Puritans, the pure of spirit, mind, and body. Pure they are, yet only deceiving. These people wear a mask as a criminal at court. They are no more holy or righteous than you or I. These so-called Puritans hide in their churches of sinful religion, damning all others who live outside this pure path. But they are not the only ones. It is easy to see the flaws and point out the wrong-doings of such a society, yet today the world is no different. Today we criticize other religions and races for their customs. How do we know that their customs are less correct and righteous than our own? Take religions for example: How does anyone know what is the correct belief when each individual religion deems itself as the single ruler of the spirit? We can never be sure. Therefore, there must be flaws in each and every aspect of humanity, with no set right or wrong, just different variations. Is there really a Christ as the Christian community believes, or is Islam or Hinduism the accurate perception of history? No-one will ever know. Maybe there is not one single ruler of the human universe, but several separate gods and goddesses, as the Greeks and Native Americans thought. So how can one group of people see themselves as dominant over another? They cannot. There is no such thing as a Puritan society, no matter if it is named so.
Irony trumps everything. Ironic that Hester Prynne's husband appears from the wilderness at the same time that she is set upon the stage of grief and mockery. Also, ironic that her former love and caregiver is the physician that is brought in to care for Hester and her newborn child, a child that should be his own. Hester fears that her former husband will try to poison her or her baby with his treatments, yet he already has. He had killed them both long ago when he was presumed dead, abondaning them in this new world filled with opportunity and destruction. However, with his potions he has saved them, yet only phyically. The scars on Hester Prynne's life will never cease, and her child's soul will fester forever because of the wrong-doings of her mother, father, and Mr. Prynne.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Custom House & Chapter 1
"It is a good lesson--though it may be a hard one--for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves and all he aims at."
Wow. How true is this? What do our personal goals really mean to the world? The answer: Nothing. Each of our dreams, goals, loves, and hopes are but another flake of snow upon this earth. Some shall last forever, some only seconds. Some hopes will be recycled, thawed by spring's warming life, enabling it to quench the thirst of moral fiber; while others vanish, or sometimes, will become polluted by all the impurities of humanity and its sinful ways of nature. Goals and aspirations are unique for each individual, yet sometimes the basics of an aspiration allow for the grouping of separate people into the 'clicks' of clubs and teams and circles striving toward their common factor. Yet how meaningless such goals are outside these clicks, out in the real world--which some argue doesn't exist, that the world is simple what someone makes of it--that forages on the meat of raw ambition and hopeless hope.
It is ironic that Hawthorne writes that this lesson is a "hard one." Is this not so with many of life's most important lessons? Friendship, love, life, death; all of these are harsh lessons at times that abuse the learner, forcing that person to stare directly into the eye of difficulty and defeat knowing not what will become of them, only that there is a lesson to be learned. The most thorough lessons in life are the ones that collapse the ground from underneath the foot. At these times it is a decision to stand again on a lower pedestal or to slide apathetically into the lifeless home of darkness.
The narrator of The Custom House is looking for fame. However, fame is like control, an allusion of the senses, a shadow that is held for only a second before eluding the eternal grasp of its demise. Fame is a mindset, and how happy everyone would be is they all could simply be famous to themselves.
Wow. How true is this? What do our personal goals really mean to the world? The answer: Nothing. Each of our dreams, goals, loves, and hopes are but another flake of snow upon this earth. Some shall last forever, some only seconds. Some hopes will be recycled, thawed by spring's warming life, enabling it to quench the thirst of moral fiber; while others vanish, or sometimes, will become polluted by all the impurities of humanity and its sinful ways of nature. Goals and aspirations are unique for each individual, yet sometimes the basics of an aspiration allow for the grouping of separate people into the 'clicks' of clubs and teams and circles striving toward their common factor. Yet how meaningless such goals are outside these clicks, out in the real world--which some argue doesn't exist, that the world is simple what someone makes of it--that forages on the meat of raw ambition and hopeless hope.
It is ironic that Hawthorne writes that this lesson is a "hard one." Is this not so with many of life's most important lessons? Friendship, love, life, death; all of these are harsh lessons at times that abuse the learner, forcing that person to stare directly into the eye of difficulty and defeat knowing not what will become of them, only that there is a lesson to be learned. The most thorough lessons in life are the ones that collapse the ground from underneath the foot. At these times it is a decision to stand again on a lower pedestal or to slide apathetically into the lifeless home of darkness.
The narrator of The Custom House is looking for fame. However, fame is like control, an allusion of the senses, a shadow that is held for only a second before eluding the eternal grasp of its demise. Fame is a mindset, and how happy everyone would be is they all could simply be famous to themselves.
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