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Recollected Recap

 With another year gone and another semester of school passed by, I sat down and did some self-reflection. What did I achieve, what I learned and how I have grown. Some of the most important things I have learned were due to my reflections and connections from English class. It’s easy to read literature with a disconnected mind because “How is this relevant to me, and when am I going to need to rely on such experiences?” and that is correct. I am never going to go through the experiences of Meursault or Oedipus but I am going to face similar problems, similar conflicts. I mean I’m not going to be in an existential dilemma after shooting a man 5 times (I hope) but, the main thematic conflicts with existentialism and this idea of redundancy really resonated with me. I didn’t have any earth-shattering realizations or anything, but more of a subtle change in perspective. I have become far more receptive to contradicting ideas, and I have also learned to look at things deeper than the surface. 

There is a reason old literature is still taught and still referenced, and that is that a lot of times, they can be connected to issues we face today as well. We learned about this concept of ‘One Story’, and a lot of stories that are made to reflect the conditions and problems of our society are really derivatives of the aforementioned old literature. So in a convoluted manner what I am trying to say is that I have started putting much more stock in the old stories that we read, and have become far more proficient at detecting connections to present society. 


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