Powerful Legacy

After acknowledging McMurphy as a legitimate threat, Nurse Ratched now has to find a way to get rid of him. However, she is in a difficult position since if she sends him to a different ward, the patients will only remember McMurphy as a hero. She figures that she has to beat him at his own game and then expose him for what he truly is: a con-artist. Already, McMurphy has been able to rally the support of his fellow patients and few of the staff members as well. I find it particularly interesting that McMurphy’s legacy is posing just as much a threat as he himself is. In addition to this, I found it interesting to note that the vast majority of the patients under the care of Nurse Ratched have the choice to leave the institution if they want. The reason they do not, most likely, is due to the perception that they are different from the rest of society, a notion enforced by Nurse Ratched during her “Therapeutic Sessions.” This acts as a good example of the theme of appearance versus reality since the Nurse is able to make the patients believe that they are the “left-behinds” of society, making them unwilling to even try to be cured.

Fighting the "Combine"

Since my last entry, much has happened. McMurphy, the protagonist, has been introduced, changing the entire atmosphere of the novel. He was sent to the institution because he faked insanity to get out of doing work in the fields. Having been in the ward less than a day, he has already started poker games and is already at odds with the Nurse. I find it interesting that Kesey did not use McMurphy as the narrator even though he is, by far, the most prominent character. Whenever we see McMurphy assessing his new surroundings, we are unable to gain insight into what he is thinking. As unfortunate as this limitation is, I believe that Kesey has a reason for it. It allows for a certain level of intrigue to surround McMurphy. As I read further and further into the book, I began to notice that most of the patients who are in the ward are actually quite normal and really, should not be there. It is the Nurse who makes them believe that they should not venture out into society. McMurphy, however, disagrees, and this actually serves as one of the primary points of conflict between him and the Nurse. The patients, themselves, however are not given the liberty to voice their opinion since they have been deemed unfit to take care of themselves and their opinions are often overlooked. Even the head doctor of the ward follows her lead due to her ability to intimidate people. Again, this leads back to the point of Nurse Ratched having too much unregulated power.

Setting

I recently began reading Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The story takes place in a mental institution where the narrator is one of the patients: a half-Native, named Chief. Chief seems to be a likeable character thus far in the story. Scared to talk to anyone, he pretends to be a deaf-mute and is most often sweeping around the ward. I think that this is quite a clever move on Kesey’s part since it helps to get rid of some of the limitations of having a first-person narration. Nurse Ratched, the head nurse of the ward, seems to be at the opposite end of the spectrum. She feels the need to control everyone around her and interferes in the lives of all the patients. From what I can tell, she seems to be mad with power and claims all that she does has therapeutic value. The institution seems to be a pretty boring place. Everything is run with routine day after day. Even the patients are categorized based on their condition. Kesey gives the impression almost of a totalitarian regime ruling the area. I find interesting the new terms that are being introduced, such as the “Combine” which is supposed to represent the outside forces that constantly work to create a standard in society. The vocabulary in this book reads easily since Kesey uses colloquial English quite prominently, similar to Catcher in the Rye. From what I have heard from people who have read this book and read from reviews online, I am sure it will not be one to disappoint.

Confidence in Your Ideas

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.” (Feynman, 343)

Throughout much of his autobiography, Richard Feynman tells stories about his collaborations with famous minds ranging from the theoretical, such as Albert Einstein, to the much less so, such as Nick the Greek. During his time at Los Alamos, he worked with many of the great names in physics, such as Edward Teller and J. R. Oppenheimer, assisting them with calculations. He found that many of these physicists, with such illustrious accolades and distinctions, chose to discuss their theories with him before anyone else. At first he questioned this practice, since he was hardly as qualified as many of his contemporaries. However, it was Neils Bohr who explained to him the difficulty there was in finding someone with whom he could openly discuss theories without that person being intimidated by reputation. Feynman found that when he discussed theories and ideas, he focused on the concept as opposed to the person who was conveying it. Feynman uses this anecdote to explain his quotation above. Often times, people have a tendency to second-guess themselves and reject their own ideas. This tendency brings up the hidden difficulty in the thought process of defending one’s own ideas. This, again, comes back to the idea of having a comprehensive knowledge-base in order to defend ideas. However, from the quotation above, Feynman tells that having such a knowledge-base is never enough. Having the courage and vigour to follow through with the idea is just as necessary. He draws attention to the famous example of Millikan’s oil-drop experiment that was used to find the elementary charge constant (electric charge of a single electron). Millikan’s experiment found the value, but had a fundamental flaw in it: he incorrectly measured the viscosity of air. Thus, for years, scientists who reproduced the experiment would bias their results towards the accepted value of the time. Never had the possibility entered their minds that Millikan’s value could be wrong because they lacked the confidence to defend their own results.

From Wobbling Plates to Quantum Electrodynamics

“It was effortless…There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.” (Feynman, 174)

Although he has won many other awards, Richard Feynman’s crowning achievement would arguably have to be his Nobel Prize in Physics, which he won in 1965 for his work with quantum mechanics. Throughout his autobiography, he repeatedly tells stories of how he would play around with technology and use science to create devices that would make everyday life easier. For example, in his youth, he gained quite a reputation for fixing radios and would salvage broken ones from the local market and repair them. In this quote from his autobiography, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, Feynman explains how his interest in the mechanics behind simple, everyday phenomena would lead him to make more complex connections. In this example specifically, he talks about how he began by modelling the movement of a wobbling plate, which then, through a series of connections, led to his work in quantum electrodynamics. This work was what won him his Nobel Prize. I find it interesting that his ground-breaking research started with such a simple idea, one that everyone is familiar with. I believe that this shows that, in addition to a solid educational background, a person must have a perpetual curiosity in the mechanics behind basic phenomena in order to succeed. Later once, a solid foundation is made, I think that the more advanced connections will follow.

The Danger of "Fragile" Learning

“After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant…Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words.” (Feynman, 212)

The book I am currently reading, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, is an autobiography that follows the life of the American physicist, Richard Feynman. The book is organized into a series of stories based on actual events from Mr. Feynman’s life. One of the stories, entitled “O Americano, Outra Vez”, tells of his trip to Brazil where he ends up teaching physics at a local university. He finds that the students there have memorized all the material with extraordinary accuracy to the point of even knowing what questions would be on the final exam. However, none of the concepts were truly understood. In the Canadian education system, there is a strong emphasis on understanding the material, being able to apply it in new situations and then memorizing it (more popularly referred to as the KICA grading system). This immense difference in educational styles made me think of what future implications it would have on each of the countries in question. While simply memorizing the concepts may prove useful in tests, real-life application of the knowledge requires a comprehensive understanding. In other words, does pure book knowledge prove to be valuable without understanding and vice versa? _­­I believe that the perfect solution lies somewhere in between. I think that it would be most beneficial to not only require explanations, but to also ask for them without being given all the equations and constants, which in real life, would be expected. This way, not only would students be able to answer questions outside of a textbook, they would be able to answer it without the reference key as well. This would prevent what Feynman so resolutely warns against: “fragile” learning.

Assignment #2: Unique Literature from a Primitive Society

"People coming to Canada from, say, England in 1830 started writing in the conventions of English literature in 1830. They couldn't possibly have done anything else: they weren't primitives..." (p. 22)

I think this quote is really thought-provoking because Frye is implying that for a country or region to have a truly unique literature, it must be isolated from other sources of literature (or as Frye says, the inhabitants must be "primitives"). Usually when the word "primitive" is used to describe a group of people, it has a very negative connotation. However, here, Northrop Frye is saying that it is necessary to be primitives, to never have read or listened to any stories or poetry outside those found in your own community, to have a literary culture of your own. This, I find ironic since many of the discoveries that have identified us as an advanced society have been shared across the globe. For example, the printing press was invented by Gutenberg in what is now Germany, but has now been used internationally for a long time, helping us advance yet retain our history by making it easier to record and distribute facts and knowledge, as well as poetry and fiction. However, Frye is saying that real "literary discoveries" have to be thought of without any influence as opposed to other discoveries which usually rely on international collaboration for success.

Assignment #1: Constructing a Home

“…Literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.” (p.12)

I believe that Frye is implying that literature is something that uses concepts unique to humans, as opposed to concepts present in nature. For example, poems about natural phenomena, such as rain, snow or storms, usually talk about the mood or atmosphere they create and their effects on the human mind. Some poems may use metaphors and similes as methods of comparing these natural phenomena to more human concepts. For example, one might compare thunder to the wrath of God. Rarely, if ever, will you find a poem explaining the science behind the formation of rain. Otherwise, reading poetry would have a similar effect to that of reading a textbook and would not serve the same purpose it does today. Thus, when Northrop Frye says literature belongs to the world man constructs, I can only agree with him. Literature would not be literature if it took concepts, human or natural, and tried to describe them using science. As Frye tells earlier, literature is the language of imagination: about things that we wish would happen or wonder what would result if they did happen. It is used to describe the world that we create or carve out of the world we are given. The language of self-expression (or the technological language) however, would be the language that science uses to explain the world we see: our environment. Connections can be made between this idea and the ideas found in McCullough's speech on "The Love of Learning." In his speech, McCullough emphasizes that information and facts are never enough. Learning comes from synthesis and being able to take raw facts and apply them to a practical use. This can be paralleled to Frye's view that literature and imagination take the world we already have and concepts we want to have to create a utopia we wish to escape to. Both McCullough and Frye emphasize that the higher level of thinking required to look past what we are given (facts or our environment) and using them to create something we can use (ideas or plans for our future) is critical in any society.