Best of Week: "The Myths" - Sophie's World

My favorite chapter so far in Sophie's World is "The Myths."


Mythology has always intrigued me ever since I was in middle school. I have read countless books on Norse, Greek, Indian, Arabic, and Egyptian mythology because I love reading about the beliefs of civilizations of the past. I had not expected mythology to be a contributor to the "history of philosophy" as told by Jostein Gaarder. I was enthused when I read about Thor's hammer and Odin and Freyja because as I read their names and their little "myths," I kept thinking to myself, "oh yeah, I remember reading about them before!" Because of my past knowledge of mythology, I enjoyed reading how Gaarder used Norse mythology to deliver argument on philosophy. He talked about how myth was essentially created in order to answer the questions that philosophers strive to discover. Much is the same about religion, science, and the arts. I believe mythology is and was a prime factor in the history of philosophy, whether it be from civilizations of the past like the Scandinavians or Greeks, or the mythology of the religions of the world.


In the past, people have agreed or disagreed with proposed "myths" that attempted to explain the unknowns of the world. This is still evident today, as many people disagree and agree with particular aspects of religion, science, etc. Depending on their own "philosophical ideas," people have each developed their own set of myths that appeal to them. These individual myths can be religion, can be science, can be art, can be ancient mythology, can be interpersonal relationships. These myths are the beliefs that help people answer some of the main philosophical questions. Such is the case in my favorite part of the chapter, when Sophie began to "make up a story" in order to explain where the snow went and why the sun rose up in the morning. That is when I realized that ANYONE can create a story. ANYONE can fantasize and ponder on why and how things work and exist. This is the beauty of our world: people all live in the same world, but when asked how that world works, they all come up with completely different explanations.

The Symbolizations of Art

The power of love is the most important feeling a human being can experience in his or her lifetime. Love is the ultimate tool that a person can use in order to express their creativity, feelings, and emotions. Love is the force that binds all humans together. And through this unity, people are inspired to create art. Art is the result of the thought process that a person experiences when he or she experiences love.


When a person creates art using man-made tools, telling a story or an idea or a belief of theirs, they unconsciously produce their masterpieces because of how much they love what they are trying to convey. The type of love that people express is not always "typical love." It is also the conviction that people have towards that which they regard highly in their life. Art is created in order to open a door for the audience into the life of the artist. The artists are trying to show the audience what they care about most; what they hold most dear to them; what they cannot live without; what has encouraged them to keep living; those things that they love.

Because love is one of the few universal ideas that people all over the world believe in, it enables them to create art that is able to be judged by anyone. Art forms are infinite: be it painting, sculpture, photography, or even forms like playing sports, playing an instrument, cooking a meal, directing a movie, producing a song, designing a sleek new gadget, etc. When people produce these pieces of art, they do so according to the particular image they have in their head. That image is a representative idea of what their affinity, their love, to what they want to create is.

Even when art takes many forms, the way in which it is displayed also sparks the power of love within the audience. When a person views and experiences that which is created by someone else's emotions, their own feelings and thoughts are attempted to be provoked into feeling the same way the artist felt when they created it. The love that inspired the artist to create is transposed to the audience using the physical, visual, hands-on piece of art. Once the audience experiences that feeling, they go on to recapture that feeling within their own art creation, even if the creation is completely different from the original creation. Like a network that never ends and never has a beginning point, love and its many derivatives flows across person to person through art, and never ceases to disappear. The reason that there are so many pieces of art in this world is because people are unique in expressing what they love. Individual people trying to express the same emotion usually results in different expressions from one another.

The universal power of love is experienced by mankind in individual creations of art. One belief that people together believe in is expressed in a million different ways.

Definition: 

Art is the physical method in which a person manifests their experience with Love.

A Video Of A Manifestation of Love Through Art

What If?: We Were All Professional Musicians!

Every day in Humanities class, we collectively listen to a piece of music. The genre varies completely from one another, and its usually from artists that we would never listen to on our own. After we listen to a particular piece, we usually take 10-15 minutes going over what we feel and think about as we hear the music being played. Some of us raise our hands and tell the class what we think the music is trying to convey as best as we can. Our responses are obviously not thought out with a professional musical mind as none of us has intensely studied music theory and the history of music, or at least I think no one has. I believe that our class can be split up into three different groups: people that hardly ever listen to music, people that listen to music on the radio for enjoyment but don't actually play an instrument, and people who both listen to music for "inspiration" and the like and attempt to or actually play instruments.

Experience wise, the people who listen to music for "inspiration" and play instruments probably have the most trained musical ear just because they have willingly surrounded themselves with that environment. They are most able to formulate thoughts about a particular piece that sound interesting and unique. Yes, the other two groups of kids do have the ability to think about music too, but the probability of thinking creatively whilst hearing a new piece of music is higher for the people who actively listen to music and apply their knowledge to an instrument.

Even so, none of us still have ever had professional musical instruction in which we attend a college of music, which is what I would like to now get to.

What if we were all professional musicians that just graduated from college with a degree in music. What if all of us had years and years of experience in both playing an instrument and actively listening to the millions of historical pieces of music literature. What if we had gathered experience writing essays and reports about a piece of music that our teacher had assigned us. What if music was the main focus of each of our lives, and we had already decided to make it our careers. Imagine how much our musical debates in Humanities class would change.

We would probably go on for HOURS about what a musical piece is trying to convey. It would hugely surpass our 10-15 minutes of going over what a piece means to us. It would also never have awkward silences when no one can think of something to say or when no one even wants to try. It would never have times in which one person says one thing and the rest of the people sometimes just repeat what the first person said in a different way. There would be the most out of this world theories as to why the music was created. We would hardly ever give up our argument, and we would effectively back it up with actual music theory rules, like crescendos and decrescendos and scherzandos and dynamics and articulations and repeats and allegrettos and a whole lot of other musical terms that I have never heard about and probably never will!

I would love to be part of a debate in which all of the people involved had different educations and experiences in music, utilizing both of them to actively discuss a piece of literature that they were hearing. They would most likely have heard almost every piece that we have heard and are going to hear in Humanities class anyways. It would be really fun watching and listening to what a group of 15-20 professional musicans can think of. It would be exciting trying to grasp what goes on in the brains of people that dedicate their lives to music as they hear pieces that they had never heard before. That is the epitome of a Humanities class.

Best of Week: "Love Supreme" - Johnny Coltrane

The first song I heard in this class was Love Supreme by the jazz musician Johnny Coltrane. This piece of literature playing on the speakers surprised me because I thought I was walking into an English class, not a Music class. However, I quickly learned that I as I selected Humanities as my first choice for English my Senior year, I was getting myself into a class that attempted to tap into my human condition. It's first attempt was to coax some kind of emotion out of me as I was exposed to the reptitious tunes of Johnny Coltrane.

The result of the class analyzation of this piece was what encouraged me to select it as the "best of week" for this blog. I enjoyed hearing the opinions and thoughts of the people sitting around me. I was bemused by how people were feeling as they were thrusted into such a situation like mine. I, as many of my other classmates, did not expect to start 3rd period English with some jazz music. It was a change, and I very much liked it. The analyzation of the first movement of this piece if you will led me to believe that Coltrane was trying to invoke some type of human love inside of the listener. I believed that this music was created to make the listener acknowledge what he/she loves most, even if it is a secret. I thought the melody of the saxophone was pieced together to let out the emotion of love, especially the type that people rarely talk about. However vague this may sound like, it should make sense to the reader with some thought. Listening to this song and really trying to let its notes take advantage of you will allow you to realize the things in life that are most important.

Surprisingly, at the end of the class analyzation, Mr. Glass told the class that Coltrane wrote this song as a tribute to his God. He said that Coltrane wanted to write about his unconditional love for whoever he worships. I was hugely surprised because I never would associate these lyrics with religion. Perhaps I think differently because I have different views of divinity. Nevertheless, it is good to understand how music appeals to different listeners, even if the creator himself of the supposed song thinks of it differently than the listener.

No, I will not change my interpretation of Love Supreme because I have learned why Coltrane wrote it. I will continue to think of this piece as the realization of that which is most loved in life, whether it be a thing, a place, a person, or in the case of Johnny Coltrane, God.