I have dedicated five years of my life to studying literature, and I vividly remember what my professor said on the last day of my class “Literature is the only medium through which you can live more than once and the study of literature makes you tolerant towards others”.

When we read a literary text, we’re not simply reading it, but living the life of someone else through the words written on the pages. You experience emotions such as grief, sadness, anger and happiness for characters that aren’t even real, you feel for them and that makes you tolerant towards people in real life.

All those famous writers we read, wrote during different times, under different political and cultural circumstances, many even faced exile and persecution for the simple act of writing what’s on their mind. Literature has a lot of power, it can shape the society and make it a better place but that would only be possible if people start giving literature the importance it deserves.

You read novels like Beloved, Things Fall Apart, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Hungry Tide etc., and realize that life is not all about you. These novels gave me the chance to recognize my privilege and feel for the slaves that were treated like animals in the US, or how European Colonizers ruined perfectly well civilizations for their own gain. Reading these novels made me thankful that I didn’t have to endure such difficulties but it also helped me to see things from a different perspective.

When I’m sad, I pick up a copy of my favourite novel and it makes me realize that I’m not alone, the characters too are suffering and it indirectly means that the writer too, suffered, and that’s why he/she was able to write something so devastatingly beautiful. Literature makes me feel less lonely in an otherwise lonely world of mine.

Rene Descartes was a great French philosopher and mathematician during the 17th century. He is considered as a precursor to the Rationalist school of thought, and due to his vast contributions to the fields of philosophy and mathematics, he is often known as the ‘Father of Modern Philosophy.’

The Latin phrase “cogito, ergo sum” is a translation of Descartes’ original French statement, “Je pense, donc, je suis.” The argument that is usually summarized as “cogito, ergo sum” appears first in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, where he attempts to build an entire philosophical system with no prior assumptions. He reasons that since all his beliefs have been derived from potentially misleading sense data or potentially fallacious logic, he can trust nothing that he has hitherto taken to be true. That is to say, he decides to systematically doubt all that could conceivably be doubted. He discovers the one thing that he cannot doubt is his own existence. After all, he claims, something nonexistent is incapable even of the act of doubting. Thus the formulation, “I think, therefore I am”, was the starting point of his philosophy.

There are three important notes to keep in mind here. First, he claims only the certainty of his own existence from the first­person point of view — he has not proved the existence of other minds at this point. This is something that has to be thought through by each of us for ourselves, as we follow the course of the meditations. Second, he does not say that his existence is necessary; he says that if he thinks, then necessarily he exists (see the instantiation principle). Third, this proposition “I am, I exist” is held true not based on a deduction or on empirical induction but on the clarity and self­-evidence of the proposition.

The proposition is sometimes given as “dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum.” This fuller form was penned by the eloquent French literary critic, Antoine Léonard Thomas, in an award-winning 1765 essay in praise of Descartes, where it appeared as “Puisque je doute, je pense; puisque je pense, j’existe.” In English, this is “Since I doubt, I think; since I think I exist”; with rearrangement and compaction, “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am”, or in Latin, “dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum”.

According to many Descartes specialists, including Étienne Gilson, the goal of Descartes in establishing this first truth is to demonstrate the capacity of his criterion — the immediate clarity and distinctiveness of self­evident propositions — to establish true and justified propositions despite having adopted a method of generalized doubt. As a consequence of this demonstration, Descartes considers science and mathematics to be justified to the extent that their proposals are established on a similarly immediate clarity, distinctiveness, and self­evidence that presents itself to the mind.