It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility

I’m not a huge Joseph Conrad fan, but this is just too true.

I came to the striking realization today that a person’s fate is pretty much in their own hands, no matter what I do or say.  I guess I actually realized it approximately 2 years, 2 months, and 27 days ago, but I definitely got the remedial version today.  Once a man’s mind is made up, there is nothing I, or anyone else, can do to change it.  It is only in that pre-certainty stage that we may have any effect at all.  The problem is that no one, oftentimes not even the man himself, will have any idea when that point is and it’s all a skeet shoot.  It makes life kind of pointless yet completely justifies it at the same time.  Perhaps our futures are pre-ordained, perhaps they are not, but either way, I make decisions without completely realizing what led to them and I know others do too.  Strangely enough, those seem to be the only ones I put any stock in.  So when my best friend tells me he’s going to kill himself because of some deep feeling he can’t express or comprehend, that’s when I get worried.  As opposed to 27 months ago when my late best friend told me he wasn’t going to kill himself and gave me a completely rational explanation for everything he had been saying the four months prior–the night before he killed himself.  Not to say that those who say they will aren’t serious.  They are.  They probably just don’t know it yet.  Funny way life goes about deceiving us, I guess.

It’s Like Someone Who Quits Smoking On Their Deathbed

Or so it all seems. Completely pointless, futile, too little too late. I’ve quit trying to give intelligent answers to stupid questions. I’m done countering ridiculous propaganda. I’ve no longer any interest in fostering the solitary philosophical debates that plague the teenage mind in the waning hours of the night. What’s the point? What do the thoughts gain us? The more time and thought we invest in philosophy, the more philosophical theory we create to counter.

I don’t know what to say, the pain is too harsh and the struggle too fierce.  I don’t know why I bother and I don’t know why he does either.  Is it bad to sometimes think I wish he would just kill himself to give closure to the epic battle consuming my life?  I don’t really feel that way, but sometimes I think it.  I love him, and I can’t even conceive life without him, but I just want it all to be over.  The pain he puts himself through puts me through infinitely more and he doesn’t even realize it.  What do you say to someone who is wallowing in self-disgust for good reason?  He has a right to be ashamed of himself, but he doesn’t have a right to deflect all of his pain onto others.  The thing is, I know it’s something he can’t go through alone, the pain is too much for him, but who am I to take it from him?  I wish shit just wasn’t this difficult…

Nature is just enough; but men and women must comprehend and accept her suggestions.

I’m really getting sick of hearing about nothing but global warming and the environment.  I think that it’s important, but not to the extent it is presented to us.  One of the things I have noticed about America, is that we are a country of followers, and therefore very susceptible to propaganda.  We don’t care about anything until someone tells us to, and we will buy into anything that is presented through a media circus.  Maybe I’m just cynical from the whole Y2K thing, but I feel that global warming may not be as bad as the media is making it out to be.  Another reason we are so susceptible to propaganda is because we are so uninformed.  The majority of this country puts more thought into their next meal than their next president.   The problem is that then you have a whole slew of people who think that they know what is going on, or at least to a satisfactory extent just because they watched a special on TV.  So if people want some common sense out of their leaders, they have to infuse it into the next generation first.  It doesn’t just grow on trees, you know?

Summer Thinking Points

This blog has been dormant far too long, but when school’s out, I have better things to do than sit around and re-examine life and all its subtleties. I have compiled a brief argument/manifestation of thought on a plethora of subjects, so motivated by giving release to the wild and rambunctious analyses bouncing around inside my head, I have decided a compromise between lifestyle and expectations is long overdue; so here it is in all of its succinct glory:

1.) It bothers me the way you don’t even have to major in a particular subject in college to teach it in high school. What separates your AP Chemistry teacher from you, an AP Chemistry student, is probably nothing more than four years and piece of paper that more likely than not says something like History on it. At least where I’m from. I feel like English teachers (or perhaps, in a larger school, foreign language teachers) are the most qualified staff members in the average high school. English, which is in high school, probably the most pointless subject. I can say this as an English major. It picks up its importance in college and holds a fair amount through the eighth grade. High school English is all plot progression and literary terms. You may read a few books that clue you in to the cultural codes of your time, but you do not develop the critical thinking skills that give an English course its true value. Never mind that you will use math every day of your life, and civics a few times a week. History is a classic lesson in leadership and in avoiding the mistakes others have already made for you. Languages offer important communication skills in a quickly diversifying world. But learning the difference between a simile and a metaphor or how to interpret Shakespeare’s diction is simply not going to get you far in life.

2.) One of my friends was telling me the other day that the basis of his apologetics argument was that Christianity has been around for 2 000 years, and what else has survived the test of time to that extent? Well, classical mythology, for one. It started about 1000 B.C. and persevered straight through the introduction of Christianity into sixth century Athens, not to mention that you do find the the occasional anomaly who still believes it to this day. To put it into context, classical mythology survived as long as its supporting empires. It was introduced by the Greeks and spread far and wide as the Greeks did, and then was picked up by the Roman Empire, which being the major world power at the time, spread it around as well. Christianity has been around so long because it was adopted as the main religion of Western culture, which is inarguably the most influential population in the word today. Not that I don’t believe in Jesus, just that I don’t think surviving 2 000 years of changing culture is a firm argument for its veracity. That’s just the way the world works, those in charge determine the information (much of which is propaganda) that gets disseminated to its populace. Also keep in mind that the church provides a good moral code to society that encourages people to raise their children in the church regardless of religious convictions. It is so embedded in our culture, one must certainly be acquainted with it to a reasonable extent in order to be accepted.

3.) Once in a job interview, I was asked the question, “What is something in your life that you had to do right the first time?” I didn’t really have a good answer to this question, but it hit me later on just how ironic that was. I mean, life as a whole is something you have to do right the first time. You don’t get a second chance. Even if you believe in reincarnation or whatever (which I don’t, for the record), you have to admit that it will be different the next time around. You won’t be the same person and you won’t remember the experiences from which you learned all of life’s little lessons. We spend all of our lives learning from our mistakes so that we can go on and reflect what we have learned in future situations so that we don’t make the same mistakes twice, but the picture we only get one shot at. I could elaborate on that more, but sometimes I think its better to just let people meditate on it right there.

4.) Tonight in church we were talking about abortion and it got me thinking.  The whole situation has been so political lately that I’ve almost tried my hardest to just ignore it.  Most of me feels like the government shouldn’t get involved, but at the same time, I know that it is the government’s money that funds these clinics.  I know that where I am in my life right now, if I got pregnant, I don’t really feel I’m set up to have a kid.  I know that people much worse off, much busier than I am do have children, but I have come to the conclusion that they are much stronger, much wiser than I am.  I feel, though, that if I can sit here and say that I am not ready to have a kid, then it is my responsibility to make sure that the situation doesn’t arise.  I know that there are situations beyond my control that I guess should be handled on a case-by-case basis and there just is no cover-all answer.  And as for whether or not I believe that the man involved should have any say in the matter, I guess I feel that if we’re at the point in our relationship where I’m going to let him get me pregnant, than I probably value his opinion and trust him, and if he told me he was going to stick around and be a part of my life as well as our child’s than I may begin to feel that it would be a good enough support system to make it work, if it was important to him.  I don’t know if I could even bring myself to actually go through with an abortion.  It’s something that I can’t really even fathom until it becomes a real-life, in-my-face situation, which is why I feel guys shouldn’t really be telling women that they should or shouldn’t have an abortion.  They can’t even conceive all that’s involved in that because it will never feel real to them.  The situation will never arise for them, they will never have to make that choice.  I feel they are perfectly welcome to bring all the input they want as long as they leave it up to the woman to decide.  Not only is it her body, but it’s her conscience, it’s her emotion, her connection with the baby that the man could never ever relate to.  Anyway, that just put a whole new dynamic into this blog that I never wanted to arise, but feel free to comment as you wish.

The Formation of Identity

The yearning to categorize oneself in respect to others and form alliances is engrained in every person from a young age. It goes back to the sheer biology of human beings and the concept of strength in numbers. For this reason, much of the way we view ourselves is determined by the codes of the society in which we live. One’s value system and selection of life goals are all based in the attitudes around them, whether they are choosing to abide by those codes, rebel against them, or take a middle stance, no one is completely unaffected by the mindset of the culture in which they live.

For this reason, most people spend a good deal of their lives exploring how they view themselves and the dynamic way in which that is affected by what label or title has been attached to their character by those around them. This is a struggle that begins the moment we are born, but it is not until later on that we realize the extent to which the customs we are born into shape the way we will choose to continue structuring ourselves and our personalities for the rest of our lives. Only so much of who we are and desire to become is explicitly of our choosing.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie spent her formative years immersed in a culture vastly different from the one with which she is expected to identify. She tells Phoeby, “Ah was wid dem white chillun so much till Ah didn’t know Ah wuzn’t white till Ah was round six years old.” (8 ) She grew up in a world of race delineations, but she was largely immune to their effects up to the point she started school. She is then rudely tossed out into the adult world on pages 12 – 14, with Nanny marrying her off to Logan Killicks for the sake of “protection” (15) with the warning, “De nigger woman is the mule uh the world so fur as Ah can see.” (14) However, not too long after Janie marries Logan, Jody shows up and tells her, “A pretty doll-baby lak you is made to sit on de front porch and rock and fan yo’self and eat p’taters that other folks plant just special for you.”(29) These two ideas are more than contradictory in Janie’s head. She feels the pull of both worlds and doesn’t know how to mesh that with her version of herself and her current goals.

A similar situation is found in The House of Mirth through Lily’s upbringing in the richest strata of society and then her decline into enormous debt while still trying to maintain her membership in a culture built solely on monetary value. She knows how to survive and progress only in the scope of the world in which she was raised, and when all circumstances try to force her out of it, she has to become more independent and fight back. She knows that she can buy her way back into the highest strata on her last valuable commodity – her beauty. The problem with becoming too conspicuously independent is that self-sufficiency is a trait common to “governesses—or widows. But not girls—not poor, miserable, marriageable girls!”(22) That is the standard which has been imposed on her by hegemony, and until she can break from those societal codes, she will never be free. Just as she described to Selden in discussing his cousin, Gerty Farish, “She likes being good, and I like being happy. And besides, she is free and I am not.” (23) This all stems from the fact that Gerty is viewed as such an anomaly in that society and it is recognized that she threw in the towel on the whole game of marriage years ago. She chose for herself a different path.

Lily knows that if she is to continue to define herself by the standards of a society in which she does not take part, she will come up short. The naturalist character in her feels pushed to conform to the society around her, but the realist character sees the opportunity to branch out and obtain a new standard by which to judge herself. It is a hard decision which Lily does not have the courage to make, so she justifies her indecision by deflecting blame on to the mass of society. “I never had any choice. There was no one, I mean, to tell me about the republic of the spirit.” (105-106) So Lily continues on in the direction she began, despite her feeling of inadequacy concerning the culture. She cries out to Selden during their conversation under the tree that fateful Sunday afternoon, “Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?” (110) showing that she knows she has chosen her own path and that her despair is of her own doing as well as exploiting her dislike of her current situation and her desire to escape from it.

But the path you choose for yourself is really chosen by those who influence you from your earliest recollections of life. When Janie tells Phoeby, “Dey all useter call me Alphabet ‘cause so many people had done named me different names,” (9) she is revealing a sense of nonidentity from early childhood. No one quite knew what to call her, so they resorted to the most all-encompassing term they could conceive. A name like “Alphabet” is complex in that it can represent every name known to man, and, yet it does not assign a distinct character or personality. In a way, those children are eradicating what little identity she had managed to forge by the young age of six.

In addition to this, Janie grew up with Nanny’s influence in lieu of her mother’s, which tends to cause a lag in the passing of culture, and it doesn’t always get passed correctly. Parents pass on to their children what they learned from their parents, utilizing techniques they view as effective and avoiding ones they don’t (in general). But when you have a generational skip, as in this case, you have a young woman brought up according outdated societal codes, which causes a discrepancy between what the child learns at home and what the child learns from their peers. Nanny’s emphasis on values learned from slavery is important in many ways, but will not affect Janie in the same way in which it affected Janie’s mother due to the lapse in time and the progression of society therein. This causes Janie to be a bit more rebellious toward Nanny than would be expected of her in relation to her mother, contributing to her statement in Eatonville that “[s]he hated her grandmother and had hidden it from herself all these years under a cloak of pity.” ( 89)r statement more rebellious toward Nanny than would be expected of her in relation to her mother, contributi

Lily shares a similar experience in that with the death of her parents at such an impressionable and young age, she is left to be passed from relative to relative, and with her proven inability to stand on her own two feet, she becomes so vulnerable that her opinion of herself is simply a conglomeration of the opinions of others, with almost no realist core. The attitudes of Aunt Peniston in relation to the societal expectations imposed on Lily were in disaccord. She does not support Lily playing bridge, though Judy expects it of her. (49) She does not do much in the way of getting Lily married off, as is the custom. (65) Aunt Peniston is not Lily’s mother and therefore does not feel the obligation to see to her well-being that comes with parenthood, which is ultimately exemplified through her disinheriting of Lily on page 316.

A major part of both of the worlds in which these two strikingly different women were raised is the emphasis on marriage and its role in the definition of a woman and in her social establishment. For Janie, marriage is a quest to find herself and to find her balance between society’s expectations and her own, which is certainly not an easy journey. She begins by marrying Logan at 16 upon Nanny’s behest out of concern for Janie’s future. This is where Nanny’s slavery background affects Janie to a much larger degree than was really necessary. Nanny is concerned about her granddaughter being taken advantage of and becoming ostracized and a fugitive like her mother. She doesn’t want to see Janie put through the same struggles, so she pushes Janie into a marriage for which she is not quite prepared.

Up until her marriage to Logan, Janie’s idea of marriage was a partnership of love, but she knew from the beginning that she did not love Logan Killicks. She laments to Nanny at one point, “Ah wants to want him sometimes. Ah don’t want him to do all de wantin’…. Ah wants sweet things wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think.” (23-24) This is a turning point in Janie’s life because it changes the way she views herself in many ways. She has gone from knowing herself as someone who will enter a lifelong partnership with a man who values her for who she is and have a “happily-ever-after” life to realizing that she is married to a man who sees her as an object and that she will never have that sense of freedom if she continues down that path. “Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”(25)

Lily goes through the same steps, except through a different value system. At the beginning of the book, she feels that she must marry and she must marry wealthy. She views it as her default state, as though there is no alternative, as shown through her discussion with Selden when he asks, “Isn’t marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?” to which she responds, “I suppose so. What else is there?” (26) He brings up the state of his cousin, Gerty Farish, but Lily rejects that idea offhand as representing a lifestyle she could never see herself endorsing. “She was not made for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises of poverty. Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.” (48 ) She views her need to marry as being derived from her gender. She puts it to Selden very matter-of-factly in saying “A girl must [marry], a man may if he chooses.” (29) which goes back to the way she was raised that the man will work (or provide money in some other manner) and the lady will spend it. The whole point of marriage was to move up in society. There was no love factor in it, which is why Lily originally gravitated toward Gryce. But the problem was that “[s]he had several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but only once with a man.” (101) And that man was not Percy Gryce. This was the moment Lily made her first meaningful realist decision, but it was one that would lead to many more.

Self-image is based on a sequence of events, not just one, no matter how important. When Janie met Jody and left Logan, she followed him to Eatonville where she encountered a completely different community from the one in which she was raised. Eatonville was an all-black community that was more or less self-sufficient. The people who lived there had a laid-back way of life that Jody could not help but exploit. Jody’s need to control everything around him applied just as much, if not more so, to his wife. He feels the need to confine her to the store and to ensure her hair is covered all the time. He does not tolerate things he cannot control. One night he breaks down and slaps Janie and at that point she realizes that her idea of him is not accurate and her idea of their marriage is not accurate. This was a major milestone and it caused her to develop a whole new philosophy on life. “She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.” (72)

Lily Bart, on the other hand, held this view from the beginning. Selden’s exclamation of “That is how she looks when she is alone!”(106) exposes the ostentatious nature of the culture in which they live. She could not show her true colors at the risk of not performing in a socially-acceptable manner. Her actions are based on what society expects of her. She cannot allow herself to smoke during her pursuit of Percy Gryce because “it is not considered becoming in a jeune fille à marier; and at the present moment I am a jeune fille à marier .” (107) The society puts such an emphasis on the outer performance, that it almost drains the realist character out of a person. The structure of it all was so rigid that it really forced naturalism upon its inhabitants. With someone standing over you all the time, telling you how much money to spend how often on which items, as well as how to spend every instant of your time, truly does not allow for much in the way of “discovering oneself”. Take, for instance, Lily’s performance in the tableaux vivants, which further showed her knowledge of the encroaching close on her marketability. Ned Van Alstyne summed up the underlying feelings of the crowd quite well in saying, “Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up; but, gad, there isn’t a break in the lines anywhere, and I suppose she wanted us to know it!” (196) there were so many expectations for her to meet, how was she to be expected to form her own?

Janie escaped from this, however, when Tea Cake entered her life. His free soul that was the opposite of everything she had been through up to that point and he could therefore provide a unique perspective on her situation. He allowed her to be herself enough to explore who exactly it was that she had become and who she wanted to be. With Tea Cake, Janie always had options, and it is the ability to make choices in one way or another that causes us to form our personalities. Without the choices we make, we are all the same.

And Lily had some tough choices to make. When she discovered that Selden was sleeping with Bertha Dorset and that he had not properly disposed of the evidence (154), it created an epic moral dilemma between the naturalist character in her and the realist character. The force of society was telling her to use this God-given information to her advantage and destroy Bertha as no one else had ever had the power to, but at the same time, Lily could not bring herself to stoop to the level of a population she so despised. And it was not helping things that the letters were from Lawrence Selden, of all people. She had the choice to follow her heart to Selden (who may ultimately reject her anyway, as far as she knows) or to buy her way back into the society which has thrown her to the dogs. Her ultimate decision to destroy the letters reveals much about the development of her morals throughout the book.

Over the course of these novels, both Janie and Lily learned a lot about themselves, what society expected of them, and what mattered to them in terms of society’s expectations for them. Janie moved from a world in which “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,” (1) and the wishes and desires of women were determined by those of the men with whom they were affiliated to “pull[ing] in her horizon like a great fish-net,” (193) and becoming her own determined individual. Lily, after a fierce inner struggle of her own, reflected to Selden, “I remembered you saying that such a life could never satisfy me; and I was ashamed to admit to myself that it could.” (433) On the other hand, it obviously could not, as in the end, she contemplates suicide and whether or not she actually acts on it is quite irrelevant as she does die and leaves all inner conflict behind. Janie’s ending is a bit more ambiguous, but she was bitten by her rabid husband, and she seems to be at peace with who she has become and ready to die, in a sense. After her moment of self-actualization, “She called in her soul to come and see.” (193) The renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow, who devised the hierarchy of needs, the capstone of which being self-actualization, once conjectured that only two percent of people reach the top. Others are content enough right before or upon arrival, that they can just succumb to nature and die happy.

It was over for both of them, though in no way a perfect, happily-ever-after ending, it was an ending all the same. Janie had proved to herself that she could stand on her own two feet and did not need a man to define her. She was content. She knew that “uh nigger woman is de freest thing on earth.” (189) Lily had proved to herself that she had power over the world in which “[s]he was so evidently the victim of the civilization that had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.” (23) The inner struggles were over; they knew who they were, and it was time to die.

The Time-Novel Continuum

A dialogical novel is a strong tool in addressing a sensitive social issue of the time. It enables the author to take a stand on the issue, quite openly, while allowing the readers to believe that any connection they see to their own time is a creation of their own imaginations. The author is allowed to make his point through a sort of subliminal messaging by proving the point to the readers and then allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions about how it applies to them and to their lives. Any knowledge or insight the readers gain from the work is proof of the author’s skill at his craft and will not often reflect poorly upon his reputation. For this reason, dialogical novels emerge at times of prominent social change (both as causes and effects) and will tend to remain in circulation for years to come as a valuable tool in dissecting the social experience of the narrating present.

Two leading works of this nature are Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Both of these volumes were written in similar social periods of the same era, yet use very different reference times for the fabula. Written in 1885, Huck Finn is set in the 1830s or 1840s, though in some cases, the text has no meaning in that period and the context must be shifted to the narrating present to understand the author’s intended message. The Scarlet Letter, written in 1850 and set in the mid-seventeenth century, addresses many different issues than those addressed in Huck Finn, though there is significant overlap.

One of the major differences between the period about which The Scarlet Letter is written versus that about which Huck Finn is written is that Twain actually lived through the period he is writing about, whereas Hawthorne is restricted to other men’s views of the time. This becomes important when trying to gauge how their actions made each of the characters feel. It is one thing to write about what a character did, but to be able to analyze why a character did what they did takes a more profound insight into the culture of the time than one can really get from a seventh grade history book. This is why these two novels, though both dialogical, are dialogical in different ways, as will be shown throughout the paper. Twain speaks to his audience more in terms of having them relate to Huck Finn by exposing the societal expectations around him and completely immersing the reader into the life of Huck Finn. Hawthorne simply cannot do this and is seen throughout the novel to pull the reader out of the story and explain how and why something happened. He also gives his readers the ability to decide for themselves how the story actually went in certain places, such as at the beginning of Chapter Two, when Hawthorne is discussing the reason for the congregation of people in the marketplace. He writes, “It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child…was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antimonian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle and vagrant Indian…” (47) and “It might be…or perhaps…” and so on. He simply does not have the authority to claim he knew what was happening, and thus his method of getting the reader to read into what he is writing must be more direct than Twain’s.

Neither of them certainly was short of topics to address. The nineteenth century was a very dynamic social period. Women’s rights were a big issue, especially concerning suffrage, as well as other social reform movements such as temperance and abolition. This is definitely reflected in general throughout both books by the portrayal of certain characters and their fundamental struggles. Hawthorne shows Hester Prynne to be a victim of hegemony because she is a woman and thus more at fault for her sin than a man would ever be. Twain portrays Huck’s father (Pap) as a drunk and as a bad role model (implying a correlation between the two). Twain also portrays Jim both as the nigger society expects, and as a human being who is unbelievably resourceful at times and more than capable of intelligent thought, which is quite contrary to society’s expectation. Just the basic plots and characters that make up the two books show the authors’ rebellion against the societal norm. Twain even puts his protagonist in the position to come out and explicitly defy the morals laid out for him in his culture to follow his conscience (Huck exclaimed “All right then, I’ll go to hell!” (271) in regard to his decision to not inform Jim’s owner of his whereabouts and thus allow him to escape into freedom.).

One of the major tools that Twain uses throughout Huck Finn to get his point across is to push a lot of symbolism through the characters’ mouths, especially in relation to cultural mixing. When Huck is at the widow’s house, there is a point where he starts talking about the food and says “There warn’t really anything the matter with them [the food]. That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice swaps around, and the things go better.” (2) Then the raftsmen commented that “the water of the Mississippi was wholesomer to drink than the clear water of the Ohio…what you wanted to do was keep it all stirred up—and when the river was low keep mud on hand to put in and thicken the water up the way it ought to be.” (112-113) This subtle mention is more than likely not even noticed by the majority of Twain’s readers, but those who do take notice are well aware that Southern congressmen pushed the gag rule through Congress at the beginning of the book’s setting to prevent all abolitionist discussions in terms of legislature. This rule was also repealed in the timeframe of this book (1844). In that context, it is hard to miss Twain’s point that he believes society would benefit from integration.

This same point also shows up in The Scarlet Letter, though not in respect to race, in the way that Hester being ostracized from society did not have the effect desired by the elders. The scarlet letter itself even backfired to some extent. That which was supposed to be the epitome of her shame and her guilt instead became a tool for showing off her skill at the needle and even caused some of the women of the town to be jealous of her (51). The women of the town called on her for innumerable tasks because her skill was so great, yet she was never asked to make a wedding veil because of the sanctity of the garment and her “unclean” nature (75). This, when looked at in the light of the great religious reform movement known as The Second Great Awakening that had just reached its final stages at the time Hawthorne penned the novel, can also be seen to be proving a point to the people of his time that this societal exclusion does not bring down the intended victim as much as it can be turned around and used as a sense of self-empowerment.

Slaves in the Deep South were known for the same and the concept was exemplified in Huck Finn by Jim’s wearing of the minstrel mask to skew unfavorable circumstances in his favor. For instance, when Tom Sawyer lifted Jim’s hat off his head as he slept and claimed witches were at fault for the sake of a joke (7), Jim turned it into a tourist attraction. He told people who came from far and wide about his terrible encounter with the unnatural, which (a) got him out of work to tell the story, (b) got other slaves out of work to come hear the story, and (c) got him monetary compensation for telling the story. The whole set-up was designed to make a fool out of Jim and he turned it around and used the white man’s assumption of his ignorance to his advantage. He could never have gotten away with such a trick if white men thought that it had ever even occurred to him that Tom Sawyer (or anyone other than witches) was at fault. Contrary to the popular belief of the time, slaves, as a population, were probably more resourceful than even Huck Finn himself (one of the great ironies of the book). An analytical reader can get that from the text through scenes such as the above, but it is never stated explicitly.

Similar to this is the scene in The Scarlet Letter when Pearl is in the meeting with the Governor and is asked if she knows who created her to which she responds indignantly that she “had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison door” (99). Pearl’s exemplification of the “imp of the perverse” is a representation of the bickering between Americans solely for the sake of bickering. 1850 is the end of the antebellum period of American history and is the time when the country was the most divided (aside from the period encompassing the war itself, of course).

In Huck Finn, this same situation is shown through the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons:

“’Did you want to kill him, Buck?’

‘Well, I bet I did.’

‘What did he do to you?’

‘Him? He never done nothing to me.’

‘Well then, what did you want to kill him for?’

‘Well nothing—only it’s on account of the feud.’” (146)

In the midst of this conversation, Buck also shows his disregard for death in relation to feud with the nonchalant comment “We got one, and they got one,” (164) in response to the question of whether or not anyone had been killed in the feud that year, showing that the feud itself took priority over the family for which he was fighting in his mind. When Huck tells Buck on the next page that he views the Shepherdson who shot Buck’s cousin as a coward, that is Twain’s method of expressing his views that the problems of the Civil War could have been solved in a much more dignified manner. This scene climaxes when Buck is killed in the feud and Huck finds his body and just accepts his death as a fact of life, though he does express emotion over the loss (154).

While that scene shows Americans to be relatively ignorant and insensitive to human emotion, there is a scene in The Scarlet Letter where Dimmesdale gets up in front of his congregation and proclaims himself to be “utterly a pollution and a lie” (125) in an attempt to clear his obviously guilt-ridden conscience. He asks on page 126, “Could there be plainer speech than this?” in the context of his “confession”, when he knows full well that he could just come out and tell his audience clearly and precisely that he is Pearl’s father. He is obviously making an effort to convince himself that he has done right by himself, his congregation, and God by this proclamation of simple humanity, though he does not care enough about God’s opinion of him to actually confess, which exposes the inner feelings of many people during the Second Great Awakening. The religious revolution was a showcase of American conformism at its finest. Huge revivals spawn from sentiments that one will not be accepted in their society if they do not participate. The fact that Dimmesdale continues to bring up his confession again and again for four pages (125-128 ) is evidence that he does not believe that it accomplished anything. And how could he? He knows perfectly well that those who declare themselves to be the least holy are held in the highest regard in his society. This is a hint to Hawthorne’s readers that acknowledging their participation in a corrupt system does not accomplish much in the way of progressing society away from that system. Telling themselves that they have done the right thing, does not make it so.

In this same manner of attacking the notion that you can fake your way into heaven, Twain inserts a bit of commentary on Southern life into his novel on page 137, when he talks about the fruit in the bowl on the table that has such a nice finish on the outside that make them out to be better than real fruit, but one crack that gives away its forgery and is slowly but surely destroying the entire fruit itself. This is true of Southern culture. They give an appearance of chivalry on the men’s part and delicacy on the women’s part that makes Southern culture seem elite in contrast to the rest of American culture. Not only that, but the South has one major flaw (which is human bondage), that will eventually corrupt everything well and good about the culture and destroy it from the inside out. This statement is in many ways representative of one of the fundamental messages of the entire book: that America had shifted into the same state of self-delusion as exposed in The Scarlet Letter.

Twain continues to push this idea into the heads of his readers on page 190 through the speech Sherburn makes prior to his lynching: “The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man!” The monologue this is excerpted from must hit a little too close to home for many readers, as there were no lynch mobs of the degree of which he speaks in the time of Huck Finn’s narrative. It was not until significantly later, after the war and emancipation, that a respectable member of society would have dared to lynch a black man. On the other hand, the change in those circumstances did a lot to push the blame off of white criminals in many cases and onto black ones, so as to give the mobs an excuse to exploit the “inferiority” of the black man following the restriction of their former outlet (slavery). The emphasis on the word man in this passage is also interesting, because it can be seen to drive a certain anger toward governmental power into the heads of his readers immediately following the Civil War. It underscores the fact that black men are no longer regarded as 3/5 of a human being, but as a whole human being. If you take Twain’s intended audience of this speech to be a standard nineteenth century mid-society member, then this one word can ignite significant feelings of resentment (especially among those in the Deep South) in the middle of the Reconstructive era. What could Twain hope to gain by this?

In the same passage, Twain also highlights the corrupt nature of the American justice system following the Civil war. “Why a man’s safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind—as long as it’s daytime and you’re not behind him.”(190) This is a proclamation directed straight at members of the Ku Klux Klan, which did not exist at the time of the narrative, and it even calls them out as cowards. Twain speaks what America knows and is too ashamed to confront. It is well-known that the KKK is in the wrong and that lynch mobs in the middle of the night are immoral (which is why such things happen only in the middle of the night), but as long as it is not talked about, it is not “truly” wrong. This declaration is a very low blow to his readership and puts his reputation as a respected author further in jeopardy. He was gambling with his reputation from the beginning by writing a book in the vernacular with a 13-year-old, low-society boy working against society’s morals as the protagonist and the first-person narrator. He furthered this danger by putting a slave in the position to be nominated for best supporting actor. Whatever was going through the heads of Twain’s readers at this point, it was not complimentary.

So, back to the question of what Twain could be hoping to accomplish, we must recognize that most significant societal change only comes about through the self-sacrificing angering of the leadership of the population. Just as in physics, you have the principle of conservation of energy, and anger can be seen as heat energy. If you take the anger of the population and redirect it toward a single white man, you accomplish two main things: (a) You will truly deflect some of the anger taken out on the black population (running the risk of releasing compounded anger on them in the end if your point does not sink in all the way), and (b) you will expose the magnitude of society’s anger by putting it into perspective. When the anger is shown to be directed toward someone society views as an equal (or, at least, closer to an equal than a black man is seen to be), the anger is seen more clearly and more inhumanely. This is just like how society sees killing a man as a higher degree crime than killing a dog.

These are two novels which can be read through and understood by any normal person above the age of 13 or so without understanding the deeper significance of the writing. With a dialogical novel, you get out of it what you look for. If all you want is a story with a good plot line, that is what you get, but if you want a moral at the end of it, you can find that as well. The author wants to attribute the points made away from himself; they are not made to attract attention and win the author awards. They are made to bring about cultural progression. The works are reflective of the culture as a whole, not of just the author, or they lose their significance altogether. It is as Hawthorne described at the beginning of The Custom House, “[I]t may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil.”(7)

Throw one of those small pumpkins

“If you’re in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it’ll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.” — Jack Handy

This, in all its stupidity, really represents a lot of truth in the way people think.  Humans are, by nature, narcissists.  They like to pretend that they are better than everyone else (and most truly think they are, when you get right down to it).  The rich ones put so much of their resources into Humanitarian efforts, but not because they feel bad for those people, but because giving them something proves to themselves that they have more than those people and are, therefore, better than them.  Humanitarians are the biggest hypocrites in the world, yet they are the most admired, which just furthers their narcissistic impressions of themselves.  Yeah, it’s great that people in third-world countries can benefit from the stupidity of such people, but every mission trip I go on, there is a big point made of the idea that we are there to learn from the people perhaps even more so than we are there to help them.  We are not better than them.  They are, overall, more content with less.  We are “improving” their quality of life by conforming it to our standards.  How much sense does that make?

Industrialized nations foster a dog-eat-dog environment and there’s this notion that manipulating your way out of earning something is the only worthy method of attaining it.  It makes no sense.  It’s like high society New York.  You get a bunch of bored people sitting around all day whose idea of fun becomes ostracizing someone because, come on, what else is there to do?  The fastest way to corrupt a nation’s values is to pump the economy.  People start developing multiple personalities (and according to the diagram on the chalkboard when I walked into English the other day, multiple personalities -> neurosis -> psychosis -> anti-social behavior (which is where all college students currently are) -> suicide.  See what I meant by misinformation?) because they feel they have to trick everyone else to get to the top.  If you can sleep with someone’s wife without them knowing, you’ve won.  So you have to put on your game-face in front of them and another game-face for their wife (because God only knows it isn’t even about her, it’s about you winning) and then there’s the inner you.  The inner core.  Not corrupted by society and still free to do as you wish.  That is where morals live and thrive.  Your conscience.  Yet, even though you know what you’re doing is wrong on some level, you have now created so many levels, there is no way you’re ever going to find your way out of the mess.  There is the realist plot of decline, which corresponds to the naturalist plot of ascent.  Most people try to look at it the other way, but they’re just being optimistic, and that little cat hasn’t shown up at my door just yet (i.e. I’m still fundamentally not an optimist).

War is stupid.  Backstabbing other people to get ahead is stupid.  We think we won because we fooled the enemy into trusting us.  So then we go ahead and kill them anyway.  What the hell?  Then we win because the enemy is dead.  But then the favor is reciprocated and we get shot in the back.  Who’s winning now?  It’s a vicious cycle of death that does no one any good, yet we are all pushed into it through plain and simple hegemony.  We just either refuse to acknowledge it or are too ignorant to see it.  Either way, we fail at exactly the point at which we think we’ve won.  Some culture it is we’re imposing on others.

What if the light at the end of the tunnel is just a guy with a match who’s spent his whole life trying to find it?

This is a question I posed to my friend a few years back when he was tossing about the idea of suicide. I don’t think it really hit me what I had actually said until a year or so later. There are times in our lives when we make decisions based on faulty information. Sometimes the consequences are greater than others.

I’ve never really understood the whole “light at the end of the tunnel” concept.  What is it really saying?  Life is a tunnel, dark and dank, the light at the end is bold and frank?  I think I heard that somewhere once, but perhaps I made it up just now, I don’t quite know.  All I remember is the conversation that ensued from my best friend sitting in front of me telling me he was knockin’ on heaven’s door and the light at the end of the tunnel was overwhelming all the sadness in his life.  I didn’t mean to completely shoot down all his hopes when I asked him this, it just kind of came out.  I mean, really, no one knows what happens when you die.  Catholics claim suicide is the unforgivable sin, but heck, they also claim we will all be judged.  So at that point I couldn’t ask God to forgive me?  I know, something about the revelation of the “Glory of God” and it’s too late.  Not that I’m suicidal…or an atheist.  I just have to wonder sometimes.  It has been said that to believe with certainty we must begin with doubting.

The other part of my question implies something I wasn’t even going for in that conversation: the quest for salvation.  Not necessarily in the Christian sense of the word, but just in general.  A quest for salvation implies a need for salvation from something.  So what is it that everyone seems so desperate to escape?  Sure, life holds a lot of pain, but is it really just simplistic optimism that the unknown must be better than whatever we know now?  I, personally, do not put much stock in optimism.  I don’t consider myself a pessimist, just a realist.  That’s what personal experience has taught me, I guess: Screw me once, shame on you; screw me twice, shame on me.  It’s better to expect to fail and then succeed than to expect to succeed and then fail.  Have I worn you out on the cliches yet?

I just have to wonder more and more what it was that guy was looking for.  A light at the end of the tunnel.  What does that do to anyone?  It gives us hope to carry on, but at the same time, it just tells us that we have to wait to be rewarded.  Saying things will get better is in many ways just a reminder that things suck now.  Doesn’t it make more sense to play up the way things are now?  Not in a patronizing manner.  Obviously, the fact that I’m failing math is bad, but saying to me, “Well, at least your EAI (Engineering Admissions Index) can’t go down,” is pretty backhanded.  Rubbing it in that I suck at math will in no way help me do better or feel better.  So what purpose does it serve?  Telling me there’s a light at the end of the tunnel is really just saying, “Your stupid self got lost in a tunnel…but it’s okay, you’ll make it out in the end.”  So I take the pessimistic approach and tell myself that there is no real light at the end of the tunnel, just a bunch of fools (like me) meandering around a tunnel looking for a way out when we could just be assimilating to the tunnel people and making the best of it.  That still didn’t turn into a very bright situation.  The fact of the matter is, I’m stuck in a tunnel.  Period.

But it also implies that there is nothing to be gained from the tunnel and I would have to disagree.  Saying there’s a light at the end of the tunnel highlights that things won’t get better until you get out of the tunnel.  But what’s so bad about the tunnel?  We’re making a lot of assumptions here.  Every tunnel I’ve ever been in has been very well lit, and rather comfortable.  As a kid, a tunnel meant adventure.  Where I’m from, we build tunnels or skyways between every building.  It’s cold in the winter and the tunnel is warm.  I can take the tunnel from the mall to the bank to avoid going outside.  Or from the mall to the heated parking garage.  I love tunnels.  So why the hell am I trying to get out of it?  As a kid, before I moved to the Yukon, tunnels were cool for the sole fact that they had all this connotation similar to that of caves.  I don’t how many of you have seen The Goonies (great American classic), but really, that’s every kid’s dream.  Huck Finn on the Walter Scott.  One big adventure.  And a tunnel embodies that adventure for any kid under the age of twelve.  The only plus I see to there being a light at the end of the tunnel is that it illuminated the freaking tunnel so that I don’t stub my toe on a rattlesnake or something.  You guys probably think I’m taking this too far, but if these were close to the last words you ever said to someone, you’d spend a lot of time meditating on them too.  I don’t know.  Drop me a line, tell me what you think.

Keep the inmost Me behind it’s veil

Despite my loathing of this book (The Scarlet Letter), I have succumbed to the immeasurable charm of this certain “quotable quote”. If only Hawthorne could apply his obvious adeptness at writing to a somewhat tolerable plot line…

As a member of a generation that screams its personal business to the world in the futile hope that someone will actually take the time to stop and listen, I find a small gasp of fresh air in the 18th century common sense expressed by Nathaniel Hawthorne. He opens the book making it clear that he wants someone to pay attention to what he’s saying, but not to scrutinize his every word looking for the next juicy bit of speculation gained from ill-trained psycho-analysis. I feel as if my generation has developed a sort of superiority complex in relation to the previous and thinks the best remedy is to simply blabber nonsense until someone remarks that the BS is actually very profound. At this point, my generation has been subjected to positive reinforcement that has lowered them to the status of Pavlov’s dog. It is almost as if my generation is just another social experiment to expose the self-perceived superiority of the Baby Boomers. Consciously or not, the 55+ citizens of America are the indirect sustenance of the misguided progressions of a lost generation. They encourage our stupidity probably out of the sadistic pleasure that comes with making oneself look better than another. Seriously, is Britney Spears really any worse of a role model than Twiggy was? It is the edification of the Jessica Simpson/Lindsay Lohan image that has corrupted the value system for my entire generation.

What does this have to do with the cry for help that has been all but explicitly enunciated? It is the background, the foundation. So why do we continue on a path that we know leads through the wide gate? For the same reason we go to college: it is the default state. Even Newton figured out way back when that an object in motion remains in motion until another force acts upon it. So when my generation says that they are progressing society, they aren’t wrong. But it is the misguided implication in that statement that forward motion is change that sets us on the wrong course. The world was set in motion a long time ago, it is the stopping of that motion that would be the epically drastic change that every generation at some point seems to think it has already enacted.

So why do I want to keep my inner core hidden? Why does it bother me that my generation pours out their every waking (and occasionally otherwise conjectured) thought to every living soul? First of all, it is a constant reminder of the pain and hurt that is suffered by the entire race. Such a measure can only be taken out of desperation. Second of all, it is the conservation of privacy that entitles one to respect. The air of mystery shrouds the wrongs and amplifies the rights. The lack of it exposes all that is deficient about the basic human nature that is at the root of everything we do. Leaving something for another to infer also is the only way to act as a society. The conclusions people draw from given information tells you how they think and a lot about them. Without knowing about them, you can’t conform. So why can’t we all just talk about our feelings and get along? Because the lack of that knowledge is what allows people to believe the best about others and without that, there is little room for forgiveness. We all screw up and need a clean(er) slate once in a while, but if we put everything we have on the table from the get-go, we have nothing left to wager. If you go all-in too soon, you could win big, but gambling is an addiction and the stakes are high; statistically the house always wins and you will be left stone-dry with nothing but burned bridges behind you. We, as a generation, need to slow down a little and stop for a breather. You’d think the generation with the highest asthma rates could grasp that concept.

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

Continuing thinking of Bob Dylan, this quote left me somewhat puzzled. I haven’t spent a great deal of time in old-age homes, and not a whole lot in college, however I think I can see a semblance of correlation. Both are just groups of people who are there for a lack of somewhere else to be, really. College is the end of the beginning and an old-age home is the beginning of the end, so between the two is life. People, at least here in the United States, seem to measure their worth in terms of how assimilated they are to the propagandized image of the American leader (and I don’t mean the president, closer to Britney Spears, really). So if college is portrayed by media giants and others of influence as “in”, it is “impossible” to progress in life without first crossing that threshold. There is an adage growing in popularity that advises being nice to your kids because they’re the ones who choose your retirement home. Translation : One day you will be old and helpless (as opposed to your current state of young and helpless). Both cultures are just representations of what everyone has to be and no one wants to be. They are the catalysts of the next stage of your life and thus foster a wide range of “do-it-while-you-still-can” motives that really serve no purpose excepting the expulsion of socially taboo urges in a socially acceptable construct. There is a sense of uselessness and forfeiture of goals throughout the experience in either setting. College is where you go to learn that sometimes you fail and to get the inevitable nervous break-down out of the way before your “life” starts. No one really looks for a college graduate who is amazing at whatever field they graduated in, without evidence that the person has matured and learned about themselves and the “real” world. Not the MTV version. I don’t think a lot of people realize upon entering college that they are going for reasons outside of a standard book education or a societal expectation. When people ask me what I learned in school today, the first thing that occurs to me rarely has anything to do with science or math. I learn who I can trust and who I can’t and how to tell the difference. I learn what kind of response each of my actions will elicit from other people. I go to college to learn the cultural codes of a society that I managed to live in without fully experiencing or understanding for the first 18 years of my life so that I can continue to impose the laws of “nature” on future generations until I get old and die. My question is why? What good does it do to continue a system that exists because America runs on autopilot? But on the other hand, what would the change be and what good would it be? It would simply lead to the next generation enforcing their own cultural codes (which really happens anyway). College is when you realize the absolute hypocrisy you have accepted as normal for the last 18 years and are given four years to basically acclimate or die. It’s like a black hole. You leave college and you remember that you learned something and that it was important, but hell if you remember how it made you feel and what it made you think of yourself and your peers and thus you don’t really ingest the education. You have fully acclimated. Mission accomplished. Now what? (You inhale and exhale and repeat until one day you can’t and that’s really are there is to it.)