Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Philosophy Students...

How does the following passage relate to existentialism?

"It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, and through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant;- the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered childless and absolved of all mortality- old Priam reft of his old wife and outlived all his sons." THE BEAR, by William Faulkner

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