There's Only One Story!

How To Read Literature Like a Professor

Seasons matter. We always associate seasons with decline. mid age, tiredness, yet harvest. That's why poets use seasons, either obviously or subtly, to bring ideas we're familiar with to our minds. For example, poet W.H. Auden uses the gloomy connotations  of winter to describe the death of dearly missed W.B Yeats. Or in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, he talks about the season's coming of end, but the poem's really about his coming of old age. Pay attention to seasons! My favorite chapter is "One Story" because it's so fascinating. Foster says "There's only one story". I never realized it: there really is only one story, if you think about it a certain way. Yes, One. The number 1. That's it. When poets write something, they either talk about us-and-the-world or us-in-the-world. There's a connection between everything; no story is fully original. John Barth complains that all the stories have been used. Funny! But really, it's true in a way. When writers write, they are, whether they're aware or not, influenced by what they have read in their lifetimes. History of the things we read never leaves us. It's a part of us. This even falls into movies. Example: Movie westerns are inspired by other movie westerns that have been influenced by you guessed  it, other movie westerns. It rattles my mind because it's so true. Foster says himself in this chapter, "The movies you have seen were created by men and women who had seen others, and so on, until every movie connects with every other movie ever made." Couldn't have said it better myself. In the next chapter, he says that a physical deformity shouldn't be looked over because it means something. Just think of Harry Potter's scar and you'll believe it. Oh, and "It's never just heart disease." Nope. Think about what the heart symbolizes. Love, passion, stuff like that. So if a guy has heart disease, he might have had(metaphorically speaking) bad love, cruelty, or loneliness in his life. In "The Man of Adamant"(1837), the man, with a stone heart, thinks all people are sinners and avoids human contact by living in a limestone cave. Because of the calcium in the water, his heart literally turns to stone. Well, I found these chapters to be really relate-able to and interesting. Bye!!