Final Blog

In my sub group, Hemingway’s story about Nick was the foundation text from which we started.  In Hemingway’s story, the character Nick leaves civilization to go camping in nature by himself to find a peace of mind or sense of self worth.  The question that arose was broad, but allow fit what Hemingway had intended for the story.  What does isolation in nature look like? Do you have to abandon friends and family? Do you have to barely be able to make ends meet with survival?  These questions allowed for me to find other texts which pin pointed these exact questions and allowed for me to show how Hemingway might possibly view these texts.  I chose “The Boundaries Between Us” which examines boarders between people, nations, and cultures.  Boundaries make us feel safe and content, but Hemingway wants people to live on the edge because in nature boundaries do not exist.  After annotating the in class text, I needed an outside text that would describe isolation to perfection.  I chose the song “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls.  Now, I realize that the song and narrator do not speak to nature, but I imagined it did and I would ask anyone to do the same because it makes the song pretty powerful.  The narrator doesn’t want the world to know who he is, but wants nature to know who he is.  It’s kind of the reverse of the question we have asked through the course of the semester which is: What is nature? What does nature look like to us?  In the song, the narrator is happiest when he is in nature isolated and Hemingway would totally agree.  The narrator even considers this place heaven like.  Personally, I do not know a lot of answers to all of these questions, but that’s the beauty of it.  I can still figure that out.  I don’t know what it looks like to be isolated in nature and whether or not that makes me human because I have been living in my parents’ shadows for 18 years.  Frankly, I don’t even know what it means to be human.  I think ill figure that out when I’m older.  I need to experience nature for myself and on my own to realize its beauty. 

                The contributions I made were inserting questions and answers into the giant script.  I did one of the four annotations and I found my outside source.  If I had to alter the project at all, I would maybe put in more guidelines.  Without guidelines, people get stressed, and when people get stressed they go insane.  Guidelines create sanity.  I actually really enjoyed the project because I never thought doing a project with so many people would be as successful as it was.  Everyone pulled their weight which made it that much easier.  I really think by having so many people in a group, the greatest amount of content can be cover and it was.  This was a great way to end Reading Place and I would recommend doing this project again in the future.