Reflective Essay 'On Learning To Read'

Chandlor Ratcliffe

Professor Lisa Wall

English 1301-N11

19 October 2014

On Learning to Read Reading has taught me to use my imagination. It has shown me the path to clear reasoning, and it has repeatedly furthered my education. Endlessly it builds me up, and occasionally to do so it must first break me down. To that end, I've been lead into and out of delusions conceived by respected tomes, and shown paradox. Even when in those deeply negative spaces, the inverse of their lessons taught favorable things. I learned to draw a line between what is and isn't real, and I've been taught to recognize incredibly circular reason by the many books and the people that I've encountered. When I was a child, my parents would often answer my questions

Because things cannot both exist and not exist simultaneously in the macroscopic universe, I was allowed to conceive for the first time that this foundation that I had carefully built my entire life and thought process upon was not only flawed, but impossible. This troubled me greatly, so I dove deeper and deeper into the text to find a way to refute that contradiction; I hunted for text to defend against the circle I was lead through. Instead of finding what I wanted, I discovered the veracity of its impossibility by uncovering more and more contradictory messages in the book. The book, in the end, was insufficient to explain everything in terms relatable to reality, and it failed to explain adequately much of anything consistently in terms of itself. Later, I would learn from Douglas Hofstadter that “Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says that any system which is 'sufficiently powerful' is, by virtue of its power, incomplete,” (Hofstadter 101). The book I was examining was extremely powerful; it reasoned about itself. That level of power is precisely what Gödel's theorem would deem sufficiently powerful. A system of that power can't be both true to itself and encompass everything expressible; it can't be consistent and complete. This realization provided final closure to the

When Douglas discovered The Columbian Orator, he declared that “Every opportunity [he] got, [he] read that book,” (Douglas 637); when I discovered my selection of texts, I could hardly put them down. I read a vast wealth of books from Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle, to Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. They helped me escape the world and explore grand new ideas. I dove into Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce, and A Book of Abstract Algebra by Charles C. Pinter to learn, and to grow. Each of these has contributed further to my understanding of good writing, and equally to the way I look at the world. Paolini's books shaped my imagination and confidence. Hofstadter's gave me deep philosophical insights into both the world, and my mind. Pierce and Pinter gave me a working understanding of the fields I intend to pursue. All of these books, and the countless unmentioned volumes that lie between and within them, are responsible for who and what I am today, both as a person and a