Our assignment over spring break is to read Hamlet and The Bhagavad Gita.These will be the two texts which will be most central to the latter half of the class, and especially to the development of our term papers, which we are advised to postpone thinking about until after we have read these two works(holy mouthful sentence!).

We discussed To the Lighthouse and its connections with another poem by Wallace Stevens, To an Old Philosopher in Rome, itself an elegy, and also a consideration on the space where we have epiphanies: the threshold of heaven, on the street.

And we also talked about Kevin's blog, in which he went off on a magnificent defense of To the Lighthouse on the grounds of its practicality. I also loved his observation, closely aligned with that of practicality, that the book presents Inscape as a way, not only of looking at the world, though it is that too, but as a way of looking at ourselves. When we are able to perceive other things in the way in which they truly are themselves(a table, a chair, a boat) than we can perhaps be able to perceive ourselves for what they truly are. This ties back so very interestingly with Vladimir Nabokov's Transparent Things. Is this what N. was on about in that book, which also has the typical response from readers of "I don't like it", and "I don't understand it." Just goes to show that the anagogic level requires a mysterious mental maneuver to gain entrance to.