Gabby!

Into the Wild: Alone

   One of the most tragic aspects of this movie, to me, was what Chris wrote at the very end of his life, just before he died.  When he wrote that happiness was only real when shared, it broke my heart because it was like in his final moments he was realizing his mistakes.  It felt like he had made all of these huge, sweeping declarations and stuck to his guns so thoroughly and completely and then just as his adventure was coming to an end, he acknowledged his regret.  As sad as it was, I think he was right in his regret.  What shocked me about this movie was how long Chris was happy.  For the majority of his time away, he was having a great time.  He was struggling in the most exciting way and meeting the most amazing people.  He found what he had never found with his parents in more than one group on the road.  Almost everywhere he landed, in fact, he found a home.  When he was working on the fields, the men he worked with were his family, a true honest family he shared openly with and loved.  In Slab City, he found people who could really have been parent figures, and who even seemed to want him to take on that role within their community.  Ron openly asked him to be a part of his family before he left, begging Chris to let him adopt him and be his grandfather.  It seemed that Chris was so blinded by his quest that he didn't stop to notice when he had already found it.  He was trying so hard to release himself from the fake, cruel restraints of society he had been exposed to growing up, but what he really needed was a release from those aspects of society.  He needed people who were not centered around material goods and getting ahead in a cruel world, people who cared about making other people happy with their company and working hard for what they had and sharing generously.  He kept pushing forward even though he came across many opportunities to be truly happy, to be wildly different from what he had been but not entirely secluded.  I think in his quest to drive away the gross competitive nature of society, he found a similar nature in himself because he couldn't have been happy with what he found, he needed to keep looking until he reached some mythical perfect point of complete release and freedom.  His ideals were sound and his complaints with society were very real but I wish he would have opened his eyes along the way and realized that it wasn't all bad.

We haven't figured this out yet!

   I have probably uttered a variation on this sentence a million times in all my years, and it stresses me out!  I, like many others, like to know things that I am supposed to know, and to know them when I am supposed to know them.  I fear being left behind.  I yearn for the knowledge that I am on track, that I am where I am supposed to be and doing well.  I think in this anxious scrapping for knowledge that we feel we should have, we miss all the fun in getting there.  When we anguish in the not knowing of something, we forget all the doors open to us by not knowing, all the doors we get to open and test in the figuring out of things.
   I think a trap a lot of people fall into, including myself, is imagining that there is a set type of things we are supposed to understand at certain points in our life.  We imagine each section of our lives as a vessel that is to be filled up before we can move on to the next part.  High school, for example, is one such vessel.  It seems like a place where we are supposed to learn enough from our classes to survive on college and move on.  But when we imagine things this way we limit ourselves to the endless possibilities of our own wandering minds.  We should feel free to imagine beyond what is expected, to be hungry for more than what is needed, to be comfortable having not figured something out yet.  We must find the value in the journey to figuring something out instead of all that we place in having the answer.  It is in the journey where we find out what interests us and examine those things and take as many detours as we can to fill ourselves with more than we thought necessary.  I know this is something I have to work on.  I have to relax when I don't have all the answers because looking for them is what makes us fully developed people, people who have looked at things from all angles and have real, valuable opinions about the world because we have taken the time to look around.

How Do I Know What I Know?

   As we grow up, we learn about a million ways to learn.  We take in information in all of these different ways and have to learn, as we go, how to sort out what is useful and helpful and what is harmful to our growth.  The fact is, however, that there is no set way of knowing what we know or learning new things.  We know what we know through a huge combination of many different influences that all come together to teach us something.  Even the simplest of things is the result of multiple "ways of knowing."
   The example that comes to mind for me is baking chocolate chip cookies.  This has been something that I have done since I was tall enough to reach the counter, something that I watched being done since before I can even remember.  When I first started to learn how to make chocolate chip cookies, I was all about the recipe.  A fairly cautious child, I checked and re-checked about a billion times to make sure I was getting the exact right amount of everything and doing everything in just the right order.  But this technique did not serve to make the best cookies.  I had to let the other aspect of learning take a little more control, the role of experience.  I had seen these cookies made all my life, and so part of me knew what I was doing without trying.  That part can be easily silenced by too much attention to detail, and it is important that we don't let that happen, because it is crucial to knowing what we know.  Sometimes we just know it, and that's it.  I knew to start with the butter and sugar even though it says to do that part separately, and to use a little more flour than suggested and a little less sugar.  I knew how much salt to put in without measuring it out exactly simply by mimicking the motions I knew so well from my mother.
   I think much of what we know is the same as this.  Part of us needs to actively seek knowledge, but part of us needs to let it seep in naturally and not try to answer the question of how we know what we know because we can rest assured that we know it.

The Garden State

   In the last pages of Candide, the characters have finally reached their "Garden State," their place where they can all co-exist relatively happily.  They have finally found their places in life and their roles in their world stretch out long into the future as they settle into what they have decided to do.  In the end, their garden state is not such an extraordinary place.  It is not the city of gold or the castle of Westphalia where nothing bad ever happens.  They find what bliss they can in their small garden behind their modest home.  They work the garden, every member of the household helping in the ways that they can.
   I think this ending is demonstrating how Voltaire was right about the world, not Martin or Candide.  Martin thought people had no free will and their world was governed by the wishes of the devil, forcing everyone to be miserable and do terrible things to each other.  Candide and Pangloss had felt that everything that happened was for the best, no matter how many seemingly terrible things needed to happen to get to that point.  While Pangloss still clings to this belief through the end of the book, I feel as though Candid has begun to truly rethink it.  They end up in a situation that is neither terrible nor wonderful.  They work hard and begin to live a fairly happy life.  They are not being held as slaves or killing or hurting each other, and they are not living in a lavish castle, never knowing a worry or fear.  They land somewhere in the middle, working hard for what they have and enjoying it the best they can.  I think the last line shows Candide's transformation the most.  Throughout the book, when terrible things have happened, Candide has started to doubt his philosophy but has always found a way to justify it in the end.  In these last few lines, however, when Pangloss tells Candide that his theory has been right all along because without all the terrible things that happened they would not have ended up where they are now, Candide shrugs it off.  "That's true enough," he says, "but we must go and work in the garden."  He is not willing to agree wholeheartedly with Pangloss and relish in the joy they are now experiencing due to all the troubles they had to go through before, but he is also not firmly rejecting this theory and stewing in his own misery.  He simply accepts what Pangloss has to say and presses forward in the modest life he has chosen of hard work and average happiness.

Candide's Punishments, Do They Fit the Crime?

   I think this question depends a lot on what you consider Candide's "crime" to be.  He has done several sketchy things in the book so far, like killing three people, some in self-defense and some as preventative measures, but I think his over arching "crime," especially according to Voltaire, would be his insistence on his protagonist views.  He has been a firm believer in Liebniz/Pangloss' philosophy, his faith wavering at times but never failing to return to him.

   In this sense of a crime, I think his punishments do fit it.  Voltaire is playing with him, as a test subject to test the validity of the idea that all is good in the world.  He keeps throwing him all of these terrible, unexplainable things to show him that it is not so easy to explain everything away with the sweeping statement that all is for the best.  When Candide insists on holding his beliefs, Voltaire punishes him by showing how harsh his ideas can be by testing him with the pain and suffering of someone he loves, Lady Cunègonde.  He is trying to show to the reader and to Candide how the philosophy gets harder and harder to stand by when terrible things happen for, seemingly, no reason at all.  Every time Candide has been "punished" he has doubted his beliefs for a moment, and then something else has happened that solidified them in his mind and let him return, in full, to Pangloss' philosophy.  Voltaire's world then responds by punishing him again, trying again and again to show Candide how wrong he is and what a harsh place the world can be.

The Modern Gadfly

   I don't think there is any one modern gadfly, but rather a fleet of them.  Today's society is extremely conducive to gadflies, enabling anybody with an internet connection and a will to voice their opinions to be heard throughout the world.  People have taken hold of this opportunity and take advantage of it at every turn.  Anything with a comments section is riddled with the thoughts of today's gadflies, everybody thinking what they have to say will have some earth-shattering, life-changing effect on all who read it.  In reality, most of us scroll through the musings and critiques of faceless words on the internet for amusement, taking little to none of it to heart.
   While this hyper-connectivity has gone a bit over board and dipped into the annoying side of advancement, I do think it is important to have a voice in this world.  Gadflies are not just creatures of annoyance and criticizing, but rather people who force us to ask the questions that facilitate growth and change.  There is a lot of garbage to wade through but there is also a lot of good that can come from the modern gadfly and their omni-presence.  I think there is a fine line that we are yet to fully understand between this helpful gadfly and an unnecessary disturbance.  But if there weren't people out there who could not rest until they had voiced their thoughts on every little occurrence, a lot of those occurrences would go unnoticed.  I think it is essential to have some form of a gadfly in a society.  We need a voice present that will never hesitate to point out what is wrong with a situation or idea.  We need someone whose default is to question what is going on so that we can assure ourselves we are alright with it.

The Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living?

To say the unexamined life is not worth living is most notably harsh.  Whether or not it is a valid point, I think the idea that those who do not have points of deep inward reflection do not deserve to live at all is too grand a statement.  Nonetheless, I think there is some truth to this.  I think this digs at the root of the question, "What is the meaning of life."  Many would say the meaning of life is to be happy.  But if we were to spend our lives shut in our room hooked up to some machine that made us experience the constant sensation of joy, would this be a life well spent?  What is happiness?  I think it is more than a split second of a good feeling, it is all that comes with that feeling, the good and bad.  It is not only the joy of something you love, but the satisfaction at having found this joy and called it your own.  Without some examination into what makes us happy and what makes us sad, it is difficult to truly experience those emotions.
When I was younger, I almost enjoyed talking politics; not talking as much as listening and not politics as much as my parents' strongly liberal and shared opinions on various issues.  I used to love hearing about something I didn't know about and making an opinion all on my own.  While my parents would talk I would listen, asking questions here and there to force some clarity into my young mind so I could begin to grapple with the idea by myself.  After considering things, I was always excited to find I had come up with similar answers as my parents.  I was happy that I was a person with an opinion, an opinion like my parents', but moreover I was happy that I was not blindly accepting my parents' words as my own to spit out in response to other children speaking their own parents' words.  Looking inward to come up with our own answers is something we should be excited to do, as it is a prideful thing to be an independent person capable of free thought.

Me

My name is Isabella Rosen.  I have two older brothers, 23 and 20, and one younger sister, 14.  We have all gone to Whitney, my brothers and I starting in the academic center.  My sister just started here as a freshman after going to the academic center at Lane Tech.  One of my brothers goes to Hampshire College in Amherst Massachusetts and the other went to Reed College and now lives in San Francisco. This summer I did a week long program at Barnard College in New York City and I went to Indonesia with my family, which was really fun. I'm really excited to finally be a senior this year, but also terrified about the entire college application process, which I am yet to begin. I feel really overwhelmed by the whole thing and don't really know how I will make myself do it. I imagine I will need a lot of help. I am excited this year because I'm doing a senior experience during the second semester of this school year and what I want to do is just starting to come together. I found an organization that I want to work with called the UIC Center for Literacy where I will probably help out for the first semester until I turn 18 and am allowed to tutor people who are trying to get their GEDs. I'm kind of nervous about it because I have never done something like it before, but I think I will really enjoy it and I am thinking about being a teacher, but I'm really not sure, and this should give me a hint into what that would be like.