Eighteenth lecture for my students in English 165EW, "Life After the End of the World," winter 2013 at UC Santa Barbara. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/w13/

1. Lecture 18: »Du mußt dein Leben ändern«
English 165EW
Winter 2013
13 March 2013
“Destiny always seems decades away, but suddenly
it’s not decades away; it’s right now. But maybe
destiny is always right now, right here, right this very
instant, maybe.”
— Brother Joshua in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A
Canticle for Leibowitz

2. The Epic of Gilgamesh
● One of the oldest surviving works of literature.
– Dates to at least the 18th century BCE in its earliest
form.
● Early Sumerian poems are combined into an epic
in Akkadian around the 12th century BCE.
● Reconstructed based on recovery of partial stone
tablets, on which the epic was carved.
● Was likely influential on the Bible, including the
books of Genesis, Daniel, and Ecclesiastes.
● For our purposes, Gilgamesh is also notable as a
very early work of transhumanism.

3. Sample Final Exam Questions
Section I: Name/idea identifications. Pick
five of the following items. For each, explain in
your blue book, in approximately four to five
sentences, where the term occurs and what its
definition is, as well as what its relevance
and/or significance are. (5 points each.)
– Mourning

4. Section II: Quote identifications. Pick five of
the following passages. In your blue book,
identify the name of the work from which the
quote comes, the author of the work, who is
speaking in the passage quoted, and, in 1-2
sentences, describe its broader significance to
the work from which it is drawn and/or the
larger concerns of the course. (4 points each.)
“The man thought he seemed some sad and
solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of
a traveling spectacle in the shire and village who
does not know that behind him the players have all
been carried off by wolves.”

5. Section II: Quote identifications. Pick five of
the following passages. In your blue book,
identify the name of the work from which the
quote comes, the author of the work, who is
speaking in the passage quoted, and, in 1-2
sentences, describe its broader significance to
the work from which it is drawn and/or the
larger concerns of the course. (4 points each.)
“The man thought he seemed some sad and
solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of
a traveling spectacle in the shire and village who
does not know that behind him the players have all
been carried off by wolves.” (The narrator in
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, 78)

6. Section III: Short answer. Pick four of the
following questions. In your blue book, answer
each in a paragraph of approximately five to eight
sentences. In each case, you should connect your
answer to specific details (though not necessarily
textual quotations) from course texts. (You may
use optional readings to answer these questions if
you believe it is appropriate.) (5 points each.)
Section IV: Essay. Pick only one and write an
essay addressing it. Regardless of which option
you choose, your essay must make reference to
at least four texts that appeared on the syllabus
this quarter, including at least two novels. (You
are certainly welcome to treat movies – and
optional readings – as course texts.) (35 points)

7. Oryx’s education
“In the village it was not called ‘selling,’ this transaction.
The talk about it implied apprenticeship. The children
were being trained to earn their living in the wide world:
this was the gloss put on it. Besides, if they stayed
where they were, what was there for them to do?” (116;
ch. 6)
“Oryx was sold to a man who made movies. She was
the only one of them that went with the movie man. […]
He asked her wouldn’t she like to be in a movie. She’d
never seen a movie so she didn’t know whether she
would like it or not; but it sounded like an offer of a treat,
so she said yes. By this time she was good at knowing
when yes was the expected answer.” (136; ch. 6)

8. “So I learned about life,” said Oryx.
“Learned what?” said Jimmy. He shouldn’t have
had the pizza, and the weed they’d smoked on
top of that. He was feeling a little sick.
“That everything has a price.”
“Not everything. That can’t be true. You can’t
buy time. You can’t buy …” He wanted to say
love, but hesitated. It was too soppy.
“You can’t buy it, but it has a price,” said Oryx.
“Everything has a price.”
“Not me,” said Jimmy, trying to joke. “I don’t
have a price.”
Wrong, as usual. (139; ch. 6)

9. Seeing the Real
“But Jimmy, you should know. All sex is real.” (144;
ch. 6)
“She [Oryx] turned into the camera and there it was
again, that look, that stare, the stare that went right
into him [Jimmy] and saw him as he truly was.”
(308; ch. 12)
“Rich was just a thing you learned to tell.” (136; ch.
6)
“Perhaps they’ll say, These things are not real. They
are phantasmagoria. They were made by dreams,
and now that no one is dreaming them any longer
they are crumbling away.” (222; ch. 9)

10. “Of course (said Oryx), having a money value was
no substitute for love. Every child should have
love, every person should have it. She herself
would rather have had her mother’s love – the
love she still continued to believe in, the love that
had followed her through the jungle in the form of
a bird so she would not be too frightened or lonely
– but love was undependable, it came and then it
went, so it was good to have a money value,
because then at least those who wanted to make
a profit from you would make sure you were fed
enough and not damaged too much. Also there
were many people who had neither love nor a
money value, and having one of these things was
better than having nothing.” (126; ch. 6)

11. What Do People Want?
“What people want is perfection,” said the
man. “In themselves.”
“But they need the steps to it to be pointed
out,” said the woman.
“In simple order,” said the man.
“With encouragement,” said the woman. “And
a positive attitude.”
“They like to hear about the before and the
after,” said the man. “It’s the art of the possible.
But with no guarantees, of course.” (246; ch. 10)

12. Crake still had a collection of fridge magnets, but
they were different ones. No more science quips.
Where God is, Man is not.
There are two moons, the one you can see and
the one you can’t.
Du musz dein Leben andern.
We understand more than we know.
I think, therefore.
To stay human is to break a limitation.
Dream steals from its lair towards its prey.
(301; ch. 12)

13. Ranier Maria Rilke, „Archaischer Torso Apollos“
Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,
sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.
Sonst stünde dieser Stein enstellt und kurz
unter der Shultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;
und brächte nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

14. Ranier Maria Rilke, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo”
(tr. Stephen Mitchell)
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.