Students might also be interested in how Swift took material from his own experiences;
they can see how in some situations we feel bigger than our fellows, while in others we
feel humiliatingly small. In either case, though, people need some way of keeping our
perspective--are we really big or small? How do others see us? Gulliver's Travels helps
students see what things they can rightly take pride in without getting too big for their
britches. It suggests that the proper use of reason is not to figure out the mysteries of the
universe but to gain self-knowledge and attain the golden mean so prized by the ancient
Greeks and Romans. As Swift's friend Alexander Pope put it,