Free Epic of Gilgamesh Essays: Defining Humanity in Gilgamesh :: Epic Gilgamesh essays

Defining Humanity in The Epic of Gilgamesh Fifteen Works Cited     Stories do not need to claim us of anything. They do inform us of things. From The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, we fill in something of the people who lived in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the second and third millenniums BCE. We know they celebrated a king named Gilgamesh we know they believed in many gods we know they were self-conscious of their own cultivation of the natural world and we know they were literate. These things we can fix -- or establish definitely. But stories overly remind us of things we cannot fix -- of what it means to be human. They reflect our will to understand what we cannot understand, and reconcile us to mortality.             We read The Epic of Gilgamesh, four thousand old age after it was written, in part because we are scholars, or pseudo-scholars, and wish to get a line something about human hi story. We read it as well because we want to know the significance of life. The meaning of life, however, is not something we can wrap up and walk away with. Discussing the philosophy of the Tao, Alan Watts explains what he believes Lao-tzu means by the line, The five colours will dodge a mans sight. The eyes sensitivity to color, Watts writes, is impaired by the fixed idea that there are just five true colors. in that location is an infinite continuity of shading, and disruption it down into divisions with names distracts the attention from its subtlety (27). Similarly, the minds sensitivity to the meaning of life is impaired by fixed notions or perspectives on what it means to be human. There is an infinite continuity of meaning that can be comprehended only by seeing again, for ourselves. We read stories -- and reading is a kind of re-telling -- not to learn what is known but to know what cannot be known, for it is ongoing and we are in the middle of it.     & nbsp       To see for ourselves the meaning of a story, we need, first of all, to look carefully at what happens in the story that is, we need to look at it as if the actions and people it describes actually took place or existed. We can articulate the questions raised by a characters actions and discuss the implications of their consequences.