My Confusion (And Perhaps Denial) Regarding the Nature and Core of this Course

The Secular Scripture seems to be a foundational text for this course. It's everything we're being taught in this class wrapped up into a nice little paperback. Perhaps not everything, but a large, overarching chunk. Something Frye discussed sparked an interesting thought in me. He discusses criticisms of Scott, noting "that much of the criticism of Scott attempted to assimilate him to standards that were not his." I think this is something that we as humans do every day. From science to uttering the words "I love you," we judge interactions or works or accomplishments based on our prior understanding of related concepts rather than often being open to new and different interpretations. In science, we think something new and different is outrageous rather than remembering that our "science" is a set of explanations we use to describe the world around us and that it may not be the only correct set of explanations. When someone says "I love you," we assume we know what they mean (Alison does this, stating that Nicholas doesn't love her and that he doesn't feel as she does) rather than asking what that means. Does Alison really know that Nicholas doesn't love her? Is she accurate in stating that he cannot feel like she can? Perhaps it's different, but does that mean it's not still love or emotion?

So we're basing this class off of the notion that the past possesses the present; that themes are played out over and over again throughout time, that the same stories are told, that the same few myths are constantly being recreated and relived. But how do we know this is really true? How do we know that we're not simply making connections that aren't really there or inferring things based on one understanding rather than being open to all of the individual differences? Yes, we see similarities between the stories that have been told for centuries and the lives of people living right now. But how do we know that those similarities truly exist? How do we know that we didn't bunch the stories together because we didn't have the language and concepts to differentiate them? How do we know we didn't make all of these connections to simplify things because everything is truly different? This is something we will likely never know because we cannot separate ourselves from our language and our experiences. I can neither think about nor communicate this idea without using the very words that limit me. So, to a certain extent, perhaps I have no choice other than to resign to the notion that the same myths are repeated throughout time. Part of me thinks there may be something else going on, but I have neither the language nor the intellectual depth to say what it is. Something just feels off about all of this. I can't say I know what it is, but it's hard for me to believe that our lives can be so simplified into such a small collection of stories, re-appropriated century after century after century.