Part 1 of Essay
Stories do not need to inform us of anything. They do inform us of things. From The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, we know 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 ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... the philosophy of the Tao, Alan Watts explains what he believes Lao-tzu means by the line, "The five colors will blind a man's sight. The eye's sensitivity to color," Watts writes, "is impaired by the fixed idea that there are just five true colors. There is an infinite continuity of shading, and breaking it down into divisions with names distracts the attention from its subtlety" . Similarly, the mind's sensitivity to the meaning of life is impaired by fixed notions or perspectives on what it means to b ....