Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Reading Analysis for Milton, Shakespeare, and Schiff

In John Milton's "When I consider how my light is spent," William Shakespeare's "My mistress; eyes are nothing like the sun," and Stacy Schiff's "Know It All: Can Wikipedia Conquer Experience," the main idea is that human beings will acknowledge the imperfections in themselves, their loved ones, and the materials they utilize, and yet they will not stray from what they know. If these imperfections are not fixable, we find a way to accept them. We come to depend on them, even though we know they are not perfect.



In Milton's poem, he expresses his concern that he has not served God to the fullest because of his blindness. He feels that he could not fulfill his duties as well as someone without his impairment. He compares his life to Jesus' parable of talents who did not obey him. However, Milton reverses his concern by the end of the poem by stating "They also serve who only stand and wait," (line 14). He comes to accept his blindness and that he can serve God by waiting to find out what his duty is. He is aware of his imperfection, but he realizes that he can still be faithful to his Master. This poem is connected to Shakespeare's poem because the speaker is describing all of his lover's imperfections. She is not beautiful or graceful and in fact it seems that the speaker can hardly stand her. Yet she is his love, and he tolerates all of her flaws for love.



The last reading is Schiff's article about Wikipedia. She describes how popular this site has become. According to the article, the has become the 17th most popular site on the web. You really can find information about anything on it. Even though it is a wonderful source of information, it has many flaws. Anyone can edit an article and put whatever information they want on it. The article states "nothing about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse," (Schiff, page 2). Although people understand that all the information they read may not be completely true, they still use it because it is so helpful. There are articles that go in depth about Islam in Iceland, according to Schiff's article. Not too many other sites are going to have that. So, we humans are aware of imperfections in our daily lives, but we learn to cope with them because we can't always find a way around them.

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