Waking up at 6:30am to read Emerson’s ,” The American Scholar”, (TWICE) and I still don’t understand it, sadly. What I got from it was a little bit on how to be the perfect “American scholar” is the past (books), which probably means having the right understanding and be yourself because you won’t get to experience life in order to have.

Emerson kind of mentioned on how you can find knowledge by learning the real truth with books and how they are basically the key to understand life fully, “Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth,–learn the amount of this influence more conveniently,–by considering their value alone.” (Emerson) I agree with this concept becasue I actually do agree on how books open up more creative minds and ideas with a full experience on what the book mentions or the type of genre it is. “Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles,” this quote got to me, no words.

“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. ” (Emerson), this quote caught my interest because I majored in Creative Writing (even got a certificate) and enjoy creative writing because it I think creativity can expand the mind to it protentional of creativity when it comes to writing.

For some odd reason, I found King’s article interesting, but sad at the same time. The fact that those men had to endure for months in the sea and their only way to survive was cannibalism, its heartbreaking and the fact that they had to choose who to eat was just horrible to read about that. It reminded me about the Uruguayan rugby team whose airplane crashed into the Andes mountains and endured so much a traumatic event and also to recourse to cannibalism as well. To know that Herman Melville was inspired by this true event makes it more interesting, nerve-wrecking and fully grasp the need on wanting to read it now and know what the deal is with Moby Dick. It still was a bit hard to understand so hopefully can someone help me understand it a bit more in class.