please be nice and help me

[mike-eustace]

:nod: i have two days to write an essay 'explore the harmonious consciousness of seperate entities discuss arguements and examples from literature'

HELP HELP HELP

Where do i start? can anyone think of any supporting literature? if poss. not too complex...i don't have much time...

[RobinHood3000]

Well, you could try Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but that wasn't exactly "harmonious..."

[mike-eustace]

the image that keeps coming to my mind is the way that you can watch a crowd of people (eg. london rush hour) all avoiding each other, all aware of what others are doing. they snkae in and out of obstacles intuitively. is this an image that reminds anyone of a passage in a novel?

[Petrarch's Love]

I can't think of a passage in a novel, but your description of London commuters reminded me of a section from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Wasteland". It's toward the end of the first section ("The Burial of the Dead"), and begins:

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet,
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street...

He is describing just the sort of rush hour scene you referred to. The poem as a whole would probably be applicable to your topic, however you might want to use a fairly well annotated edition since it's a pretty complex poem with many subtle literary allusions (for example, in the quote above the line "I had not thought death had undone so many" is taken from Dante's Inferno and thus compares the crowded city sidewalks in Eliot's poem to the crowding of hell in Dante's).

For a more positive take on "an harmonious conciousness of seperate entities" you might wish to look at John Donne's meditation XVII in his Devotions upon emergent Occasions. The best known passage begins "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." and ends with the famous line "Don't ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Best of luck!

[BSturdy]

Bit of post mania at the moment, but I do have to comment that the crowd idea is inspired - always occurs to me when I cannot avoid somewhere like Oxford Street. Go for it.

Sorry i have racked my brain for references - I just think of shoals of fish and people dancing and the so called 'temporary automonous zone'.

Not very helpful but you have a great idea!