Therefore, I am apologizing for the quality, or rather the lack thereof, in this blog post. I'm not really sure what exactly this post should be like, so I am going to try one thing and see if it works. If not... well, at the very least I shall attempt to curb some of my random tangents.
Well.
So far in literature, we have covered The Nutcracker, by E. T. A. Hoffman, The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry, and some selections from Pu-Song Ling (a Chinese guy) and Basho (the penname of a Japanese guy).
I must confess that I didn't get much out of the latter two authors. The fable by Ling wasn't hard to understand, but let's just say stories involving lust make me cringe and move on. Let Us Never Speak Of This Again. As for the poetry (mainly haikus) and prose by Basho... hmm... I agree with Dr. Brewton. I found the simple elegance of the prose a lot more involving than the haikus. I just don't understand poetry at the best of times (unless it tells a story, and then I may like it), and haikus wrack my poor brain.
It also doesn't help that whenever I think of haikus my brain jumps to The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan- third in the Percy Jackson series- where Apollo keeps spouting off horrible haikus. (They go something like this: "Sun breaks through the clouds/ Artemis pleads for my help/ I am so awesome.") And then I think of the funny line: "Let's go see if we roasted anyone important," and I am officially no longer concentrating.
I did try!
Now that my very extended apology is over, I shall forge ahead into the body of my blog post. (Blog posts aren't too much like letters, but I think some similarities should exist.)
The theme that struck me the most through our various reading selections so far was the theme of a quest, of going on a life-changing search for something or someone. In The Nutcracker, the astrologer and the clock-maker (a.k.a. Drosselmeier) go on a search for the special golden nut and the special boy who hasn't shaved or worn boots to crack it and offer it to the disfigured princess in a suitably dramatic fashion. The question of how the astrologer is able to learn all that from studying the stars aside, the end result is the two go on a quest through many foreign countries and cities. Ironically, they find both the boy and the nut in a city close to home (Leipzig springs to mind, but I could be wrong).
As I admitted in my normal blog, reading The Nutcracker reminded me greatly of the anime Princess Tutu. This was primarily because there was also a character named Drosselmeyer who told stories, even if PT's Drosselmeyer was far more sinister. PT also involved a quest. Duck (the main character, who transforms into the eponymous Princess Tutu) is on a quest to find all the heart shards lost by Prince Mytho so his feelings will be restored. As the anime goes on, finding the shards involves greater and greater effort, until at the end Duck must give up everything, becoming just an ordinary duck once more instead of a human girl, in order to complete her quest and free the prince from his nigh-soulless existence.
(Dr. Brewton said to make our blog interactive. Therefore, I am posting this video again, in hopes that I will convert someone to Princess Tutu.)
To continue with the theme of going on a quest, there is also my latest fixation: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. If you know anything at all about the movie or the book, you know that the 13 Dwarves in The Hobbit are on a quest to their lost homeland of Erebor (a.k.a the Lonely Mountain), which was invaded and taken from them by the malicious dragon, Smaug. In the book, the Dwarves seem more concerned with getting their gold back, while in the movie their desire to have their home back is emphasized more. I like the change, since it makes the Dwarves more relatable. Also, it emphasizes the fact that in Dwarf culture they value their homelands (Moria, Erebor) in ways that non-Dwarves find hard to empathize with.
It isn't the Dwarves' fault that returning to their homelands tends to involve waking up nasty beasties that would have been better left asleep...
Ironically, The Lord of the Rings is not a quest in the true sense. The Fellowship does not set out to find some object that will save Middle-earth. Instead, they have set out to destroy the Ring, and thereby save Middle-earth. It is almost an anti-quest.
The quest theme was not so prevalent in The Gift of the Magi, however. One could say that Della is questing for a suitable gift for Jim, and the story details her sacrifices in order to attain the end result of her quest. Off-screen, Jim has a quest to find a gift for Della, and also sacrifices his most valued possession in order to get one for her.
However, quests can go awry. In Ling's story The Mural, Chu falls in love with a painting and somehow gets sucked into it. (We're a Genre Savvy class. We knew the instant it said Chu lost his self-control that bad things would happen.) He is on a twisted sort of a quest himself, in order to get the maiden from the painting, but since the object of his quest is a selfish desire, the quest itself and also its end result end only in fear, frustration, and suffering for him.
Lesson, class: quests are bad when their objects are bad, and when the method of questing is bad.
The travel narrative of Basho was also a quest of a sort, however, and a much less selfish one, related to the self though it may be. According to my limited understanding of Buddhism (I have never clearly understood what exactly meditation is supposed to be), he is going on a quest for enlightenment, wherein he can lose his desires and self-consciousness in the emotion of the moment. This 'moment' can come about from various instances of beautiful scenary, national or religious landmarks, and various other inspirations. Since his method of questing is good and his desire to lose himself is good, his quest is good.
You might even say that he had one of the noblest quests of all, since he was searching for self-sanctification.
I wanted to say that his losing himself in the moment might be an example of ek-stasis, a 'standing outside of yourself', a Greek term that has led to our modern word 'ecstasy'. However, most of the class might have connoted that with a type of drug- not the connotation I wanted at all- and I would have had to explain Greek and a good deal of philosophy behind it. Did not feel like regurgitating several books' worth of Peter Kreeft, so I kept my mouth shut.
That's why I have this blog, after all.
I find it interesting that the theme of a quest speaks so strongly to me. What is, after all, the most moving form of a quest? The quest to right a wrong... to return what has been stolen (a.k.a., the Arkenstone)... to reclaim a long-lost homeland.
Reclaiming a homeland. Isn't that what we are all trying to do? We're all looking for our little Paradises Lost. Paradise Losts? Scratch that. We're all looking for Paradise Lost. Mankind has lost the innocence and the freedom he once enjoyed, and yet he still seeks for it everywhere on this side of the Angel of Death, though he will not find it here.
He is still seeking. He is still like the Magi, mentioned at the end of O. Henry's story, questing across the world, priceless gifts in their hands, searching for the King of Kings. Man searches, often in the most unlikely of places, and he who seeks honestly will find. It was promised so.
Do I often get this philosophical about literature? Um, yeah. Make me talk about a theme, and sooner or later I'm off into my Lebensschauung and my Weltansschauung. And dissecting exactly how and why the literature I just read did not (or, rarely, how it did) line up with said views and beliefs of mine.
I'm at once a nice critic and a harsh critic of literature. I'm willing to accept plenty of things. It's just I don't take stupidity very well.
I'm going to have a hard time in life.
And this is the moment where I break the rule I learned in speech and apologize at the end of this blog post. (I almost typed 'plog bost', XD.) I have tried my best at addressing all of our reading selections so far with a unifying theme, but it is not up to me to decide if I succeeded or not.
I tried. Do I get a gold star?
In Pace Christi,
Elyse
No comments:
Post a Comment