Adagia pt. 1

There are so many short phrases and thoughts that fill the last few pages of our Steven Wallace readings that stand out to me. I don't know exactly where to begin. I think I will just comment on a few of them.

"There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it"
This phrase really began to make me think. At first read, it sounds like a wishy-washy quote from a transcendentalist writer. But as I began to think on it, I guess there is some truth to this for a artist rooted in secular expression. Secular artists are not inspired by a deity or a higher being or a greater power. They are merely inspired by themselves. They are inspired by human existence, by experience and by what they observe. We spend so much of our time during the day thinking and pondering, or at least my day is filled with this. To relate it back to our discussion of "big frame arches" in class, I guess I would say that in the case of this quote, the biggest frame arch for Stevens is himself. The individual is the big thing that controls all else. The quote is very humanist in this way. The Humanist belief is that we are what we make of ourselves. We are in control of our own destiny and how we live our lives. Therefore, our lives are what we think of them. We control our opinions, and our viewpoints and our own outlooks on the world. Although many of these things are controlled by the environment/society that we live in, it is what we think of these influences that makes life what it is for us.