Just a Girl from the North

I don’t know about you, but after reading a Rossetti poem, my mouth tends to make the questionable noise, “huh.” Rossetti goes out of her way to be extremely descriptive in many of her poems, including Goblin Market . You may think she is a little obsessive when it comes to describing the goblins. However, after really analyzing this specific poem, you come to realize the purpose of her excessive wording. Goblin Market can serve as a parallel to three ideas which involve one’s faith. Throughout the poem, I made connections with the goblins and temptation, their fruit and sin, Lizzie and Jesus Christ, and Laura and the human race. In the very first stanza of the poem, Rossetti describes the fruit of the goblins to a whole other level. When I first read this stanza, I did not think much of it. I really thought she was just thinking of as many fruits as she could. After completing the reading, however, I saw a purpose in this long description of the fruit. I made the connection that...

How do we know that God exists? The simple yet bluntly honest answer is that He exists because it is the truth. We cannot see God. We cannot touch God. We cannot physically “hang out” with God. Even though we cannot experience all of these tangible concepts with God, we know He is with always with us. Pascal states on page 65, “We know the existence of the infinite without knowing its nature, because it too has extension but unlike us no limits. But we do not know either the existence of the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits. But by faith we know his existence, through glory we shall know his nature.” In this quote, Pascal is basically explaining that we don’t need to know every single fact to prove the existence of God. We have something as strong as faith and trust in Him in order to believe. To my confusion, however, Pascal chose to make the comparison of faith to mathematical concepts, including infinity. On pages 64 and 65, Pascal states, “We know that ...

So is Machiavelli a genius or just downright absurd? His opinions are drastic, but somehow correct in their interpretation. Would it be better to be loved or feared? Most of the time, your first answer is obviously to be loved, because who doesn’t want to be loved? However, Machiavelli would disagree with being loved. He finds it more effective to be feared. He states on page 66, “From this a dispute arises whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The response is that one would want to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to put them together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one has to lack one of the two.” In this passage, Machiavelli says it is safer to be feared. Initially, I disagreed with this because, if you have people loving you, you automatically have people on your side. These people that love you will support you as prince and will have your back. However, reading later on in the passage, he makes the valid point of ho...

You should never judge a book by its cover. Though this may seem obvious, everyone struggles with this, including me, on the daily. We’re all human, we can’t help it. When it comes down to it, however, you find the real character of a person on the inside. Physical interaction can be deceptive. There is the most common example in the world of the ugly person but the beautiful soul. I think that it is especially important to have this mindset going into meeting anyone new and getting to know them. Praise of Folly really emphasizes this obvious point of getting to know someone before judging their character. Folly makes it appear quite obvious the easiest way to get to know someone. Folly expresses her opinion on pages 12 and 13 saying, “But was there any need to tell you even as much as that, as if I didn’t make it perfectly clear who I am from the look on my face, as they say? Anyone who argued that I was Minerva or Wisdom could easily be convinced of his mistake simply by the sig...

In my opinion, Dante’s Inferno is filled with multiple accounts of irony. If it even makes sense, I think it’s actually filled with multiple accounts of reasonable irony. We can all agree that if your life is completely full of sin, you are more than likely to end up in hell. Everyone can also agree that there are different levels of sin. Therefore, different levels of sin come with different levels of punishment. This is shown throughout the different rings of hell. For instance, someone who committed incontinence sins is going to have a different punishment than someone with a life of fraudulent sins. This does not mean that certain sins have “better” or “easier” punishments and it’s not what Dante was implying. Sin is sin. Dante provides enough imagery to show that all types of sin will lead you to hell. In Canto Ten, the main focus is on the heretics and image of the characters Farinata and Cavalcante. To no surprise, there is a random man(Cavalcante) who has something random...

Living in southern Illinois can only be defined by a handful of words. Some of these words include lame, boring, or empty. I had the unfortunate privilege of living in this state for eighteen long years. I grew up in the small town of Mascoutah where everybody knew everybody. Literally everyone knew everyone. Usually when people think of Illinois, their minds go straight to the intriguing city of Chicago. I am here to tell you that I live nowhere near Chicago. I live next to corn fields and numerous populations of cows. All my life I couldn’t wait to get away from that boring state and venture somewhere actually worth my time. While I have been ranting on and on about my less than interesting state, a figure has presented itself in the corner of my dorm room. It appears to be an elderly woman, almost resembling an image of my grandmother. She has an empty expression, but when she speaks, I cannot help but listen to what she has to say. The very first words she speaks are, “Aren’t y...