Protective Destruction

Author's Note:  This is a timed response, that was supposed to be to Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare. I hadn't started reading yet, because my iPad didn't want to download the book, so I instead decided to use the sequel series (The Mortal Instruments), to craft my response to the prompt:"Discuss the character’s perspective on the world and how it is reflected by the setting of the novel." I would openly admit, I didn't respond very accurately to the response, as it was a long time ago that I read this series, but I did come up with something to say, which was good. I will be practicing more timed responses in the future. 

Throughout our lives, we are protected by our family, and those who love us. They guard us from evil, and make sure to keep us out of harm’s way. Lots of parents have this task managed, and know when to let their baby birds fly, but others lack that gut feeling. Lots of children are shielded from reality, they don’t know about struggles in their parents’ lives, and often have never had to pay for a single thing since the day they were born. This seems very slight to the case of Clarissa Morgenstern. Clary was brought up by her mother, Jocelyn, and her mom’s best friend, Luke. She was taken to Magnus Bane – the High Warlock of New York City – every year to have all of her sights of the other world erased. Her mother was lying to Clary, constantly, though she was keeping her daughter from her mistakes, and keeping her out of the life she once had. Too many people in this world lie to loved ones, in order to protect them from themselves.

It is funny what we think is protection. We avoid telling our loved ones something, because it will be hard for us to say. Humans, in their nature, are constantly selfish. Jocelyn didn’t want the same life she had for Clary, so she kept her from it. She didn’t want to have to face her mistakes, so she secretly went behind Clary’s back, and lied to her face. Every night, Jocelyn would cry over a silver box with a lock of her only son’s hair, and some of his belongings. While Jocelyn knew it was her son, Jonathan’s, she told Clary and everyone else, it was her husband, Jonathan’s. She had an image of a stranger in a military suit on the mantel, and would claim that to be Clary’s father. All that came from Jocelyn’s overprotection was danger. It endangered Clary more, because eventually she was bound to find out about this other world around her.  Oftentimes when we are not straightforward with someone, they find out in the wrong way. We are then accused of lying, and being a bad friend, when we were only trying to protect them.

Clary did indeed find out, in nearly the worst way possible. Her mother, in her battle to protect her, announced that they would be spending the summer at Luke’s farm out of the city, with a stop by Magnus’ on the way. This is because Jocelyn knew that they would be coming for her, that her husband would want to get her back. This, of course, made Clary mad, so she went out with friends and ignored her mother’s calls for a while. This is when he came for her. While Clary was out, she saw the shadowhunters, on their prey of a demon. By the time she got home, her mother had been taken. She had just been thrown into the ocean, on her own. She was supposed to try and comprehend all that had happened, while in the midst of danger. If only her mother had been more truthful with her, she would have known what happened. She would’ve known what to do. It was the shield of protection that her mom had put up, that had put her into danger.

True protection doesn’t come from avoidance, it comes from honesty. Being honest with someone, and being able to have a level of trust, is the most you can ask for. If a person is truly protected, they will know all of their own vices, without being self-depreciative. We should avoid cutting corners, and maintain honesty in all relationships. Being honest, in all forms, is being protective. There is no way to protect them from themselves, you just must be truthful, and hope for understanding.

Lack of Reality

Author's Note: This is a response to "Teddy" by J.D. Salinger. This was a tough piece to write about, as I was trying to focus on ideas that are a little over my head. This is what I came out with. Let me know what you think about the ending, I think it is a little too abrupt, but wasn't sure. I may have also fallen of the thesis a bit towards the end. I was trying to use a larger average vocabulary, not necessarily hard words, but words that match what I am really trying to say more effectively.

School by definition is an institution for educating children. The best thing a person can ever learn to do is to think, and develop their own ideas. This is exactly the behavior that is discouraged by schools. If you have thoughts, then you cannot be fully controlled, you cannot be another victim of the system. At school, as well as churches, people are being dehumanized. They are being taught to not think, to just do. If you do a certain activity, and are positive, prompt, polite and not profane, then you will have all you need going forward. You will be educated. This is exactly what they want us to believe. People are taught to swim inside of a swimming pool, while not a single person is tossed into the ocean and told to find a way out. This false reality is created around us, often without our knowledge. Rather than being gently nudged into the ocean, the reality, some find themselves dumped there, while others never have to face the reality, and never have any hardships in life.


Society is forcing us into a habitual routine, into the square dimensions of a pool, without our recognition. Mentioned a lot in this story were the cigarettes that people were smoking as Teddy passed them on the deck, the people who were sucking in chemicals, as suggested by society, in order to be happy. Even Mr. McArdle, Teddy's father, was a follower of this way. This is just another way to avoid facing reality. Almost everyone on the boat is sharing this habit. Once you have smoked a cigarette, it is near impossible to stop. A large majority of people who start smoking have this in mind when they start, but it isn’t important to them. If not smoking, everyone on the boat has a way of escaping reality, a habit of some sort. That is, everyone except one.  Teddy McArdle is the outlier of his family, and of the entire boat. While everyone else is off smoking cigarettes, or playing games, Teddy is the only one to be found writing in his journal. He is the only one developing thoughts, and embracing the reality of the world. This is the reason that so many people are not understanding of Teddy. Every time he is on to something they just cut him off, in disbelief of his thoughts.  This is the same reason for so many ideas in this world being shut down, and never coming to life. Everything that is insightful is not understood. People do not want to hear the truth, they would like to accept the falseness of their reality.

One of the great things in this story is the clear exaggeration of Teddy being unaccepted. He is constantly spoken over. This is a common practice with youth, and children, but oftentimes they are the lucky ones. They still have an imagination, they have not been turned into machines. Children are often able to see things more for what they are than adults. You see very different reactions from children compared to adults. Ignoring a person in need of help, beating an animal, there are many common practices that are ignored by humanity, but not by children. Kids are quick to be cut off, because no one wants to hear what they have to say. No one wants to see things for what they are, because in reality life and our daily practices are disturbing. They are disturbing, but accepted -- even suggested -- by society. Gradually, we encourage our children to “grow-up” and to just go with the flow. Most oblige, but the few that don’t are quickly shoved beneath the rug, classified as “mental.” We have all had our moments of being unaccepted, and being not welcome. This is something that most children feel very often, and Teddy feels almost all the time.

Teddy brings to the ship something that no one else has: a general understanding of the reality of the world, of the harshness. He has very genuine thoughts, and is quick to be shut up. He has been hauled around from place to place, with no one able to tell his parents what is wrong with him. This is because there is nothing wrong with him. The real problem is the parents. They are living a dysfunctional life, and pretending everything is okay. They always seem to be bickering, and can never agree on anything. That is anything accept Teddy. Mr and Mrs McArdle both seem to think that there is something wrong with their son. In reality, there is something wrong with society. This is what Teddy is trying to talk about, and every time he says something of intellect, he is denied. He is somewhere out in the ocean, in the reality of life, while everyone else is safe on the boat, with their swimming pool. If there isn’t a change in society, people like Teddy will cease to exist. While life gets worse, people will believe more and more, and not recognize this until it is too late.

This whole idea of protecting people from the truth is quite absurd. Institutions are putting them in a box, while still saying silly things like "think outside the box." You cannot possibly think out of a box you have been placed in. All of the nonsense of everyone being treated the same, and everything being "one size fits all," is another crazy phenomenon. The first place for change is the school, they should teach inner thoughts, rather than memorization of useless knowledge. All of these crazy ideas need to be put to an end, and reality needs to be faced, and greeted as a long lost friend.

Obsessions of the Mind

Author's Note: This is a piece that I wrote from reading the first 30 pages of Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. I will be trying to develop a higher frequency with this novel, as well as write in short periods of time. I allowed myself about 45 minutes to write this, and am sort of happy with it. While not perfectly, I was able to sort of determine what I wanted to say, before having to rewrite the whole thing. 

Everyone knows the feeling: you think or do something you shouldn't have, and it suddenly becomes an obsession, wondering if everyone knows what you’ve done, or what you’ve done in your head.   In Flight Behavior, Dellarobia is just another victim of this. She has been having meetings with a man, with potential affair conflict, and she doesn't even know why. She is somehow attracted to the idea of the risk of losing everything. It is human nature to have a strange attraction to death, to be constantly flirting with death. Dellarobia, much like the average human being, has this attraction, yet it is not quite to death, it is to losing everthing.

We have all heard the crazy stories of people risking their life to do something that is completely unnecessary, and endangering of their lives. Felix Baumgartner in his freefall from space, Harry Houdini in his continuous daredevil stunts, Philippe Petit’s high wire walk between the Twin Towers; there are tons of examples of people doing risky stunts, but lots believe it is not the fame they are looking for. They are looking for the satisfaction of surviving death, for the belief that they can outlive death. The character Dellarobia is not risking her life by committing continuous acts of betrayal, but she is risking something that is much worse than death to most people: family.

When Dellarobia thinks she is leaving her family for sure, permanently, she is turned back by something totally unexpected. Leaving her kids at her mother-in-law’s, she begins the long hike over the mountain, when suddenly out of the distance, she believes to see a lake of fire. This lake of fire is a sign for her, a sign that her purity is beginning to burn to nothing. She rushes back, determining to never do it again. "Her strange turnaround on the mountain had acted on her like some kind of shock therapy." (p 22) In the future, I imagine that her life will have a large turnaround, but the guilt of what she was thinking of doing will eat her, and she will soon face confrontation.

Guilt

Author's Note: This is my response/analysis to "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe. It took a few pieces, with help from Mr. Johnson to discover what I really wanted to talk about which is somewhere along the lines of what contained guilt can lead a person to do... I was trying to use strong vocabulary (as this tends to be one of my weaknesses), as well as include a few semantic/ syntactical devices in a more natural way, as I have the tendency to try and force them in. I am not sure why there are a few paragraphs highlighted, but I couldn't get it to change back to normal.  Let me know what you think.

People feel safest when constantly hearing noise; sound gives us comfort, sound gives us warmth, and sound gives us breath. When the silence comes, normally during the night, things become eerie. The time when our minds go a little crazy, when it is dark, we can’t really see things, so we imagine them. We can’t really hear things, so we imagine them, and we can’t really comprehend things. Due to such little amount of noise, the least comfortable time is night. As far as hearing things, however, it can sometimes apply during the day. When you are thinking about one thing so frequently, you can sometimes faintly hear it, even when it’s not there. One thing that would lead a person to hearing something that is not there is guilt. Guilt is a deadly parasite – it kills people from the inside.

The man in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a victim of this parasite. He is so aware of what he has done, his hearing has been so heightened, that he begins to make up things in his head, just to satisfy his insanity, to satisfy his thirst for something exotic to happen. “And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror.” He literally believes that he can hear the heartbeat of the man, even after death. A heightened awareness present due to guilt only leads to bad things; in this character’s case it is even a step worse than paranoia: schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a mental disease that causes the bearer to completely imagine things.

Even from the beginning of the story, the main character, although constantly claiming otherwise, has become mad; he has gone off the deep end a little; he has surrendered to this thought that the landlord’s eye is evil. "He had the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold...” There are people everywhere with cataracts in their eyes, or coloboma (cat) eyes; it is an entirely human reaction to be a bit spooked, and maybe even avoid the person for a while. This character however, brings himself to believe that this man – who has done him no wrong – has an eye that is reason enough for murder. He has no reason to kill this man, he acts with no reasonable motive. Thus he leads himself into the guilt he receives, it is not just some fluke situation. Guilt is deadly, but predictable. Oftentimes we know very well the amount of guilt our actions will leave us with.

Guilt is a human feeling. Although most people have not been involved in murder, all people will feel guilt sometime in their lives. We are in a world full of rules, in society, religion, and just about everything else. This story, for example, is set in the Victorian Era. This era was known for strict behavioral beliefs, and also Christianity. This man, when deciding to take the old man’s life, fully understands that his is breaking the sixth commandment according to Moses, as well as breaking the morals of his society. However, Christianity has a very powerful theme: forgiveness. The only way to get rid of guilt is by forgiveness. 

Forgiveness is easier to give to someone, than to give yourself. In order to get rid of guilt entirely, you need to forgive yourself.Guilt grows steadily, and without forgiving yourself, it just continues to build up inside. We are our own worst critics, because we know of all of our own mistakes, all of our reasons to be guilt. Without forgiveness, the guilt grows more. This character’s actions become a manifestation of what happens when the guilt becomes unmanageable. He refuses to accept what he has done, and forgive himself. Sure, it would normally take more time to forgive oneself. Under these circumstances, however, when the police show up right after his evil deed, there are only two choices that he has: to forgive himself, or let the guilt takeover, and give in. 

After the death of the old man, the murderer begins to feel his self-inflicted guilt. He has the knowledge that the police officers do not, of the man directly beneath his feet. The guilt he is feeling for killing the man is so powerful, so overwhelming, that his schizophrenia reveals itself as he begins to hear the man’s heartbeat. The imagined sound is driven by his guilt directly. As the sun begins to rise, he hears the heartbeat louder and louder. The sun is a symbol of knowledge, revealed while the man begins to worry that the officers can hear the heartbeat too. He is driven into confessing to the murder, revealing the man beneath him; he finally bursts out the guilt, admitting to what he’d done. Guilt leads us into sick measures. Like a parasite, unless eliminated from the body, the outcomes are deadly.

Clarisse and Mildred

AN: This is a piece I am not particularly proud of. I start in sort of an emotional voice, and attempted to smoothly transition into a more academic voice. I was trying to sort of incorporate a synecdoche by referring to Mildred as society and vice-versa, but rather than being in just one phrase, it is sort of throughout the piece. I think that this can be used as a synecdoche, but am not 100% sure, because I am sort of just learning how to use one. Let me know how these things worked out. This response to Fahrenheit 451 is to the prompt: "Compare and contrast Clarisse and Mildred. In your response, include references that discuss them in relation to the theme."

The purity and love that Clarisse bears, the happiness flows through her like a river, while Mildred, a lost sole, empty inside, has nothing left to share, nothing to offer. Clarisse is a sign of perfection, innocence, an individual not afraid of messing up, not afraid of living.  Mildred is the truth, the cold hard reality, the bearer of such insanity that she wanted to kill herself.  The pair, whom both are very involved in Montag’s life, are severely different from each other.  They both also have their effects on Montag, and the way Montag reacts and behaves.  

Though both Clarisse and Mildred have had their effects on him, Montag is more responsive, and reactive to Clarisse. When walking home, dreading returning to his empty home, Clarisse is always there to greet him and
walk the last block or two. She is always there, refreshing his life, allowing him to see the way she sees, helping him to see what the government is doing to the people. When he returns home, he returns to reality, he returns to his empty wife. “… if she died, he was certain he wouldn’t cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street
face, a newspaper image…” (p.44) Mildred is in such a distant place, it is as though Montag doesn’t even know her. She is so lost in the television, that she has not a thought about anything.

Mildred shows us the ignorance of present day society, as well as the conformity of society. If the government says that firemen have always started fires, then that is the truth, not a doubt in her mind. It is the lucky ones like Clarisse, who have a family that raises her to ask not how, but why. Why do the firemen start fires? Clarisse has the uncanny ability to question the government, and to question what she is told. While Mildred is in the parlor, being brainwashed while watching what the government wants her to see, Clarisse is developing her own thoughts, not directly influenced by what society thinks is right.

Constantly it is wanted of us to be like everyone else, to just follow the flow, not developing our own ideas of any sort. We are supposed to stand in a straight line, to raise our hand before we speak, to write in ITS CLEAR format. These things are not up for debate, we can’t question why things happen the way they do. Even though this is well known, Clarisse still does question everything. While everyone else is following society, buying that fourth television, soaking up everything that the government fictionalizes, Clarisse is off questioning the truth of what they tell us. She recognizes that the government isn’t really telling everything to the citizens. “It’s a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not.”(p. 27)  Yet while she has recognized this, and developed her own thoughts, Mildred – in the same way that the rest of the population has – is absorbing all of lies the government is feeding her. Clarisse has developed the desirable ability to develop her own thoughts, even when being force-fed ideas, and told what to believe.

While Mildred is soaking up the television, Clarisse is out, discovering the world, and learning. Clarisse has
a huge attention to detail, and a huge developed knowledge of lots of things, unlike Montag, and presumably the general population. In their conversations, she often stops, so that Montag can experience the things that she experiences. She stops so that he can smell the old leaves that are scented like cinnamon. Clarisse has the most acute attention to detail, which is questioned in this society. She is forced to see a psychiatrist, who asks why she goes out and hikes around in the forests, and watches the birds, and collects butterflies.  The psychiatrist, just like the population, just like Mildred, has no attention to detail, no thought. It is proven that out of everything, the least amount of the brain is used when watching television. This is what the majority, or the “normal” people do with their time. Mildred watches so much television that she refers to the fictional characters as family. While Mildred’s uncle is a fictionalized character on the television, Clarisse’s uncle is filling her up with knowledge, guiding her to make her own decisions, and build her own thoughts. Clarisse and Mildred are so incredibly different, it is implausible.

Mildred is society, and what it has become; she follows what she is told, she believes what she is told, she never questions what is told, and she never adds ideas to what she is told. An obvious real life example is the ITS CLEAR format of writing. Most don’t question the reasoning for such a silly thing, and just complete it, except for those few who have experienced real writing. Rather than asking the teacher how to complete the task, they question why. Those who ask why instead of how are virtually the definition of Clarisse, they are the ones who have not yet been brainwashed. More of society is like Mildred, though. Mildred is dried up, with nothing fresh, because she has only been fed ideas, and never developed her own ideas or thoughts. The higher hope is a life like Clarisse’s, where thoughts are provoked, and everything has a purpose, whether it be determined or undetermined. However, Clarisse’s life was put to a quick end, because of her desire to learn, and her thought process. The government had to have power,  either by brainwashing the citizens, or killing them, so that others cannot learn.

Welcome!

This is my new blog, for my freshman year language arts. This year my focus will be on science fiction literature, and I will hope to demonstrate a better understanding of it through my writing. I hope you enjoy reading my pieces, and I will try to update as soon as possible.