"About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."
- Ernest Hemmingway
"To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams"
- Ernest Becker
Chicano literature
Chicano literature is the literature written by Mexican Americans in the United States. Although its origins can be traced back to the sixteenth century, the bulk of Chicano literature dates from after 1848, when the USA annexed large parts of what had been Mexico in the wake of the Mexican-American War. (My obsession with Sandra Cisneros is fireyyyyy and raw)
Existentialism
Existentialism philosophy was developed primarily by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Existentialism started from the position that there was no God, no supreme being, no absolute truth, no “transpersonal entity.” Modern science and the twentieth century’s multiple disasters seemed to prove that Gob must be absent, leaving humans “condemned to be free,” as Sartre put it. Since there is no God, the self is not a “soul” or even a stable entity but rather a process in constant evolution as each of us establishes an identity and responds to our world. Sartre’s principle philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, postulated that human begins are responsible for the world they have created, yet they are also free to decide how to act in it.
On August 8th of 1933, author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the following letter of advice to his 11-year-old daughter, “Scottie,” who was away at camp.
It included this list:
Things to worry about:
Worry about courage
Worry about Cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship
Worry about…
Things not to worry about:
Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions
Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?
"True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself; hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person"
- Albert Camus
