A Literary Profile

The earliest memories of my literary journey begin when I was five, reading A Little Princess, The Secret Garden and the Bible with my mother and snuggling up with my huge stuffed dog to read books like Little Chick's Breakfast, Make Way for Ducklings, What Would Jesus Do?, Lile the Friendly Crocodile, and the Beatrix Potter series by myself.  As I got older, I enjoyed books with interesting words and sweet morals.  I liked old books, and enjoyed looking at pictures of people from different time periods.  The literature I experienced in junior high and high school include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pride and Prejudice, and The Iliad.  I also loved reading books about architechture, art, music, and the biographies of composers.  Perhaps the most personally influential literature I encountered was the poetry I read during my senior year of high school.  Four poems affected me the most, I think: To a Waterfowl by William Cullen Bryant, Love by George Herbert, Daffodils by William Wordsworth, and A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  To be sure, I didn't understand them completely, but within these poems I felt that there were certain truths and concepts that I could grasp.  They each came at a time when I needed them, and I found them to be very encouraging.  My most recent discoveries, which I am reading little by little, include Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis, Little House on the Ozarks by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Let Me Be a Woman by Elisabeth Eilliot, and Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior In Company and Conversation by George Washington.
      "An artist's work grows from a lifetime of experiences, thoughts, and emotions; no one else can duplicate them exactly.  Works of art hold many meanings.  The greatest of them seem to speak anew to each generation and to each attentive observer.  The most important thing is that some works of art come to mean something for you, that your own experiences, thoughts and emotions find a place in them, for then you will have made them live."  This is a quote from my Art Appreciation textbook called Living with Art by Mark Getlein, and it reminded me of Professor Corrigan's essay, Literature Is a Thing You Do as Part of Your Life. Professor Corrigan says, "...true art draws people more deeply into reality.  One reason for this is that literature is about life.  Life experiences inform a person's understanding of what they read, and what a person reads informs their life experiences."  I feel that literature, art, and music are all elegant forms of communication which, when we take part in them, can help us to better understand each other, ourselves, and mostly importantly, God.  It's the "doing" of literature, the "how" I can take part in it that I am excited to learn more fully.  I would like to know how to paint a short story and interpret a difficult poem.  Just like finding the hidden meanings in a painting or discovering something special in a piece of music, I want to know how to discover the author's meaning and apply it to my own life - in other words "making it live."

Here is a piece that was running through my mind as I was thinking about these things