I am haunted by one passage in particular from The bluest eye:"The orange-patched sky of the steel-mill section never reached this part of town. This sky was always blue" (p. 105).
In many ways, this one sentence exemplifies not only the racist and classist segregation of Lorain, Ohio, but everything that is wrong with our world. We gluttonously consume without thinking of the consequences, the human cost, the ecological cost. As long as the skies of our lives are blue, we give little thought to the suffering of others, and we are determined to maintain that blueness even if we have to paint it on, thereby creating an artifice and ignoring the encroaching orange patches all around us. I believe humans should strive for happiness, but we have an enormous blind spot, and our capacity for happiness will, in a most profound irony, cause our ultimate destruction - unless we can find happiness in alleviating the misery of others and working to solve the enormous problems we are faced with. We need to derive our contentment from an understanding of the whole, not lie under our blue sky oblivious to the choking pollution just over the way.
'Untitled' by Guilherme Cecílio, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.0
I think if everyone empathize with others, no one can try to keep only their own benefits. People's egoism makes the world only the place in which people struggle in order to live.
ReplyDeleteI don't know whether it is natural or not! Really should oppressed people struggle in order to live?!
probably, I should write a blog about that :))
I see someone's being egoist as an inherit thing. We are naturally created like that. However, some of us notice that they have this being-egoist, like me:P
ReplyDeleteOn my own, I cannot offer much to people. I cannot change their lives immediately. However, there is something I can do by myself.
I recycle:D
I sounds irrelevant. BUT no.
As an example: People starve and have no fresh water etc. I cannot bring them water or food somehow. But, I can protect the envirenment. I won't use up too much water.. I can throw the scratch paper to the recycle bin. At least, this is better than doing nothing.
Or maybe I can try to tell people that wars are bad. Maybe that would change or form their minds in a positive way. There is no bad in telling this or similar things.
Although it is a drop in the ocean, I can individually do such things fot he time-being.
By the way, I also dislike it when somebody looks down on the people who don't have so good living conditions. This attitude only destroys the relationships among themselves and makes it so hard to take any better steps in everything.
Also Pecola wanted to be like a bird and she wanted to fly to blue sky at the end of the novel. It is so sad and that scene hit me from my heart because it has so many emoutions and also she wanted to have blue eyes so much and she thinks blue eyes would change the image of everything in her life but nothing is changed even went bad (she raped from her father again) and she goes mad, had an imaginary friend.
ReplyDeleteI think blue sky is important symbol of having good life conditions and hopes in the novel. I liked Morrison used the sky as a symbol in her novel.