A Final Thought

Remember when your parents tell you that you do things too wild? That charging through life in a “shoot now, ask later” mentality never brings the best results, well I’m 22 years-old-now and to tell you the truth I still don’t fully believe that, but I do respect it.

I think there is a constant struggle between being a responsible citizen of a floating world and then there are moments where you just want to run zigzags through every rule that’s out there. But when I say I’ve learned to respect the more refined approach to life’s little innuendos I actually mean that authors such as Salman Rushdie, Bessie Head, and Ishiguro have shed light on the subject that allow me to think otherwise.

Hope and despair runs through each of these authors’ novels, Rushdie in his short story “The Harmony of the spheres”, Head with her “Question of power”, and Ishiguro with “artist of the floating world. Ironically hope and despair are constantly recurring themes within our own lifestyles I feel. But the ying and yang of both of them make them more appreciable. With despair comes hope and hope always carries and inevitable feeling of despair with it as well.

The most obvious of this example was Head’s character in “A question of power”. Elizabeth drowns in the most despicable form of despair throughout her entire life, but it all culminates in the end for her with the presence of others and a feeling of hope. The white-robed monk represented the next step for her in fulfilling her destiny and mark the beginning of her transition in that direction. So hope does prevail in that sense for her.

On the other side in Ishiguro’s novel, the character Ono had his picture of hope long before the start of the novel. He was hoping to lead a new era of Japan into a golden age, where the catalyst was military power. Of course he didn’t physically have to do with any of the fighting but his “propaganda” offered a new look at Japan and projected on image on her people about what they should become. In this case hope fails and a large sense of despair is felt throughout most of the novel.

Finally we come to what was the most enjoyable story for me, Rushdie’s The Harmony of the Sphere. In my previous blog I referred to this story as the madness of the spheres because of the borderline craziness of Eliot Crane that then turns out to have some truth. It’s a humbling story, for the narrator at least, it proved that amidst all the madness life around you, you don’t really have as much control over it as you think you do. In this case not even the narrator’s own wife, which she admits at the end that Crane’s detailed accounts of intimacy with her were not all that false. This story brought despair followed by hope and then ended on another somber note of despair.

What I feel I learned from the three was that sometimes the transition out of despair can be an atrocious one, one that can also leave you at a complete loss for yourself – but the end result can be greatly satisfying. The second point I learned was that ignoring or shutting out decisions in the past is no way to get over them, and acting as though nothing has happened only shows others how distraught you really are. The third point I learned is that you really have no control over anything else besides yourself, a humbling sense of you are only a pawn in the real scheme of things. The best thing you can do is play your part well enough to ensure that others play theirs accordingly to you… O’ yea and that don’t underestimate crazy/genius schizophrenic people because their crazy for a reason.

  So I guess my final point is that having that fire inside you, that gun-ho attitude in life doesn’t really prove anything besides that you’re a careless individual, it’s what you do with that passion that really drives you to new realities.

If with age comes wisdom then I guess with youth comes vigor, I just want to find my balance with both.