Disputing the Canon I was at my best when I realized that Shakespeare was truly great. During my freshman year of high school, I took an English class with an esteemed teacher, Mr. Broza, acclaimed as the Shakespeare aficionado of Paul D. Schreiber High School, founder of Schreiber's annual Shakespeare Day, and, perhaps most touching of all, a self-proclaimed lover of Shakespeare, whose posters of the Bard could be found as wallpaper in his small office. How lucky I thought I was. Indeed, if I wanted to appreciate Hamlet, I was in the right hands. But how misguided I was, at least in Walker Percy's eyes. In his essay “The Creature's Loss,” Percy recalls a scene from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter:…the girl hides in the bushes to hear the Capehart in the big house play Beethoven. Maybe she was the lucky one after all. Think of the unhappy souls inside you, who see the record, worry about the scratches and above all worry about whether they will get it, whether they are true music lovers. What's the best way to listen to Beethoven: sitting quietly around the Capehart or eavesdropping from an azalea bush? (521)Percy here contrasts two different approaches to viewing art: the girl who informally and spontaneously encounters the work of art, out of context, as opposed to the "unhappy souls inside" who formally prepare themselves for a sort of pre-packaged listening . experience. Percy wonders what is best: a question intended for the reader's reflection. But his essay offers its answer: we can truly see or hear a work of art only through “the decay of those structures designed to aid the tourist” (514). Maybe Percy is right: it would have been better if my experience with Hamlet had been an accident... middle of paper... such great heights to which I could leap, so many territories to discover awaiting my arrival. Works CitedBloom, Harold. The Western Canon. Harcourt, 1994. “Borges, Jorge Luis; Joyce, James; Shakespeare, William. Columbia Encyclopedia. 6th ed. 2000.Gould, Stephen Jay. “The brain of women”. Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. 2nd ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 305-10.Nietzsche, Friedrich. The birth of tragedy and other writings. Ed. Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs. Trans. Ronald Speirs. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. Percy, Walker. “The loss of the creature”. Ways of reading. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston: Bedford, 1996. Winterson, Jeanette. "The semiotics of sex". Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. 2nd ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 642-51.