Personal Insight Questions

Personal Insight Questions Antigone has become my favorite book because it wraps political and legal theory around complex characters and a compelling narrative. Prior to reading Antigone , I assumed that if I hadn’t read every book that pertained to the architecture of US government, I had at least heard of them. Antigone proved this assumption wrong because Antigone itself was a case study in the actual consequences of ideas discussed by political philosophers. In other words, Antigone humanized the esoteric and function-driven debates I’d studied last year. Finishing the play, I was ashamed that I’d harbored such skepticism at the outset of my reading. Index cards, store receipts, and any other paper I can find, covered in notes I took, stick out of the tops of my books. I dream of a place where everyone enjoys books differently. There is greatness to be found in every book, but these are some of the writers that challenged what I thought to be true and opened the door to moral questions that will take more than my lifetime to answer. They find a rock with inscriptions written in Hebrew. After some rough translation and a lot of thought, they realize the slab talks about the logic process of classifying numbers. My experience with Antigone reminds me why I get excited each time I use calculus in physics or art in cooking, and I look forward to a lifetime of making these connections. I am a reader because I am a writer, not the other way around. Neither of the two are mathematicians but they take upon the task and try to glean everything they can from the inscriptions. Somehow, I found the way this scenario was presented to be engaging and allowed me to be drawn into the story. Their first simple conclusion was that any number is the pair of sets to the left and right of that number. The inscription stated that any element of the left set is not greater than or equal to an element of the right setâ€"a very simple idea upon which to build a number system. The work displays the Soviet society under immense repression and how it affects people’s mindsets. It also addresses the relationship between individuals and their community and time. It embraces individualism and faith as compasses to accomplishment. The third aspectâ€"that of conformismâ€"connects the novel with today and calls on the reader to think and reflect more deeply, to search for a unique identity. The experience of reading the story has taught me that raising questions and finding answers should be an indefinite, life-long process. The novel focuses on ways the Soviet regime exerted its power on its people. Coming from a post-Soviet country still struggling with its past, where some adore past times while others despise them, I am interested in how the regime worked to indoctrinate people. Although the novel is not a history book, its presentation of characters helps to crystallize the essence of what the Soviet Union looked like. The fact of it being a literary work has made it easier for me to comprehend and visualize the historical period which was so devastating to my country. The novel helped me understand that the harder an ideology is pushed on people, the harder they will rebel in indirect ways. Specifically, let’s imagine that there were no elements in either the left or right set. Then the statement above about left elements and right elements would still be true as long as one of the sets has nothing. So you would start off with 0, and then you could get -1 and 1 by using 0 in the left or right set, and then it builds that way forever in both directions. It proceeds logically, then showing the recursive nature of numbers and how they build upon previous numbers. The beauty of this notion of sets is this idea that 0 is the origin of numbers. I hope to start answering these questions at St. John’s. The aforementioned aspects signify what makes Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita great in my opinion. Not only do the literary devices make it a wonder to read, but the way it discusses eternal human problems makes it a great book.