Peaks and valleys

“In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens . . . Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joys and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. . . . in stories, endings matter” (238-239).

"Dead End" (1980)  by Jacek Yerka

If the meaning of a life is revealed not through an accurate account of your day-to-day experience, but through a narrative that dwells on significant moments, should we focus more on achieving great things than we do on simple pleasures?

If the stories we tell have a significant effect on our life experience, should we make a conscious effort to talk about our lives in terms of peaks of joys and less in terms of valleys of misery?

The Being Mortal Sandbox

"Children Playing on the Beach, 1884" (1884) by Mary Cassatt

Have a question or comment about Being Mortal that had not been addressed elsewhere on this website?

Bring it to the comment box below.

The Being Mortal Takeaway

"Taking up the Net" (1881) by Thomas Eakins

So you've read Being Mortal now. In 100 words or less, identify the part of the book the is most likely to stick with you the longest.

What's your take away?

Don't answer this question until you've finished reading the entire book.

Welcome aboard, Honors Entering Class of 2015!

"Pushing Off the Boat at Sea Bright, New Jersey" (1887) by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

So you're officially a college student.  And not just that, you are joining the ECU Honors Program. Congratulations and welcome aboard!  You've officially arrived.  It's a brave new world.   But fear not: signs of your success are already apparent.  If you're reading this, then you made it to ECU's Honors Enduring Questions website.  That's step #1.  And better yet (step #2), you already have the book for the summer reading (You do, right?  If not, stop reading this right now, yes now, go get your book--Atul Gawande's Being Mortal--and then start reading this again.  Seriously.).  After taking a peek at the questions on this website (click here;  yes there ARE a lot.  Don't panic!), you may be thinking to yourself (that's called reflection, and good, too, by the way)--"What exactly am I supposed to do here?"  These questions  have a simple purpose.  They are designed to help you engage with the text (and the rest of us).  And since we certainly don't want you to feel uncertain or to approach the questions "willy-nilly" (a fun way to say without structure or system), click here to see the rules.  See you on the next post!

Surrogate armies? Mercenary mothers?

Click here to read a debate published in The New York Times (Oct. 26, 2014) in response to the question:  " . . . does the government need to do more to change the way it uses private security contractors who do jobs soldiers once did?"

Readers of Michael Sandel's Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? will recognize some of the contours of this debate from Sandel's discussion of it in chapter four:  "Hired Help: Markets and Morals."

Also discussed in chapter four: surrogate motherhood.  Click here to read (or listen to) a feature on National Public Radio (Oct. 22, 2014) about some of the ethical and legal challenges faced by the surrogacy business.

Storytelling: Pleasure Machine or Species Booster?

"Is This How Literature Began?" Chauvet Cave Painting, 30-32,000 years old.

In today's New York Times, Adam Kirsch and Dana Stevens consider the question: "Should literature be considered useful?" According to Kirsch, literature is not useful in any physical sense, for "The life that literature really equips us to live is not the one Wordsworth derided as devoted to 'getting and spending,' but the second life of inwardness and imagination." Stevens,on the other hand, muses that literature, and story-telling, are, as Kenneth Burke put it, "equipment for living." And it is this equipment for living that set the human species apart from all other species on earth. "I couldn’t tell you exactly what shelf in the utility closet that equipment for living occupies," Stevens confesses, "but I suspect none of us storytelling apes would survive for long without it." The binary implied by the title of this post is problematic, since literature can be and is used in so many different ways. To find out how Kirsch and Stevens dance around the question, click here.

Stevens quotes from a poem W. H. Auden wrote about the poet W. B. Yeats following Yeats's death in 1939. According to Stevens, the line in the poem "“Poetry makes nothing happen,” when read in context, actually makes the case that poetry "enables . . . the survival of human culture." The video below reveals that context:

The story has not ended.

You've done the summer reading; the semester has begun; the story has not ended.

Lyrics after the jump (recommended to us by Dr. McMahon) ...