The Meaning of Life

When I was younger, I never understood why people wanted to know the meaning of life so much. I thought it was a stupid question – we lived our life, plain and simple. Why did it matter what our purpose on this earth was?
I can acknowledge, now, that it is a question worth seeking an answer for, though I don't by any means claim to know what that answer might be. What I do know, is that what the novels we read in CIS this year have done – what good books and stories everywhere do – is attempt to provide an answer, of sorts, for us. The very first myths were creation stories, told to explain how we came to be and give us some sort of insight into what it means to be human. Stories provide us with a reason for our existence and push us to seek an explanation for what humanity is. They ask us to wonder at what, exactly, our purpose in life should be, and how we should seek to fulfill it.
Part of the reason Never Let Me Go is so truly tragic is because we see ourselves in the characters’ lives: our own missed opportunities and confusion about life. At first, these characters may appear to have more of a sense of their place in the universe than we do: they have an ostensible reason for their lives, one that seems to make sense. They live and die to save others. But this is really the original question, disguised as a new one: why are these human lives worth more than their clones? What makes us human, and why is being human so important?
The answer to this question cannot be expressed simply, and many of these novels reflect this idea. Instead, it must be approached sideways, in a roundabout way, through stories. Many of the novels focus on the idea that the world is made up of grays, a mix of black and white. The most obvious example is Going After Cacciato, but it is a theme that returns, over and over. In the end, it all comes back to what I says to Coyote in Green Grass, Running Water: “There are no truths…only stories.” There are many, many stories; enough stories for every person, so that every person can build their own truth. In the end, everyone needs to decide for themselves what their “raison d’être” is. We all must find our own personal reason to live, and stories are there to show us how.
To do this, they must not only make us question our own humanity, but must also remind us of it. Some of these books moved me to tears, others to laughter; nearly all of them have led to some sort of love. And in the end, what could be more human than these emotions, love especially? It is love, in all its forms, that I find to be the most compelling argument for our humanity. One of the most important lessons these books have to teach us is how fragile life is, and thus, how important it is to find and hold onto love.
We will all die, and just because our time frame is less obvious than that of the characters in Never Let Me Go doesn’t mean it is any less concrete. Whether you believe in fate or chance, destiny or choice, death has no escape. This is not a reason to despair. “The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again…You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t,” (God of Small Things); we all know the ending to life is death, but what matters is not the destination, but the journey. We may live to be one hundred; we may die before we are thirty. The point of life is not how long you can go on breathing, but what you do while you are breathing. “We are only ever given just so much. But it is always, all we need,” (I Wrote This For You). Our time may be short, but if we use it to live life as fully as we can, it is as long as we could ever need. And because we may not be here very long, it is even more important to seize love when it comes around and express it when we feel it.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: “I had never told her how much I loved her. She was my sister. We slept in the same bed. There was never a right time to say it. It was always unnecessary… Here is the point I’ve been trying to tell you, Oskar. It’s always necessary,”. When I read those words, I wondered: how often do I tell my parents I love them? What about my sister? I watched a video recently, and the man in it talked about how hard we all find it to say "I love you"; to parents, even more to siblings, and probably worst for friends. How do you tell a friend you love them, even if you do? How do you show it? We all forget how miraculous life is, how easily it can be taken away, and we all forget how easily everything can change: “It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that,” (Never Let Me Go). It’s easy to let love go, to assume that there will be another chance for us, but that’s never guaranteed. Death, which features in every book we read, is the only constant of life, and if we want love and meaning in our life, we have to make an effort. We cannot allow life to pass us by. Even more importantly, we cannot be like the many people in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close who shut themselves off from the world in an effort to escape from pain and death. “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age,” (Dubliners). Better to risk death or pain, like Michael Furey, than to live on, without pain, yes, but also without true happiness.
(And if to be "human" is to love, what does this mean for animals? What about elephants, which, as Oskar pointed out, will gather around a recording of a dead elephant - a dead friend? What about the stories of dogs who wait for their masters to come home - stories like Hachi? Who are we to say that these animals cannot love, and how does this affect our treatment of them?)
Love is just one meaning of life though. In A Mercy, Florens finds happiness in freedom and independence, as do most of the women and men in Green Grass Running Water. The meaning of life, different for every person, can be found in stories, if one looks hard enough. It can be rooted in love, in the stories which reveal the truth of that love more than any final paper ever could. Or it can be rooted in something else. There are more than enough stories to go around.

(I have pretty much been using this blog for updates on shit I watch, and I feel like that is unfair (unfair to who, exactly, I have no idea, but whatevs), so I proudly present, above, the English paper I wrote about the meaning of life. Sort of. I edited the bits that were filler and/or boring and/or referenced the novels we read too much, and added in some stuff - for example, I obviously didn't turn in a final paper that had a paragraph in parentheses. I actually like this version more than the one I turned in - yet another instance where I probably should've written it, then gone back and edited, instead of doing it all in one go)

I have seen the future

And it is hell.

Or, you know, the next four months will be at least.
I have moved from one CIS to another, but this new one promises to be both harder and potentially much less interesting. In Econ, we have some sort of big project due nearly every week for the rest of the year. I don't even want to discuss or think about math. There's an enviro project, which we are supposed to start this week, and which looks to be more work than I ever wanted to put into that class. Independent gym looks like it's actually gotten harder since last year (I knew I should've done this sooner...), despite the fact that the woman running it seems to be completely incompetent. And I have no idea how to go about getting my tech credit figured out.
Fucking fucky fuck fucks.
French and band are my sole respites.

/whining

Female authors

I don't know how much anyone has been following the current debate among the literary world regarding the NYT and NPR's unequal coverage of male vs. female authors, but I have been seeing quite a lot of it on Twitter, and so I went through and tallied a couple things. All fractions are female authors/total
Books read for Book Club (2011-12 school year): 0/5
Books read for Book Club (2010-11 school year): 0/7
Books read for CIS: 2/9
Books read for English (2009-fall of 2011): 1/14
Books read 2009, 2010, 2011, respectively: 55/99, 60/92, 29/75
So despite the fact that I read about equal amounts of female/male authors, I have only picked books written by men for the last five months. And in English over the past three and a half years, I have read a total of 3 books by women.

Netflix: I has nao

Have had for a while, actually. IT'S AMAZING.
I have, over the past month, watched:

1. Muriel's Wedding
2. Waiting for Superman
3. Drive Me Crazy
4. The Men Who Stare at Goats
5. Glorious 39
6. Daniel Deronda
7. Strictly Ballroom
8. Kick-Ass
9. Billy Elliot

...and most of Greek.
And, I just happened to be browsing, and do you know what I found?
HOUSE OF ANUBIS.
Y'all, that shit's about to be watched.

Never Let Me Go

I'm trying to do a creative journal for English and this book, so I was looking up the movie in an attempt to figure out what the field described in the last paragraph of the book might look like, and I found a clip of the end of the movie. And I cried.
It's funny how the movie could do that for me when the book couldn't. I think that while Ishiguro's writing style lends itself well to a sort of detachment and distance that works with some of the central ideas of the book, those same qualities make it harder to truly connect with characters on an emotional level. Books, generally, make me cry because of the reactions of characters to trauma; I connect, generally, very strongly with the denial stage of grief in writing. On the flip side, this means it's fully possible for me to think a book is very sad, but not cry; without that reaction, it just doesn't hit home in the same way. For example, when Sirius died, I bawled like a baby, because of how Harry reacts, his realization that he won't hear or see Sirius ever again. Dumbledore's death, on the other hand, just wasn't all that sad , because that extreme reaction wasn't there.
Movies work in a slightly different way than books, so I think that while I require the same thing in order to cry for a movie, it can be expressed very differently. In a movie, I still need to see that reaction, but since movies have to show character reactions visually instead of descriptively, I need to see it in their face, and hear it in the music. Because of this, I think the scene at the end of the film, when Tommy is about to Complete, ends up being more effective than the book ending as a tearjerker. Even if that scene were included in the book (in the book, Kathy leaves before Tommy Completes), I don't think it'd be as sad for me. I can't fully connect with Kathy and Tommy in the book; their relationship isn't real for me, because of the detachment in the writing style. In the book, it just doesn't seem like Kathy cares for Tommy as much as she must, because the way she describes everything just don't fully convey the depth of the feeling. In the movie, it's possible to see how she's acting, instead of being told of it second-hand, and that makes all the difference. Even though all I saw was that one last scene, the relationship is there. The sadness of dying is there.

(Wow, I may have to use parts of this for my journal...)