The Dark Night of the Soul
by Amber Kramer Summary Essay: The Dark Night of the Soul Richard E. Miller essay “The Dark Night of the Soul” to be an interesting way to think about reading and writing in today’s world. Richard uses the violence in the world to question if our educational system is relevant to keeping us safe and whether the power literature can be used to change the tragic event that happen around us every day. Richard begins with a few horrific events such as Columbine high school massacre.
He makes us start to think about the motives behind the events. By talking about the possibility that the technological advances could be isolate us into our fantasies. He suggests that reading, writing and, discussing could have changed what had happened at the high school. Then he disproves this thought by telling us how the boys that killed so many people did do these things, but only to support their own ideas. That’s about when he starts to mention a much bleaker outlook on how reading and writing are losing power.
He states. “If you’re in the business of teaching others to read and write your labor is increasingly irrelevant. ” He explains this well when he says. “Rather than accept the fact that technological advances have taken control of publishing out of the hands of the few and transformed everyone with access to the internet into a potential author and critic, one decry the movement of our cultures critical center from the university to the sound stage of the Oprah Winfrey Show. In the second part of Richards essay “The Prince of Darkness”, Richard writes about three authors. Two of which are placed in the Martin Amos’s book “Information. ” Amos talks about a sad view on writing today how it doesn’t make you a better person or take much talent to be a writer today. Amos shows little respect for the literary arts. He describes them to be as criminals. Amos pins to authors up against each other Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry.
Tull’s work is completed with intense and indebt literary references that have been said to cause illness to those who can read it. On the other hand Tull describes Barry’s novel as garbage that took no real talent, Although Barry’s readers love his work. Through the next few pages of the essay Amos describes Tulls hard work as pointless. Richard Miller then states an agreement with Amos’s theory that finding motivation for the crimes that are committed in book, and the ones done in the school yard are just irrelevant as the art literacy itself.
To support this at the end Richard points out that Amos bring a sense of hopelessness: Whatever we do now will never have significance. In the third part of this essay Following the Word Richard takes us into Jon Krakuaer’s book “Into the Wild. ” “Into the Wild” is about Chris McCandless journey into Alaska’s wild and his death there. Chris believed so deeply in the power of books. He devoted his life to them, and consequently it killed him. As Krakuaer believes books do have power the power to draw someone into their own fantasies.
Krakuaer says “putting too much faith into an author without looking at the reality of the world around you could put people in danger. ” This is interesting to me because that is basically what is being said about technology earlier in the essay. In the fourth section in the essay Richard is speaking of Rene Descartes’s “Meditations on the first philosophy. ” Rene starts with another bleak outlook on writing. He asks the question “why bother reading and writing when the world is so obviously going to hell? Richard says Rene wrote this book to provide authors with a method to protect them from being fooled by the world around them, but in the end he only finds himself with one goal and that it to protect his reasoning. The following section Richard miller uses Mary Karr’s book “Joining The Liars’ Club: Writing and The Generation Of Hope” as an example of three things; the epidemic of people that need event and or themselves to be remembered, it shows the need for understanding the motivations of the past events, and the power of reading and writing has to heal a person from their past.
This book finally shows a more positive view on the use of the powers of reading and writing. By the end of this essay its clear to me that it’s about several different things; The need to be remembered, The power of reading and writing has on a person, the relevance of proper literature to the real world, and if there is reasons or a way to find a motives for peoples action. The Columbine boys wanted to be remembered for their actions so the used the power of reading to soot their needs.
There was no lack of reading and writing in there world, but still at the end of this essay Richard E. Miller states a disagreement with this. Richard says “ there will be no more great books” He says this because he feels the world is done with the power of literature, whether it has the power to express idol emotion, free you from your reality, give you understanding, make you remembered or not. In Richard world its become a fact that people just are not choosing to use these powers anymore and it seems to him to be getting worse.
