In these three readings I found most of my wonder and attention in “Pleasures of the Imagination”, by Joseph Addison. He made my thoughts think. If that makes sense to any of you who read it? He used beautiful language to really portray a very intuitive sense we are all blessed with, and some not so fortunate. Vision and sight are definitely one of the only senses that can grasp every other sense. You can feel, smell, hear, and of course see things through sight and the storage of memory. My favorite part of this was his random capitalizing of letters in words in the article and the allusions to figures such as “Sir Francis Bacon”. The best image that tied his whole sense of ‘sight creating imagination’ was his vision of a prisoner behind bars that could see through memory and imagination a world of freedom and things. Our imagination is how ideas are created, inventions are developed and individuality is born. Human civilization would have gone no where throughout history if it weren’t for vision and imagination.
In “On Taste”, by Edmund Burke, the sense of people preferring different “things” as in food, art, colors, activities, also create a sense of individuality. He hits on the fact that judgement and preference can be the best factor in identity of one’s passions and ‘tastes’. If you look at all the cultures of Europe, they are all different, then the people within those cultures are different, then the families are different. There is a never-ending separation in differences that create identity.
“An Essay on Criticism”, by Alexander Pope is a great portrayance of language used in the older English-speaking times. He speaks of judgment and differences that make us all different and imperfect most importantly. My favorite line in this entire poem is about mistakes:
“T’ avoid great Errors, must the less commit, 
Neglect the Rules each Verbal Critick lays,
For not to know some Trifles, is a Praise.”
I really enjoyed all of these pieces, intertwining and playing with the fact that we all are very different but it is our differences in passion, approval, judgements, and variations that make the universe compatible.