Mariella Reynoso, Period 2, 10/20/22

 Literacy & Learning

• Write about your thoughts regarding any of the fiction or nonfiction covered in class.
• Reflect on any new information you have learned in English class by considering how that learning influences your critical perception.
• How is what you’re learning applied to any other classes/the world around you?

Through Greek mythology, our class has explored big existential questions from how the universe was created to whether death is evil. We’ve picked apart these texts to understand the morals they were meant to convey and how the society they were written in felt about women. The idea that culture dictates how people see the world and each other is not new to me, but this unit has taught me that culture’s impact is more far-reaching than I thought. 

The most memorable part of the flower myth lesson for me was that the myth of Hyacinthus originated in human sacrifice. For both the Greeks and the Incas, a belief that human sacrifice was necessary for the wellbeing of the world made this practice morally justifiable. From reading the article about the Inca child mummies, I learned that being chosen to be sacrificed was even considered an honor. This perspective on human life and death is unimaginable to most people today, and it made me think about the power of culture in shaping our morality and views on mortality. 

I was raised as a Catholic and became an atheist when I was fourteen, and this change in my culture caused a profound shift in the way I see the world. When I was younger, I believed that there were fundamental rights and wrongs, and when it came to the gray areas and unknowns in life, I would get to find out the truth after I died. I believed that guilt was an objective sign that I was doing something wrong. But as I’ve grown older I’ve learned that guilt is shaped by what you are taught, and you can feel guilty for things you learned are wrong even after you realize they aren’t. Similarly, I assume a person might not feel guilty for doing something wrong that they’ve learned is right. I think about the evils of history—slavery, colonization, war—and wonder: To what extent does culture shape our hearts? How much of our morality is taught and how much is natural to us? 

Culture also shapes the way we feel about death. My family members who are devout Christians are unafraid of death because of their faith that something good comes after. To me, death is a scary unknown and as a result, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. But our class discussion about the relationship between beauty and sorrow shifted my perspective once again. Pain has a purpose. We can’t know beauty without ugliness, or happiness without sorrow. In psychology, I learned that it is dangerous to have an impaired sense of pain because pain is the signal that there is something going wrong in our bodies. A flower’s beauty is meaningful to us because of its impermanence. We appreciate the time when flowers bloom because we know they will be gone by the winter. I have never read the Iliad, but there is one quote from it I’ve seen many times: “The gods envy us. They envy us because we are mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” In other words, knowing our lives will end makes our time alive more meaningful and beautiful. 

But moving past my own changes in perspective, the most important lesson I’ve learned about the power of culture is this: by changing the culture, you can change the world. We’ve discussed how people of the past oppressed women by making them believe—through stories—that they deserved it. Now we’ve learned that the Greeks completely changed their minds about human sacrifice once they realized their belief that human blood nourished the earth was false. This lesson gives me hope that through the stories my generation decides to tell or leave behind, we can impact the changes we want to see in the world.