tability and pandemonium, wherein literature was used as an instrument for this objective. And for me, this was how literature functioned in a class-divided society. Literature is a product of life and about life. Literature gives order to our human experiences, explores cultural values, and demands emotional response from the reader. Literature is like a great journey, wherein it can show us things that we've never seen before and in the process, we will never forget. And for people like me, who's a part of a Filipino university like the Ateneo, I see literature as a rich background from which to learn vocabulary, to accumulate knowledge about written language, develop literary and literacy skills, and deepen my sensibilities. That aside from being just concerned with petty and trivial matters like boy-girl relationships, socialization, clothes, etc., which is very much the case among students in the Ateneo, literature helps us carry away something of value - an understanding, a new awareness, a feeling of pleasure about life. In a very real sense, life illuminates literature just as much as literature illuminates life. Literature helps us see the beauty in things but at the same time grounds us from reality. One may think that literature does not have a use anymore in this workaday world, where we mostly concern ourselves with banal matters and tend to forget about more important things about life and nature. Literature offers us with rich human experiences of life and nature through which we can relate to with our own personal experiences. Literature serves as a model of humanistic values, principles, and ideals, which makes available an atmosphere conducive to the richest exchange of feelings and ideas. Literature gives a "slice of life" to instruct or to entertain or even to disturb us and to make us feel and to make us think. And in this commonplace world that we live in, we normally just content ourselves to live ...
