oh, the humanity...

In Life After God, we're asked by Coupland what unique characteristics make humans human, the defining factor that can separate us from all other animals on the rock we inhabit. I'd like to think that there is a little more to our complexity than higher intellectual ability and an opposable thumb.
If you're religious, then the abilities of good and evil instilled on man are very important, but I've found that religious debate has the ability to turn even a wayward english blog into something very dismal and disenchanting. In my ecological ethics class, the question was posed,"without man on earth, could there be ethics?"
I think that there's a resounding no to that answer. I think that man is the only being capable of not only choosing an ethical corse of actions, but endowing a situation with an moral qualification. I don't think that humanity is necessarily in our actions or our creations, because we all think, act, interact, and live--for the most part--very differently from one another. I think that what makes us unique as a species is our ability to apply a sense of worth and value beyond the egoist or utilitarian worth that is almost scientifically defined. In essence, being human is unique because we can define what it is to be human.

the first drafts of my whirlwind love affair with contemporary literature.

It wasn't until extremely recently that I've had an opportunity to sit down with contemporary works. I spent most of my time in high school pouring over things made before even my parents were born, and--I believe--the most modern authors I ever had on a reading list were Fitzgerald and Hemingway. This summer I had some time to sit down with some different works by Palahniuk as well as Jonathan Safran Foer's first major novel Everything is Illuminated. I really enjoyed the more modern tone that I could find in those books, and of books written in the same genre, though from an earlier generation, by Charles Bukowski.
While I think that modern authors often sacrifice some of the most concrete facets of writing in order to apply their new styles, I've found the new styles intriguing for the nuances alone. I think that the new styles being used today allow for writers to be more unique with their writing styles, and--as such--they are able to be more true to the art and message they are attempting to convey.

-Howe