I have always considered the age of Enlightenment an age of reason. People dare to know the unknown and question authority. The pursuit of knowledge equates to the pursuit of happiness. Some may argue that it is an age of feelings. Revolutions were brewing: regimes collapsed; rights formed; economic principles emerged; men and women of letters heatedly debated. Among all the narratives for the Enlightenment, in my mind imagination hardly comes into play. Yet the semester-long seminar alters my understanding of the age: it is an age that not only epitomizes humanity’s pursuit of knowledge. It is an age of imagination, bringing both potential and perils.

 Inspired by an age-old Soviet Union joke, the White Paper Protest took thousands of Chinese people to the street in major cities in China. People hold a blank sheet of paper with nothing written on it. As the first actual mass protest after the Tiananmen Movement in 1989, the message at first seems too easy to understand: people are arguing against the loss of freedom of speech. The protest ultimately faded as the country significantly loosened its Covid policies immediately after the outbreak of demonstrations. But one question lingers: was it really about freedom of speech, democracy, or zero-Covid policy?

 Jesmyn Ward’s poignant memoir Men We Reaped tackles the interplay between inequality and education in poverty-stricken southern black communities in Mississippi. In recounting the deaths of four childhood friends and her brother Joshua, Ward sheds light on racial, class, and gender inequality honestly. Education both ameliorates and exacerbates inequality in her community – it is a matter of who is receiving quality education and who is not. Throughout the book, Jesmyn Ward does not explicitly place any blame on any individual or event. A sense of helplessness and grief permeates her text, and everyone in the community seems doomed to certain predestined ends. However, she does allude to some larger mechanism and system looming behind this inevitability, which she advocates for changes and societal support with profound emotions.

 The Tempest and The Forbidden Planet emphasize two different perceptions of risk in human attitudes towards technology, or power beyond unaided human ability. In The Tempest, technology first appears threatful and dangerous in the storm initiated by Prospero and then evolves into harmless in epilogue. The power itself is an instrumental means to achieve human ends. The opposite movement happens in The Forbidden Planet, where technology moves from seemingly beneficial to destructive and even fatal. The film seems to the perils to chase technology as ends in itself while forgetting its instrumentality.