Nothing New

Literature, as the great Canadian critic Northrop Frye observed, gorws out of other literature; we should not be surprised to find, then, that it also looks like other literature. As you read, it may pay to remember this: there's no such thing as a wholly original work of literature.

These words come from Thomas C. Foster's How To Read Literature Like a Professor. There is, I suppose, as "the Preacher" said "nothing new under the sun." This vicious cycle of ours for redundancy is not plagiarism. It can't be. We are consistently tweaking what we have taken from others what we also took from another. Yet it makes me curious as to what can be really mine. Do I have anything I can call my own?

My emotions are shared with others. Others grow angry or excited over the same things that anger and excite me. It's not that we all share the same emotions. We don't. Some of us are (thankfully) very different. There are those who grow very enthusiastic over some sport's match and there are those who are not so competitive. It balances itself all out in the end. But I share even my thoughts with others. There is, as depressing as this sounds, no more genius left. We have all thought of the same things at one point or another. Perhaps our thinking patterns and speeds are different but we all end up thinking of the same things. This is such a depressing reality that I'm not quite sure what to do.

Could it be that Earth, the land of vanity, is, after all, just the ante-sala to Hell? It'd make sense, Lewis referred to it as the great Purgatory (think The Great Divorce). Peter Kreeft also swung between it being Hell itself and a form of Purgatory. It does make sense. These two, a couple of the greatest geniuses in Christian faith, have found it all to be despair (as did their predecessor Solomon, the Preacher).