The Human Experience--Lessons From Literature

Invisible Lines

The Magical Memory Box

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Would You Ever Have Someone's Name Tattooed On You?

I have a tattoo of my grandmother's name on a banner with a red rose and a cross on my right bicep. She raised me when my parents were in the U.S. She loved me and I loved her deeply. She passed away when we were living in New York--I was maybe 7 at the time. It was the first tattoo I ever had. I was 16 when I had it and I remember the excitement I felt as I was getting it. I even remember a perfect bloody imprint it left on my white Catholic school boy uniform after it was finished.

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English Major

from Harvard University's English Department page on the English Concentration program:

To attack the insoluble and to represent the invisible; to track the mind of a suicide before the act; to speculate on heaven; to mimic the construction of a modern city; to ask why the beautiful is inveterately destroyed; to speculate how we might feel about marriage –this is what literature attempts. To create a plausible taxonomy of the bewildering genera and species of ancient and modern literature – this is what poetics does. To ask why a work seems to "click," why a line is memorable, why a character looms large in literary history – this is to inquire into the intrinsic workings of a work of literature – a work as complex in its function as the human genome. To ask how and why writers of different times and places have represented men and women (or the rich and the poor, or the colonizer and the colonized) as they have done is the question that compels cultural studies – a form of history and anthropology combined. To argue that Melville's poems are not "failures," that Wallace Stevens is not solely a cerebral poet, that Keats's odes are not merely freestanding poems, but comprise a sequence – this is to put forward literary theses. To defend a work as intelligible that has been called a hoax, to defend a work as beautiful that has been called obscene, to defend a work as interesting that has been called tedious – this is to make literary argument. To unravel the allegory written by a writer under political censure, to explain the connection between censorship and literary creation, to inquire into the history of literary suppression – this is to understand the connection between history and literature. "The most marvelous bishops of heaven," said Stevens, "have been those that made it seem like heaven." How does the literary artist make the work seem like reality? Or redefine reality?