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.
This is an interesting take on the notion of flirting with death. There is a theory by Freud which he calls Thanatos, named for a Greek god of death and destruction. He argues that we are attracted to flirt with death in order to affirm we are indeed alive. I would like to talk more about this when we are together. I also like how you are incorporating sentences structures for affect. How they are executed needs some attention, but this is way cool. Finally, I love the author's note. Your purposeful execution of a timed piece if smart, and admirable. Well done.
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