Justin Cohen Period 2 (Late Blog #1) for Class on 9/27/19

Modern Mythology 2020

Aim: How can we create and define the value of ancient mythology in contemporary society?

   

  In class today, we spoke about the Icarus story. To summarize, Icarus is given artificial wings and is told specifically “Do NOT fly close to the sun”. We read poems and looked at a painting depicting the event. One of the poems was “Musee des Beaux Arts” which explains how a sailor saw the boy falling into the water at a distance. Despite this, he casually sails on as he seems to be in a rush to get to his destination.  The other poem, “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus” describes a farmer who is completely oblivious to the fact that Icarus is drowning. These taught us all about perspective. The first poem is showing a lack of sympathy by the sailor while the second poem just depicts a lack of knowledge by the farmer. While you are having the absolute worst day of your life, someone is having the best day of their life and vice versa. As we can see, Icarus drowning is just an extremely small part of the “bigger picture” both literally and figuratively. We also learned about “hubris” meant excessive pride and “hamartia” meant “major flaw”. Icarus’ hamartia happened to be hubris.