Multicultural Reading Notes

Multi-cultural readings

The Egyptian Lover

I don’t quite know what the true meaning to this tall tale might be. It began from the perspective of a young Cleopatra from Egypt but quickly changed to the man she was meeting in Italy. He told of his life with Cleopatra and the struggles he had with his wife. Wanting to leave her but not wanting to really be without her. An accidental mix-up of love letters caused his to lose both women. So what is the moral of the story then? He mentions one quote that seems to tie each characters struggles together though, “what life do we lead, and above all, what life do we learn.” This man made many mistakes over and over yet never learned from them. Both of the women seemed to know of these problems with his fidelity yet allowed it to happen over and over again. Therefore I believe that the idea that the author is trying to get across is that we must learn from the life we lead as to live a better one. Or in other words we can have a wonderful, full and beautiful life but we must learn from our mistakes in order to live it.

Home…Sickness

I loved this story. It seems to relate so much to one of our older writing assignments. It talks about feeling so far from home, missing all the simple luxuries that we take for granted and barely realize we have. But it also discusses the opposing argument, what it is like to return home and miss all the small pleasures that we learned and gained while in our ‘new’ home. In the end the author talks about the feelings you get when you finally return home and you aren’t the same, the things your thought you missed you don’t care about and you begin to noticed what your missing there. This characters entire perspective changed from Africa to Italy and back. I imagine that this is the same sensation that we will experience, the same feelings of happiness and lose when we return home. I think everyone should read this story because I honestly LOVED it.