I asked Professor Auld, after she told me John Milton had a classical education, what kind of education I had. She said something about contemporary. I threw that word into my centrifuge and out popped this class, namely the discussion that sparked last week, and has seemed to foment with increased intensity each week. Contemporary thought is based on a post-modern idea of the world. Basically, everything is disjointed and meaning only appears when you say it does. “Subjectivity is Truth,” Kierkegaard. Post-modernism can be described as word games, nonsequitars, tangents, non-Euclidian geometry, and as with every new zeitgeist-the attempted destruction of the age that preceded it. Moderns, epitomized by poets like Pound and Eliot , sought to delve into their wealth of classical knowledge and give meaning to it. Joyce made everyman into a Homeric hero. Their notion of “its okay, we still have everything under control,” no longer holds onto us. It is no longer relevant. Chaos theory and entropy are all part of our culture. Meaning can no longer be taken from the past. “There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now; And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.” (Whitman) leaves of grass. I view this class as an exercise it the hope expressed by a post-modern culture that has lost any set terra firma. We do not despair or look for security in traditional classroom rigidity. We are excited to play, to connect, to trope. We will create something. We do it by giving of us, what we have and what we are, our disjointed thoughts, our attempts at subverting the ineffable, our desire to be part of something, to add, be it prideful or humble, but never to take away, it is the motto of the wiki, “what can you give?” I don’t care what it is, or where you got it from. I love it. It is just the right size. Thank you.