Hello :) and welcome
This blog is for all the "lost souls" (to quote Ji Inn :)) out there. No, it certainly doesn't have any answers(well not by me anyway), just a lot of questions and hopefully discussions. In a nutshell, this blog is for thoughts, ideas and discussions. For those I invited, go to profile and change yours unless you want it to keep it that way :)
I'm searching for something, but I'm not sure what it is ...
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Blog: Pens
Stella.
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happy to be in 409 '09
and to have been in ES
Sorry, that's all about me. That's the point of this blog anyway, so go read it instead :)
Co-authors of this blog:
Jennifer and Jing Yi: my best friends for the past year, 9 months, 10 days and counting :)
Ji Inn: a friend I've grown close to, and talking with whom inspired this blog
Sharon: my new prayer buddy and the resident St. John's corporal-cum-attacker (what did I say about contradictions?)
Maddie and Fei Ya: friends around us who are close enough to turn 2-people conversations into 6-people ones
There are a lot more people I'm close to, but above are the people who make our 7-people (6 of us near the front, plus Jing Yi who sits at the back) conversations what they are.
2:21 PM
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Hello,
I'll be posting the two postcards-worth of material tonight, but in the meantime, I'll be rambling a bit about two questions I've been asking:
1. Why is Shakespeare universal? (I know we did it for A lit but I really don't know, which is why I didn't choose that question).
2. Has greatness diminished with the generations, or has it become too common?
I was wondering, you know, we've never had an artist as great as Da Vinci or Picasso, never had a writer as great as Shakespeare (great as in universal and for all times). Is it because our world today simply can't match the greatness in skill and craft of past generations? Or is the opposite: so many people have become "great" and greatness is suddenly too common (e.g. Sunday times bestsellers every year, many artists who sell their artwork for thousands if not millions)?
I guess it started with Mr. Tan's question: Why is Shakespeare so timeless, so universal?
To be honest, I've never really understood. Yes, I'm an A lit student, and yes I appreciate how plot, character and theme come together (I do admire how so few words can have so many layers of meanings and how characters can be so "rounded"). I realise that the themes he deals with in his plays are universal - human ambition, morality, rivalry and dying for love etc. But don't many books deal with the same themes? I wonder if sometimes, we believe Shakespeare is great simply because everyone says so. Other reasons I thought of, are humans never change and Shakespeare deals with these themes in their rawest form, so that we remember the plays for their themes and probably admire him for the skill with which he wrote them (as in ingenuity in crafting the plot, wit in plays like The Merchant of Venice). Is that it? The themes and his skill as a writer?
Perhaps it is not because greatness is diminishing nor become too common in our generations, but because what there is to be said, has already been said, and whatever follows is only a "subset" of the classics (yup, been studying sets and venn diagrams). I mean classics are classics because they're meant to last through the ages.
But does that mean that everything that follows can never be a classic in the future?
And my last hypothesis, is our education system has something to do with it. I mean, if you think about it, this is actually what we doing:
great scientists of the past experiment and discover, they come up with theories like Newton's laws of motion (which was inspired not by lessons in school but from sitting under an apple tree), and we try to emulate that. We start by spending at least a decade learning what they did and discovered, then we learn the skills they invented (e.g. titration), and then we try and do something that hasn't been done already. I don't deny there is much more to learn about the world and our universe, but don't you think that it means the only reason we're more "educated", more advanced in technology than those of the past is we have all the knowledge that they and the generations after them attained?
That could also be said to be the only reason humans lead different lifestyles from animals. We use things that earlier generations invented - tables, phones, computers, radios. We have only improved on them, combined them etc. What truly universal things have we created (e.g. tables)? And I'll link this with something else I was thinking about. Our economy works on the producers produce what they think consumers want and consumers buy what they want and can afford. But there are so many times when consumers want things producers don't produce,. At the same time, I admit there are many times when consumers don't even realise they wanted something until producers produced it. My point is we just started out that way, and we've just been continuing with the basic ideas from the past (from little shops selling things to giant shopping malls).
Okay that's all the rambling I'll do for today. I'll be posting the postcards tonight.
