So for lack of anything better to do yesterday, I decided it would be appropriate to start Atonement on Yom Kippur. I was kinda hungry and didn't get past a chapter and a half, but it's a start. Later that night I was at the movies and saw a trailer for Atonement, the movie. I'm really excited for the class field trip we're obviously going to have.
Yesterday was the single most Jewish day of the year. In general I'm pretty Jewish -- president of the synagogue's youth group -- but Judaism is more of a cultural decision than a religious one for me. Actually, I outlined my philosophical/spiritual journey in one of my college essays. Basically I went from pure Judaism straight to Rand's Objectivism after reading The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Then I came slightly back to Judaism again and now am somewhere in the middle of the two, but not really -- the last couple books I read were Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu), and Zen and the Art of Archery (some Zen person).
I would still say that the concepts of existentialism are still the most intriguing to me. I have Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov sitting on a table waiting to be read, but it might be waiting for a little while longer. If you wondered where all this was going, it was going to my Lit X paper. I'm not quite sure what my topic will be...it may end up being some sort of comparative philosophy thing, but the first (really the only) courses I found that caught my eye, are UC Berkeley's "Existentialism in Literature and Film" and "Man, God, and Society in Western Literature."
Uh...the end.
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