Prompt #5

Many readers may start the novel How to Read Literature Like a Professor and assume the author, Thomas C. Foster, is going to narrate as an English Professor giving a lecture. The realization that Foster is not just a teacher will settle in once the reader realizes that he is not just a professor but an optometrist of sorts. He provides the reader with a murky outline and presents different lenses that can make the message so much clearer than it was before. He spins the dial making each outline sharper and sharper until the perfect lens gives the reader a twenty-twenty insight into the deeper meaning of a story.

As long as I have been reading I have been noticing symbols: three wishes, poison apples, a fork in the road, etc. Foster brings the symbolism to a whole new caliber when he notes that one should notice the things they never did before. Never would it have appeared to me that a man who fails to love a woman properly would die from heart failure. It may appear as an obvious death for such a character, but this was something I would have overlooked. That is the lesson Foster wants each reader to remember; slow down and take notice of the little things, "So engage that other creative intelligence. Listen to your instincts. Pay attention to what you feel about the text. It probably means something" (Foster, 114). As human beings we have limited abilities to evoke a feeling out of someone else. It seems nearly impossible that someone who lived two thousand years ago could still have an affect on us today, but here we are quoting Virgil in the New York Times. Writing gives us the power to connect on a deeper level and reflect on who we are as a species. Reading and writing is a way of sharing thoughts, feelings, events, tragedies, miracles, and it keeps us connected to our ancestors in a way no other species can. As I reflect upon the book I feel as though I can see for the first time. Even though Foster instructs us not to read with our eyes he has opened mine in a metaphorical sense. Romeo and Juliet still apply to us today because young lust is not a feeling that dies out with a generation. Human beings will love and lust, especially when they are young until our species has died out. Men will still kill other men in pursuit of power, glory, and riches. The way a child is brought into the world is the same way it has been since the dawn of the Homo Sapiens. There is a beauty in the way we live our lives in different clothing and houses but the events that unfold in a humdrum day are virtually the same. The pain after loosing a loved one hurts on the same level as it did four thousand years ago and knowing that makes us literate. Acknowledging that we are, in the immortal words of Disney's Pocahontas, "Connected to each other. In a circle, in a hoop, that never ends" makes us literate. I will carry the knowledge, that someone at some point in time has experienced the same things we do, with me and apply it to every poem, news paper, or piece of literature that I read.