Feeling Fashion-y and Ancient Asthmatics Philosophizing

Lady GaGa...does it get any better?  How much fierceness can be jammed into an outfit?

that's just cute.  Classy and beautiful.

she even does Christmas specials

Okay, anyways, I just had to get that fabulousness out of my system before I exploded in a cloud of glitter.

POOF!!!!!!!

 So, I read this "essay" by Seneca, (who is not Native American...it's a different kind of Seneca), and I had to write this response paper.

His essay is actually a letter to a friend, but it's pretty much what essayists (who invented the essay) based their stuff off of.  It has been titled "Asthma" and it's about him talking about an asthma attack and then he goes on about the nature of death and stuff.  It's all philosophical-y.

No Stealsies

 

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy this piece was to understand.  There’s an expectation with older pieces of writing—they will be strange and hard to understand.  But this was as easy to read as anything “modern”.  Perhaps that’s because this is a letter to a close friend, and not some great thing that he’d have read to a crowd of people.

            The form called the essay is really quite loose to my understanding now.  That is blowing my mind a little bit.  What a contrast from dry research papers, the things I had previously called “essays”.

            Now, I’m wondering though, isn’t this thing technically not an essay, but a snippet from a letter to Seneca’s buddy?  I presume he goes on to talk about things that are going on in his life afterwards.  Is this how people back then wrote letters to each other?

            Isn’t this also a “personal essay”?  It’s very much about Seneca’s own thoughts and musings, and the highly personal nature of him gasping for air.  I’m having a hard time nailing down exactly what is and what isn’t an essay and what makes up all these various types of essays.  There probably is no good answer, is there?  That kind of thinking is hard to get used to—I’m familiar with it in the context of visual arts, but it’s a little odd to have it now in writing.  Writing in the classroom used to be so regimented and strict, and now that has been blown out of the water and I don’t really know what to do.

            Wow, I’ve strayed pretty far from my topic—sorry.

            Anyways, I like how he directly speaks to his reader, by predicting what his questions are going to be.  “‘What kind of ill health?’ you’ll be asking.”  That’s pretty informal, and, well, refreshing.

            Seneca also uses two metaphors to very strong affect.  He compares his asthma attacks, and impending death because of them to a trial, in order to explain that it’d be stupid for him to be happy because his attack has passed.  The other comparison was one’s life to a lamp.  Is the lamp any worse off after it was put out than before it was lit?  He is explaining how he thinks that death is no different from that period of time before you were born—or conceived.

            I think that the reason this was so easy for me to understand is that he uses things that can be related to on a universal level.  Two thousand years after he wrote this, we still have lamps and trials and worry about the same things.  Maybe it’s just a really good translation.

 

 

Yup, so that's that.

I will leave you with this, a fabulous shoe for your consideration and worship.

Your're welcome!