Ankita Jain

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Martin Heidegger asks a powerful question: are you truly living, or just going through the motions? His concept of Dasein (“Being-there”) suggests that human life is not detached observation but active involvement in the world — through work, relationships, and everyday actions.

However, most people fall into what he calls “The They,” where life is shaped by social norms and expectations rather than personal choice. In this inauthentic state, individuals follow what others think, do, and value, without questioning their own desires.

Heidegger sees anxiety not as weakness, but as a moment of awakening. It disrupts routine and forces individuals to confront their existence honestly. This leads to his idea of Being-toward-death — recognizing that death is a personal and inevitable reality. Accepting this gives life urgency and pushes people to stop living passively.

From this awareness comes authenticity: taking responsibility for one’s choices and living deliberately. An authentic life embraces individuality and finite existence, while an inauthentic life drifts with the crowd.

Heidegger’s message is clear — stop living on autopilot. A meaningful life begins when you consciously choose how to live it.

Death in Venice is a haunting story about obsession and the destructive power of idealized beauty. It follows Gustav von Aschenbach, a disciplined and respected writer who has lived a life of strict self-control. Feeling exhausted and restless, he travels to Venice in search of inspiration.

At his hotel, he encounters Tadzio, a young boy whose extraordinary beauty captivates him. To Aschenbach, Tadzio becomes more than human — a symbol of perfect, almost divine beauty. His admiration soon turns into silent obsession, as he follows and watches the boy without ever speaking to him.

Meanwhile, a cholera epidemic spreads through Venice, though authorities hide the truth. Aschenbach learns of the danger but chooses to stay, unwilling to lose sight of Tadzio. His physical and mental state deteriorate, symbolized by his attempt to disguise his aging appearance with makeup.

In the end, Aschenbach collapses on the beach, watching Tadzio in the distance. The novella explores the tension between discipline and desire, showing how surrendering completely to beauty can lead not to freedom, but to self-destruction.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43, published in 1850, is one of the most celebrated love poems in the English language. But it is far more than beautiful feeling. It is a rigorous, spiritually ambitious attempt to map love’s full dimensions.

The central conceit is announced immediately — the speaker will count the ways she loves. This is not vague romantic impressionism. It is systematic, almost analytical — an enumeration that discovers love reaching into every level of human experience.

She begins with the most expansive image: love measured to the depth, breadth, and height the soul can reach — cosmic, spatial, all-consuming. Then she moves to the particular: love present in the quiet routines of daily life, in ordinary candlelight and small gestures. Love is not only transcendent. It is also humble and domestic.

Deeper still, she frames love as an active moral choice — not something that overwhelms her, but something she freely wills. This is love as agency, enacted with the full engagement of the moral self.

She then makes a profoundly moving claim: her love for another human being has restored the simple, unquestioning faith of childhood she had lost as an adult. Romantic love becomes a path back to God.
The Petrarchan sonnet form enacts this meaning perfectly — its structured argument mirrors love as thought and reason, not merely feeling.

The poem closes with hope beyond death: that love will continue, purified and intensified, after mortal life ends.
Sonnet 43 endures because it takes love seriously — not just as emotion, but as intellectual inquiry, spiritual experience, and an act of will.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Le Morte d’Arthur

Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel is one of Victorian literature’s most richly human stories — a meditation on love, independence, and the wisdom earned through suffering.

Bathsheba Everdene stands apart from typical Victorian heroines. She inherits a farm, runs it with genuine competence, and refuses to be defined by the men around her. Proud and spirited, she makes serious mistakes but learns from them. Hardy never punishes her simply for daring to be free. Her journey from self-sufficiency to emotional maturity is the novel’s true heart.

Three men orbit her, each representing a distinct kind of love. Gabriel Oak is steadfast, faithful, and quietly selfless — so devoted that he continues serving Bathsheba loyally even after she rejects him and he loses everything. He never manipulates or demands.

He simply remains. Sergeant Troy is Gabriel’s opposite — dashing, exciting, and wholly untrustworthy. Bathsheba marries him impulsively and pays dearly for it. He represents passion without substance: beautiful and ruinous. Boldwood, by contrast, is obsessive and possessive. A thoughtless Valentine card ignites in him a consuming fixation that ends in violence and tragedy — the dark face of love that cannot accept refusal.

The natural world is no mere backdrop. Hardy’s Wessex landscape actively shapes every crisis — storms, cliffs, and harvest rhythms are woven into the plot’s very structure.

The novel’s final union between Bathsheba and Gabriel is not fairy-tale triumph. It is something quieter and truer — two people choosing each other with clear eyes and full hearts.
Hardy’s argument is simple and profound: the most enduring love is not the most passionate. It is the most patient.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Folk tradition is humanity’s oldest form of cultural expression — a living system of knowledge, identity, and belonging passed down through generations long before formal institutions existed.

Folk Narratives are the stories communities tell themselves. Myths explain sacred origins and cosmological beliefs. Legends connect people to local history and place. Folktales teach values through moral entertainment. Fables use animals to deliver clear lessons, while fairy tales explore magic and transformation, affirming that patience and goodness ultimately prevail. Even the briefest forms carry weight — proverbs distil generational wisdom, riddles celebrate cleverness, and jokes allow communities to question authority and speak uncomfortable truths.

Folk Music serves a different but equally vital purpose. Built on simple, repetitive structures designed for collective participation, folk songs are tools for community bonding. When people sing together, they affirm shared identity, shared history, and shared emotion. Folk music is not meant for passive audiences — it is meant to be joined.

Folk Performance — ritual, seasonal plays, and role-playing — is where tradition becomes most vividly alive. Festivals and ceremonies mark life’s great transitions: birth, marriage, harvest, death. Repeated communally, these rituals renew social bonds and reinforce collective values. Folk theatre creates imaginative space to explore power, identity, and social roles.

Together, these three pillars serve overlapping but distinct functions: narratives explain and instruct, music bonds and preserves memory, performance enacts and renews shared values.
Far from primitive, folk tradition is the living cultural intelligence of a people — endlessly adaptable and endlessly human.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​