The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.

In the past few days I have watched two movies and read a novel that are directly related to class. Classical literature really does permeate everything we see and do.

To begin with, I just reread The Awakening by Kate Chopin. And there is part where Mademoiselle Reisz feels Edna's shoulder blades to see if her wings are strong. She says to Edna, "The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised,
exhausted, fluttering back to earth." Edna encounters beautiful things which initiates her growth and enlightenment. Her awakening necessitates her wings growing in; however, in the end she discovers that her wings are not strong enough to transcend her world, and she relinquishes herself to the sea.

As I was just typing the previous few lines, my train of thought led me to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. He is the seagull who is unwilling to conform to regular gull life, becomes an outcast, and is taken to a "higher plane of existence." It takes JLS a lot of hard work, but unlike Edna, he doesn't give up and is rewarded for it.

Anyhow, I watched one of my favorite movies, Moulin Rouge, this weekend, partly because of things we were talking about in class. When we were discussing courtesans, I thought of Nicole Kidman's character, Satine. She is a very striking yet very tragic woman, much like the other "kept women" that we discussed in class. Moulin Rouge is also a movie of Aphrodite and Eros, as it is all about love. And, it can also be a form of catharsis for me. Although I didn't cry this last time that I watched it, it often helps me purge my emotions. Somehow I feel better when it is over, even though it is so sad.

The other movie that I watched was An Unfinished Life. Today when I was reading the introduction to the Symposium, it made me think about Robert Redford's character who loses his son and can't move on for many years. Someone makes a comment in the movie that it is wrong to outlive one's child. And I figured out why this is, or one reason for this. According to Alexander Nehamas who wrote the introduction to the Symposium, "[the] desire to reproduce, which is also a desire for immortality, may involve physical offspring, glory, or good deeds in general - anything that springs from the individual but stays behind after the individual's death" (xix). I suppose that leaving a legacy when one dies is a motive for having children (perhaps subconsciously for most people), but I think that simply missing someone and knowing that he should be there is very hard as well.