Blog Due 3/26

     After reading Henry David Thoreau's "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For", "Our Picture of the Universe" by Stephen Hawking, and Ruth Benedict's "The Individual and the Pattern of Culture", I discovered that they address several questions in the "Essential Questions" handout. While all three readings have an abstract connection, each reading answers different questions from the handout that are more specific to the topic and its purpose. First, in "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" by Thoreau, he begins his piece of writing by describing a peaceful scene where he describes what Walden Pond looks like where he worked cutting down pines that were to be used as timber to build himself a home. In his writing, Thoreau describes many modern commodities as unnecessary and redundant in a sense. He insists that we do not really need things like newspapers and post offices. While he has a valid argument, I disagree with him. Simple things like that make day-to-day tasks much more simpler and improve our quality of life in general. Yes, they make life a little more complicated, so I would agree with him on that. In "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For", Thoreau emphasizes the simplicity and beauty of humanity and nature and how we need to appreciate it much more than we do. Sometimes we take for granted the little things, but we should not, because we may never get them back.
     The second piece of writing, "Our Picture of the Universe" by Stephen Hawking, unlike Thoreau, focuses more on ideologies and beliefs.  In his writing, Stephen Hawking focuses on explaining why society should focus on sharing one simple ideology. He goes into physics and talks about Newton but makes it a point that it is flawed and it does not accurately represent the theory of the entirety of humanity as a whole. I feel like Thoreau and Hawking kind of had the same argument, but Thoreau took a more simplistic route and Hawking took it up a notch and went in depth, taking a more scientific approach.
     Finally, the third reading, "The Individual and the Pattern of Culture" written by Ruth Benedict, takes yet another different route to state her argument. In "The Individual and the Pattern of Culture", Benedict correlates and establishes a connection between society and the infamous "social structure". Benedict describes every social status and explains how they all come together to form a whole. I agree with Benedict's argument that the culture that we are born into shapes us, but there may always be exceptions. Her argument may not apply to everyone out there, so I believe she should have included a sort of gray area for those that do not necessarily conform to society.