Song Blog

Throughout the Great Gatsby, the mysterious Jay Gatsby does all he can to win the affections of Daisy Buchanan. He's always loved her from the time they met five years ago, but it's taken him a long time to tell Daisy this. The song that I thought fit this situation was No One's Gonna Love You by Band of Horses. The song basically sums up what Gatsby is feeling throughout the story. The line, "You are the ever-living ghost of what once was" accurately depicts how Gatsby is trying to recreate what he once had with Daisy all that time ago. I would say Gatsby probably loved Daisy more than her husband Tom did, and he was quite obsessed with her. One of the lyrics in the song is, "No one's ever gonna love you more than I do" and I would say that's a decent description of how Gatsby must have been feeling. I feel the song I chose accurately described the love triangle between Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom, and summed up Gatsby's feelings quite nicely.

Are you a Transcendentalist?

I would say that I am indeed a transcendentalist because I agree with the idea that society, organized religion, and political parties generally just end up corrupting people. When people follow all of these organized institutions I feel they stop thinking for themselves and being "self-reliant." It's easy to just follow along with what a leader says but it's harder to come up with your own ideas. Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed this excellently when he stated, "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, --that is genius."

 I also agree that being independent is crucial and that you can't be self-reliant if you're constantly conforming to society. Emerson talked about the evils of society in his essay Self-Reliance and he stated, "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." I agree with Emerson when he talked about society, because I also feel that society is constantly telling people how to change themselves to fit in with everyone else. I can't see how constantly worrying about what to change about yourself will ever bring you happiness or self-relience.

Maps

http://www.libs.uga.edu/darchive/hargrett/maps/1734g6b.jpg
In the His Majesty's Colony of Georgia in America  map, I noticed that a lot of the natural foliage was destroyed in order to make a settlement there. This map also shows the European's essentially taking over the land and waterways. The large boats can be seen floating through the water, while the indiginous animals curiously look on. Just from this map of the colony of Georgia, one can sense the Europeans feeling of ownership of the territory, and it doesn't appear that they even remotely respect the land. In Valerie Babb's Crafting Whiteness in Early America, she summed up this sentiment quite well when she stated, "...A growing sense of European entitlement to the Americas is evident."