Thank you all for the lively discussion and lovely quotes today 🙂 Some “visions” are definitely needed for essay writing!
Don’t forget that your Essay II will be due in THREE days time. Make sure you pick TWO authors (one has to be English) of the same period from different columns on the author list (Learn). You should be allowed to discuss any text on your EL2 reading list (Learn). If you have got any questions, feel free to email me.
Next week we are going to look at Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. (Look on the bright side, it is no Bleak House, 750 pages long!). It is around 270 pages long so try to begin your reading early and check out the questions when you can.
Also, we will have individual tasks again next week. Remember to upload/leave your statement/quotation onto this website (by clicking on “leave a comment” beneath this post). Plz do so by NEXT TUESDAY so that your class would be given enough time to read through these quotations.
Work hard so we can “play” next week!
Jo's Wonderland 
Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man’s work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right–agreed.
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
-Two Tramps in Mud Time by Robert Frost
Love and need. Work and play. How appropriate!
A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived in him.
– Pablo Neruda
Well said! Child is the Father/Mother of Man/Woman!
What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it. Who was it who said ‘Blessed is the man who has found his work’? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work – not somebody else’s work. The work that is really a man’s work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man’s work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world.
Mark Twain, A Humorist’s Confession
How timely it is to read this right after our essay submission! Writing is indeed playing 😉
Feel free to comment on each other’s quotes if you would like. Time to play more!
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Is that why Dickinson writes that “Boys that ‘believe’ are very lonesome -“?
Wait. She also writes this …
We play at Paste –
Till qualified, for Pearl –
Then, drop the Paste –
And deem ourself a fool – (Fr282)
Article in The Times 17th November: Marguerite Hunter Blair, chief executive of the group Play Scotland and a mother of five, said placing a statutory duty on councils to provide childcentred outdoor spaces was a “brave” step by the Scottish government. “Play is easily relegated to something that is not important,” she said. “But we believe it is an essential part of the social investment we need to make in our children and young people.Children benefit hugely from playing outside. They pick up a wide variety of life skills: how to get on with their peers, how to resolve differences, as well build self-confidence and self-reliance.”
Tom Robbins – “Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”
Can’t agree more!
“It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.”
Good question. Is reading a novel learning or playing?
“A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave.” – Benjamin Franklin
😀 😀 😀
Indeed, these two qualities are sometimes difficult to separate …
“The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.”
Carl Gustav Jung
Carl Jung is a very playful writer indeed 😉
“The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”
Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
Another quote that makes one smile 🙂
“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.”
– Neil Gaiman
How true …
‘the fathers could dance upon rolling casks, stand upon bottles, catch knives and balls, twirl hand-basins, ride upon any
thing, jump over everything, and stick at nothing…there was a remarkable…childness about these people’.e (Dickens, Hard Times) I think Dickens captures the unstructured, chaotic, energetic and risk taking nature that is so important children’s play in his description of the circus.
Also really like Callam’s point about the importance of childcentered out door spaces to play in!
Good point! Maybe one outdoor tutorial sometime soon 😉
Some quotes from D.W. Winnicott’s book, The Child, The Family and The Outside World
‘playing is always exciting because it deals with the existence of a precarious borderline between the subjective and the which can be objectively percieved’
‘in their play we find the gateway to the unconscious’
‘play, like dreams, serves the function of self revelation’
Playing is like dreaming indeed!