When our new knowledge meets our old knowledge, change should occur. The way we see the world, the way we see ourselves, and even the way we see ourselves in the world. You chose between four books to read and in doing so, change should have happened.
For this week's blog, I want you to explain how your book changed the way you view, know, understand or think about something. Since many have not read your book, provide a brief summary of the idea or moment and then go on to explain how it impacted you.
The novel I read was Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The setting takes place in a futuristic world, where babies are made in a factory rather than in a womb, and certain people are assigned to certain societal standards and tasks. If a person belongs to a less intelligent group, they are trained from birth to hate books and nature, etc. People take “Soma” tablets which is a drug that allows them to feel happy.
ReplyDeleteThe concept that amazed me from this book was the fact that the people of this society do not know love. They are created in a factory, raised only to have content for soma and the job that they are assigned to. There is a high obsession with sex, but never relationships. There is no romance, no marriage, no love. The words “mother” and “birth” come across as vulgar, and the thought of permanently being with another person is a sin. Huxley explains, “Grief and remorse, compassion and duty - all were forgotten now and, as it were, absorbed into an intense overpowering hatred of these less than human monsters” (192-193). This book has made me realize that we as a society must never take the ability to love for granted. Not just loving another person, but loving the ocean when the tide comes in, or listening to the same song fifty times because you love it that much. Sure, the futuristic society in Brave New World is structured and simple, but without the love of another, of yourself, and of the world around you, what is the point? This is the exact question that main character John asked himself, and I believe that our society speaks through him. I have realized that we are truly lucky to know how to love.
The book that I chose to read was The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. O'Brien writes from his own experiences but the narrator is fictional. This strategy served a message, that sometimes the truth is not always the best path if your goal is to share an experience or emotion. The story follows the tales of the fictional narrator, who uses his own experiences to help explain how to tell a good real war story. This message impacted me because it gave me more of a lens into the difficulty of servicemen and women have with coming home and it also helped me be more aware of everyday people using this technique to cope and to share. In the novel on page 19, “They were actors. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted…” (O’Brien). This showed to me how soldiers sometimes cope. This has become more personal to me because I have met active service members and have had family in the military that struggle with their stories. These lessons help me be more conscientious and sensitive to the experiences and feelings of service members.
ReplyDeleteThe novel that I decided to read was “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. Basil, an artist, paints a portrait of the young, handsome and, innocent Dorian Gray. Lord Henry, a friend of Basil, attempts to entice Dorian to adopt his views on hedonism, thus changing Dorian’s character. Dorian becomes jealous of his painting which depicts his youth so he tries to hide it from the world and himself. As he grows older, his soul becomes darker by the study of a yellow book given to him by Lord Henry, and is corrupted morally. As a result the portrait becomes uglier and uglier to show the deterioration of his morality and soul of innocence.
ReplyDeleteUsually when people see art, they think that it has a deeper meaning and it is not just a pretty picture. However, this book preaches the opposite, saying in the preface, “art is for art’s sake”, which means that art has no purpose behind it. In the book, Lord Henry claims that art is but useless and he influences Dorian Gray with the concept and others as well (Wilde). However, the irony is that the book is meant to say that art is nothing but it uses the yellow book and the portrait as art that has meaning. In fact, the book serves as a cautionary tale that art if given meaning can bring detrimental results, such as death. It gave me new perspective, that was not only different but extremely rare to find and had never heard of. The fact that a writer himself believes in the notion that art is useless is very unique and unimaginable in a sense. It has allowed me to see the other side of what I believe in art and how that perspective is still valid.
"A Brave New World" has changed my views on society and the things that we value. In the novel, a new society has been created with social class. They have become conceited and care only about material things such as sex, vacations, or their soma, which is a drug that provides them with a sense of false happiness. They contrast this with the views of Native Americans that are seen on a trip the main characters go on. They show how they value their religion and honor ancient beliefs. The differences in the two societies made me realize that it's not about what you have that's important, but it's about what you believe in, feel and know. At the end of the novel, they talk about how they have to send people away because they know too much, they have a deeper understanding of the world. They have become truly happy and are not controlled by the soma. I think that this speaks to the ‘brainwashing’ that social media does to us. We feel this false sense of connection to people and we tell ourselves that we are happy, but in reality we aren't happy just sitting on our phones or computers doing nothing. We become truly happy when we engage in actual human contact. This book made me think more about that, and I value the people in my life more.
ReplyDeleteIt also shows how seeing the world and appreciating its beauty is an important aspect of being truly happy. Although this was regarded as a bad thing in their society because it distracts the workers, it made me think about how you have to stop and smell the roses every now and then. Sometimes it's important to just take in nature and your environment and appreciate the beauty of it. A Brave New World has made me appreciate the people and things in my life more because I see now how much of an impact they have on reaching true happiness.
As my choice book, I read “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. I became interested in the text when we first read the chapter “How To Tell a True War Story” in class, and knew I wanted to read more. The book is a collection of stories about O’Brien’s experiences in the Vietnam War, as well as stories of other individuals. Ranging from combat to pranks to women on base, O’Brien captures it all. However, not all the stories in the text are completely true, a strategy the author uses to try his best at portraying the full experience. A prominent theme throughout “The Things They Carried” is how stories will never be able to match an actual experience, something I never really thought about until I finished this book. Especially with an event as serious as war, only those who have gone through it will be able to understand each other. O’Brien explains, “It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it...You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together” (192). These men are the only ones who know what each have been through, and therefore, are able to connect so deeply. In addition to this theme, O’Brien also develops the idea that stories have to be exaggerated to get close to the full effect. My favorite quote from “The Things They Carried” is: “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (178). This supports the fact that some of O’Brien’s stories were false, as he was just doing his best to depict what he experienced. This theme further developed my lesson of experience over story. I thoroughly enjoyed O’Brien’s interpretation of the Vietnam War and his portrayal of the experiences he had. The text had a resonating influence on me, as I learned numerous lessons from reading.
ReplyDeleteIn Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, Wilde makes the commentary that “all art is quite useless”(Wilde 2). He illustrates this by having Basil, an artist, create a portrait of a beautiful man named Dorian Gray. Upon seeing the beauty of the artwork, Dorian makes the wish that he maintain his youthful beauty while the portrait ages. To his surprise, the portrait obeyed Dorian’s wish and the picture aged over time. As a result, Dorian’s life continued (beautifully), and he was later corrupted by Lord Henry, an old friend of Basil, and his character became more evil and dark. In addition, he was also corrupted by a yellow book Lord Henry gave him, which dramatically and negatively changes his perspective on the world. As the novel progresses, the picture becomes a reflection of Dorian’s soul as it grows viler and viler. Dorian lived enslaved by the terror of seeing the portrait done by Basil because it illustrated and acted as a reminder for all of the sins that he has committed against others. In the end, he takes a knife and stabs the portrait for all the evil it has done to him, and this results in his own death and the return of his rightful elderly appearance.
ReplyDeleteThe reason that Dorian Gray was negatively influenced by art was because he chose to go below the aesthetically pleasing nature of art and extract meaning from it. He did not have to read into what the portrait or the yellow book was depicting; yet he does it anyways, and this action results in his demise. In this way, Wilde illustrates that art is solely meant to be aesthetically pleasing by warning his readers not to go below the surface. Prior to reading this novel, I have always had the impression that art is always trying to speak to some moral lesson. However, reading this novel has taught me that art is not always about discovering and admiring the beauty in the message that the artist is trying to send because there isn’t always one to find. Sometimes, art is solely about appreciating the beauty in the aesthetic nature of an art piece.
The book that I choose to read was “The Things They Carried” by Tim O'Brien. Throughout the book O’Brien shares his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam through stories. O’Brien’s story shows that you cannot always believe war stories or understand a situation until you have experienced it. In the novel O’Brien explains, “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness” (O’Brien 230). This quote shows that people who have not been to war are only able to imagine what Vietnam must have been like. This concept changed the way that I view others situations. It showed that it is easy to judge or think you know about others people's situation but unless you have experienced it you will not truly know how they feel. Since many of the war stories were not true, O’Brien shows that the stories are easy to believe because of the listeners misconceptions of the situation, “Now, and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up to me afterwards and say she likes it… Sometimes, even, there are little tears. What i should do, she’ll say, is put it all behind me. Find new stories to tell” (O’Brien 84). People’s misconceptions and lack of experience inhibit them from understanding others situations. The lessons that I learned from "The Things They Carried" will help me be more accepting towards other people's situations.
ReplyDeleteThe novel "A Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley constructs a society in which sex is a normal part of every day life, and love and family is seen as pornographic. Every 'civilized' person in this society lives fast and loud, doing the job they are assigned during the day, and taking a legal drug called 'soma' and sleeping with each other after work hours. This book has allowed me to look at my own life and what gives it meaning. I am not defined by the job society says I have to do, or the one dimensional relationships I form with others, but rather the multidimensional relationships with the people I love. Without these relationships, without love, life would be empty and plain. Time spent alone would be completely invaluable because all time would be spent alone, which could explain the inability of the people in Huxley's world to think about themselves while in solitude. Rather than looking inside myself for my meaning and humanity, I should be looking at the people around me, and what I mean to them. I can't imagine my life without the people I love, so I should strive to be an important part of other people's lives to have a fulfilling existence.
ReplyDeleteThis novel made me think about the morals that we value in our society, and how some of them are slipping away. After reading "A Brave New World", I can see how selfishness and promiscuity can be an obstruction to love. To find true meaning and long term happiness, sometimes we have to discard the quick and easy methods of finding joy in exchange for the happiness of those around us.
I chose to read the novel “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. In this novel the characters live in a civilization where the citizens are conditioned in their sleep as children and because of this they grow up thinking and behaving a certain way. This society also makes babies in factories rather than having mothers birth their own children, and based on what they need, they make the babies have a certain intellectual level and physical properties to correspond with those needs.
ReplyDeleteThis factor of the novel made me step back and wonder how much our society tries to force certain views and behaviors upon us. As a society we are highly influenced by the media we see every day, media that portrays certain images of how genders and races should be viewed and treated. We are told by our parents or guardians what behaviors are right and what behaviors are wrong. Unlike in the novel “Brave New World” we were not conditioned as children to accept everything society tells us to. Yes, we were raised a certain way based upon different views, but if we don’t like something society is doing we have the power to try and make a difference, unlike any of the characters in this novel. A great example of this is the women’s march that recently took place. Women as a whole do not like the way society treats and views them, so rather than accepting what society says, we took a stand and protested for the rights we deserve. I think it’s amazing that we have the power to do this in our society and reading “Brave New World” helped me see how much we can actually do to make a change in our world.
The novel I chose to read was "The Things They Carried" by Tim O’Brien. O’Brien fought in the Vietnam War and he recollects stories from when he was in the war, and near the end, he claims that some of them may be false. Which ones, we don’t know, but he explains that the significance and impact of storytelling should not be solely based upon whether the tale actually occurred or was completely made up. The narrator is said to be fictional, but we are unsure, as the stories feature Tim O’Brien, the author (I personally believe it was the author’s true stories with some twists added in), and the stories seem so real that they can’t possibly be made up, right? Well, we don’t know. Made up stories teach lessons just as important as the real ones, and it’s important to realize that we should learn something from every story we hear, regardless of its origin.
ReplyDeleteWith that being said, it’s important to actually experience things for ourselves and be open to the possibilities of the unknown. In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story”, O’Brien tells us about how people enjoy his stories based on the way the stories make them feel, not because of the message they carry. This really changed the way I think - some of the things I like, I only like them because of how it affects me, not for what it actually is. For example, do I really enjoy the mechanics of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Music of the Night”? Nope, I don’t really care what the notes are, but I relish in the goosebumps I get when I hear them. Never do I think, “Wow, Lloyd Webber is a smart man, and these chords are an intellectual choice!” Silly example, but it’s an actual real life application for me. I think people, myself included, are so focused on their views of something, that they forget its beauty on its own. It wasn’t created with *your* ideals in mind; it was manifested with a certain image, and we need to appreciate the creator’s mind, which is one of the most special things we have on this planet. Overall, what I got out of this book was that we can’t make assumptions, our minds should always be open, and experiences outweigh our thoughts (in some, but not all, cases).
The novel I chose to read was “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. An extremely handsome man named Dorian Gray is painted by a man named Basil. Basil’s friend, Lord Henry, gets into Dorian’s mind, and causes him to envy the painting, for Dorian will age and lose his beauty but the painting will not. As Dorian becomes darker as a person, due to his reading of a yellow book given to him by Lord Henry, the painting begins to appear uglier, while Dorian now remains the same. In many language arts classes and even art classes, we are often taught that there is a deeper meaning to things than what is right in front of us. We are taught to analyze artwork and literature in order to determine what the author’s or artist’s purpose was. However, in this book, Dorian reading deeper into things is the problem. This is an interesting way of the author, Oscar Wilde, telling readers that there is not always a deeper meaning behind a piece of art or literature, which is almost the complete opposite of what most people are taught their whole lives.
ReplyDeleteI have an attunement for quotes and I seem to collect phrases and one-liners from every book that I read. The Picture of Dorian Gray is no exception. The concept that I cannot get out of my head sprouts from the death of James Vane. While Dorian, Henry, and other various people were hunting rabbits, towards the end of the hunt Dorians asks Geoffrey not to shoot at what he believes is just another rabbit. Ignoring Dorian Gray’s comment Geoffrey takes the shot and ends up killing a mysterious man, later found out to be James. After the incident Dorians feels as if it was a “bad omen” and Henry’s response has captured my mind.
ReplyDeleteLord Henry stated, “As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that” (Wilde 150). I am a very superstitious person and I choose to believe in the possibility of anything being true, including omens. So this mindset clashed with my own, but also opened a completely new perspective. Henry disputes the idea of an omen, personifying Destiny (also might be referring to mythology) and states that she is too wise or too cruel to deliver people omens. She would be too wise, because she knows better than giving people clues about the results of their own lives. On the other hand she would be too cruel, meaning that she rather keep people in the dark than warn them of bad times ahead. It is simply a unique perspective of the world, it shows such contrast. It has impacted me by displaying that the world does not want us to figure out our futures for a variety of reason. Unlike many I am comforted in the unknown and the thought that we are simply not suppose to know. This quote seems to support the value and rationality of the unknown.
Hopefully I don’t sound cliché but The Picture of Dorian Gray changed the way I view people in a sort of “don’t judge a book by its cover” way. In the book, Dorian, a young man with a beautiful face and rather naive to the world, has a portrait painted of himself. Misguided by a friend, he wishes that he would be able to stay beautiful and appear trustworthy forever. The painting does just this, and keeps his body from aging or turning wretched with sins he commits. Once he discovers this wonder, he turns to a life of sin and crime while the whole world was unawares until the end when he stabs the painting, which ends up killing himself, from guilt and his body gains the appearance it should have.
ReplyDeleteWhat this taught me is how easy it is for someone to hide their true nature. Now, I know magic portraits don’t exist but it really isn’t that hard for someone to look trustworthy and deceive you. This book didn’t really teach me anything new but it made me be a bit more cautious when trusting some people. As Dorian was able to hide the true nature of his actions and person so easily, he was able to take advantage of good people like the chemist who he blackmailed into dissolving a friend he had murdered. I’m not saying to be over cynical of people, but just be aware when meeting a new person that they could be hiding some dark secrets. Most people have them, even the people you think you know the best.
The Picture of Dorian Gray made me question how I think about a lot of aspects of life, from how I treat people, to how I make decisions, to how I'd like to see my life in 20 years. In particular, though, the book made me rethink the relationship I have with my art and how I absorb others' art. In the beginning of the book, Basil Halward, an artist, won't even show Dorian his painting of him for fear that it would reveal too much of his emotions toward Dorian. While it seemed a bit dramatic on Basil's part, it really does make sense. What someone writes, draws, paints, or creates in any way, can reveal a lot about them as a person, their values, their thoughts, their emotional state. However, by the end of the book, Basil concludes that art does more to conceal the artist than it does to reveal him. I think this argument also has merit, in that the power and the meaning behind a piece of art is created by its beholder. The person absorbing the art, along with their own thoughts and values, determine the message, regardless of the artist's intended message. While this is a bit disheartening in a way, to think that the artist has little power in delivering their intended message, it is also very beautiful to consider that a single piece of art can deliver with it infinite meanings to infinite viewers.
ReplyDeleteWhat can be made of The Picture of Dorian Gray? What change in view could this novel have begat in me? The novel, an inquiry into the relation of art and the spectator, art and the artist, disguised as a moralistic horror tale. Like The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, the novel tells the story of a man who wishes to live out his youthful sin with no consequences. Yet, torment is what Dorian finds, in the form of the portrait that ages and grows uglier with the years and sins of Gray.
ReplyDeleteWhat I found in the novel was an exceeding justification of the value of aesthetic beauty, and the risk of such beauty being utterly lost,the more one seeks to understand a work beyond the intuitive manner. That beauty should make one feel, and otherwise should not be questioned. Dorian represented for Basil a manifestation of nobility and beauty. Hallward’s realization of Dorian’s evil distorts what was once beautiful in the painting, to a display of all that is warped behind Gray’s deceptive beauty. Hallward is killed by he whom he had once thought an angel. As demonstrated with Dorian’s love of Sybil Vane, as well as through Hallward’s admiration of Dorian, the aesthetic pleasures are placed in contradistinction to the dullness and pains, and the horror(as with Hallward revisiting his masterpiece shortly before his murder), of what is real and artless. In each, as the spectator, or even the artist, detects what is real and genuine-behind the appearance, under the surface-beauty, what was first seen and felt, is eternally lost. Art is a beautiful thing, operating on the intuitive, and it is indeed at great peril, to seek to understand art like a science. For art, when the depths are revealed, may serve as a mirror to all in the spectator wished by him to remain hidden, or perhaps the exterior may never appear again to the onlooker as it once did.
To return to my question, and to provide an answer, it must be said that my view of art's relation to morality is purely imposed by the spectator. I shall not firmly hold to this view, for it is only the opinion of Wilde, many Decadents, Aesthetes, and Pre-Raphaelites (and many men, such as Tolstoy, Dickens or Hugo, or Chaplin and Griffith in the cinema, may have reason to disagree with the views of the aforementioned). Yet, I feel that I have found a new and interesting vein of thinking in which to approach this matter. Aesthetics vs. Usefulness.
Delete“The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde is a story that captures the beauty and corruption of youth and innocence. Within the story, the painting itself serves as a visual object of Dorian’s corruption and its deterioration reflects his soul. I love this idea that corruption comes from within ourselves and individuals have ultimate control over who we are as humans. Wilde also delves into the duality of man through Dorian’s belief that he can only be a man of virtue or evil. This theme covered in the book changed my outlook on my perception of who I am as a person. I have spent my entire life figuring out who I am and who I need to be. Wilde helped me to understand that I do not need to see myself as any one thing, but rather define myself by many things. Dorian spent his life trying to fit a mold of good or evil, but failed to realize that the true beauty in life comes from the combination that man has both.
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