Dylan Liguori                                                                                                                         9/11/13

EN 101 Understanding Literature                                                                                        Dr. Ellis

Love and Determination Spur Creation

The three poems and the reading “The Service of Faith and Promotion of Justice on Jesuit Higher Education” by Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach relate to Stephen Graham Jones’ speech tonight in a way not expected, but in a way that is all too simple. The poems discuss hardships from a lesser degree for example the “Mending Wall” to the more extreme in the case of the older woman trying to gain the ability to read in “Learning to Read” to become an independent person. Stephen Graham Jones faced a similar road block in his life time. The fact that his family was a farming family and him continuing that tradition or that he discovered a true gift in him being able to write. Arguments with one another and battles deep within people’s hearts are explored throughout theses readings and to lay back and let nature run its course is not what being human is about.

            In the poem “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost he writes about two neighbors in the springtime go out to make some repairs on the stone wall which separates one another. The speaker of the poem basically says that there is no need for the repairs since they aren’t trying to keep anything out, but the neighbor keeps insisting that “good fences make good neighbors”. How I perceived this to relate to Stephen Graham Jones is he could have went with the notion that he was set out to be a farmer because that was the family business and what else was he supposed to do, but he found a light in writing that he could not flicker on and off any longer so he pursued his dream and didn’t really let anyone stand in his way. In correlation to the wall the speaker is trying new ways to be friendly with his neighbor and not have the predetermination to just keep away and not interact in an environment that would promote some good.

            “Accident Mass Avenue” by Jill McDonough is about a car accident in which the lady who was hit immediately got out of her car and the two drivers who had hit each other started screaming their heads off and were using foul language unnecessarily. When they realized that no damage was done they had to take a step back for a second and compute what they were arguing about. Jones’ short story called Dirty Sanchez reminded me of this poem. There wasn’t much arguing but the two of them living together and the one character doing things that seemed normal to him, but disgusting and crude to the other character had this character do a double take and realize that he couldn’t live with this person anymore.

            “Learning to Read” by Francis E. W. Harper and Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach’s lecture have points and ideas which assimilate into each other with a smooth fashion. The message I received from learning to read is that there shouldn’t be a limit on what you should do to achieve your goals even if it’s costly and a painful venture. With Kolvenbach’s lecture he states that the Jesuits have a different approach in understanding the world and helping others to understand it so that we can go out and make the world more peaceful and help ourselves realize what we want to do and must do to fulfill one’s potential. Jones’ zombie story that he read to us exemplified these two messages into an understanding from a totally different perspective. When the animals were sacrificed to save human’s lives maybe that is what God intended the animals use for that situation was to be. When the son sacrificed his own life in the end and told his father to keeping moving, that’s what really stuck in my head and connected me from that moment to these two readings.

            Even though a lot of Jones’ stories told today weren’t as closely related to the poems as hoped for there is still trains of thoughts that begin with one idea brought up in either speech or poem and goes right down the track to connect some of the underlying ideas that make these pieces of literature work.