From my understanding, this course is titled, "Tracings" to exemplify the idea that all that was is what continues to be. In other words, nothing is ever lost, but traces persist into the future. Everything is connected in some way or another. I have already begun to realize this in our readings and class discussions. One parallel that I made was the idea of arriving where you start. This idea is perhaps most apparent in TS Eliot's The Four Quartets. The following passage is written:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
In James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the text begins mid sentence. The text also ends with an unfinished sentence. Therefore, in order to finish the last sentence, one must go back to the beginning of the book. It becomes, in a sense, a cycle of sorts. This cycle can also be seen in Dante's Four Levels of Interpretation. The levels of interpretation are arranged in a clockwise fashion, going from Literal to Allegorical to Moral to Anagogical and then back to Literal. Though I'm sure I have already encountered many other examples of arriving where you start already in this class, these three examples stood out to me the most.
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