Month: October 2017

“On His Blindness” by John Milton (1608-1674)

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

The poem by John Milton addresses the shortcomings and limitations one experiences in life. Everybody experiences them and the author has the perfect example, he is blind. Before he was blind, Milton rose to the top position as an English writer then became blind and descended all the way into a state where he was unable to read and write.

The poem is made by the way that Milton transcribes the misery he feels onto the page with imagery. First of all, he frames himself not as a miserable individual but a failed servant to God. Milton expresses his views of God entwined with his feelings of misery. As people, we all suffer from losses and setbacks but it is how we react that shows the person we really are. Setbacks can influence very important things, for example, an injury which causes you to miss out of your sports season or a bad result in an exam meaning you miss out on a class. Although it has the immediate cause of a missed opportunity, you can just as easily turn it around and use it to your advantage. Learning from mistakes and bad situations can help prepare you for future situations and give you valuable initiative. The lesson readers should take away from this is that everybody has setbacks but it can be turned around and used to my our advantage. This is seen in the novel “All the light we cannot see” where Marie Laure suffers the same problem of being blind but she uses this to her own advantage.

Although it is all well and good to get over your struggles and rise up from the occasion, in the poem, Milton does not speak as if he has risen up from his experience on the contrary, he has been left in a pit of misery, beaten by his situation which suggests he lacks the mental stamina to beat his own mind.

 

A Chance of Hope

On a road traveled, overgrown with time

Now a footpath memory, of bittersweet pines

The sign, with a smile, marks a turn, taken

Leading down to a tree, where first love was forsaken

A raging river of life, which flowed unbridled

Reduced to a stream, narrowing and idle

Where seeds of love, were sewn to the winds

Now echoes of lovers, reverberate within

Hallowed ground for a heart, with unbearable wounds

Once a cradle of love, now a visited tomb

Like a miner for gold, panning sands of time

With unstoppable tears, of melancholic brine

As the sun breaks through, the glint of a shard

Glitters in the light, like a twinkling star

Suddenly as despondency is relieved by hope

Panning faster, more appear, thawing love with a jolt

The stream rises and rushes, in response to the melt

Flowers bloom, birds sing, as new warmth is felt

Standing and smiling, pocketing the gold

Returns to reality and hopes love will grow

I read the poem, A Chance of Hope by Daniel Turner, and I interpreted the poem as he is exploring the idea of hope and its role in our lives. In the poem, Daniel uses rhyme and imagery to bring across the idea that without hope, all the wonderful things in our lives could not be brung about. Hope plays an important role in our lives and the way we live them. We live with expectancy and in bad situations, we can be “relieved by hope” that we can recover and learn from our mistakes. Turner is mainly exploring the idea of hope and love and how they intertwine to create a “ new warmth” of a relationship. I believe that hope is interconnected with every part in our lives and I have experienced the power of hope very frequently. In a recent sporting event, I took part in, I was competing with a good friend in a ski to bike race from the top of Cardrona to the bottom. I had not trained for the event but as a past time, I bike almost every day. I went into the race hoping and believing I could do well and came out with 2nd. This could be expanded to the larger world on a larger scale. A combination of training, hard work, and preparation mixed with hope and self-belief are the winning attributes in any discipline. Relating back to the ideas expressed by Turner in the poem, Love and hope are tightly interlocked as all you can do are be your own person and hope that you liked for who you are.

Another strong theme apparent to me in this poem is the idea of the natural cycle of life, ups and downs, twists and turns, experienced by everyone. The poem starts with positive imagery of “bittersweet pines The sign, with a smile, marks a turn” which gradually descends into an increasingly negative space, with “unstoppable tears”, at rock bottom, only to rise again towards a brighter future. This captures the emotional rhythm of life and the changeable world experienced by humankind. Turner uses the striking images of nature to express his inner feelings, taking the reader along on his journey. This creates a symbolic experience of deeper meaning with the hope being the powerful undercurrent that pulls Turner through. The use of nature to capture and communicate emotional meaning can also be seen in ‘Sixteen Trees of Somme’  where the author uses wood as an analogy to express a deeper meaning.

Script Publication, Fantasy

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Author J.K Rowling

The latest story of Harry Potter is a tale of bravery, redemption and time travel. Albus Potter is a young wizard who is the son of the great Harry Potter. Although for Albus this is no honor, he wants nothing more than to be a normal wizard. As for adventure, it beckons him, just as it did his father. Along with being in the vast shadow of his father accomplishments, he feels the weight of those who have fallen at Harry’s expensive. Albus and his closet friend Scorpius will learn the hard way what happens when you mess with time.

An extremely relatable problem that Albus faces is the complications that come with friendship. When Albus first boards the Hogwarts Express, his destiny is changed forever when he meets Scorpius. Scorpius is the son of Draco Malfoy, but there are rumors that he may have a different origin. Some say that before the dark lord fell he created a child and rumor has it that Scorpius is that child. Although Albus is not bothered by this accusation, Harry is torn between ruining his son’s first real friendship and protecting him from his horrible past. Another friendship incident in the book which is very impactful to the story is Delphi’s betrayal. Albus and Scorpius trust her to guide them into the past and believe that she has good intentions only to have their trust thrown away and the dark lord almost return. Friendship is an invisible rope which holds us together. All through the previous books Harry and his friends scrape at the edges of death and are pulled through by the tight-rope of their friendship. There are millions of friendships across the globe, and this drama has taught me that no matter how hard it becomes, a good friend is something to fight for as they do not come along every day. I have faced hard times were just having the support of a good friend has helped me get through it.

A significant theme throughout the book which helped me create a connection to the character of Albus, and I found myself reliving his actions in my own life, was the idea of expectation.  Although the expectation is usually intended as a good thing, sometimes the pressure can result in failure. Albus experienced this throughout the script, as he is laden with reputations of the Potter name to fulfill.  Albus is plied with expectations and in the end, it becomes too much.  He fails the ultimate test when he is sorted into Slytherin House, the disbelief is felt by everyone including the reader, as Albus becomes the first one in his family to enter Slytherin. The bad decisions that Albus makes, are in my opinion forced by his need to belong and the weight of broken expectations on his shoulders.  This causes self-doubt which spirals him into rebellion in an attempt to earn his worth.  This is relatable to younger modern readers who constantly face the high expectations of their parents, in and out of their school lives. I have experienced self-doubt and the weight of expectations before entering my mock exams which I had to spend hours preparing for and was expected to perform at a high level. This culminated in me freezing up in one particular important exam, as the pressure of doing well overwhelmed me and ultimately resulted in an unsatisfactory result. Expectation can be a positive force that encourages you to believe in yourself as well to set high personal aspirations. This reminds me of the novel Sixteen Trees of Somme set in Norway. It is a story of an orphan coming of age and going on a journey of self-exploration to discover his inner person and his place in the world just as Albus did in the Cursed Child.

Novel

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr

“All the light we cannot see” is a beautiful novel about a French girl who suffered from being blind and a young talented German boy, whose paths collide in occupied France as they both try to survive the devastation of World War Two. Marie-Laure has been blind since she was six and she lived in Paris until the invasion when she moved to Saint Malo, a small coastal town in France where her great-uncle lives. Werner, the young German boy, is from a dead-end town and wouldn’t have made it past the mines but he was lucky. He was selected to join the brutal Hitlers Youth Academy for his knack in radios. He had been deconstructing and rebuilding radios since he was a young boy and learned the art of radio technology and electronics. The enchanting storyline brings you along in their journeys while also helps to embed the characters into your heart with Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle).

The story is based on acceptance and appreciation that disability can be an ability. The idea that you could be weakened by something like blindness or deafness but strengthened in other compensating ways, creating a new and different experience of life. Throughout the book, Marie-Laure never sees herself as anything less than any other person and believes that her disability can be used to her advantage. Marie-Laure’s father builds models of Paris and Saint-Malo to allow her to navigate throughout the city unaccompanied. Sight becomes no longer necessary as she uses her heightened senses of touch and hearing to her advantage and to escape when the Germans come looking for her. This opens the gate to an independent lifestyle without the constant need for a caregiver and the opportunity to navigate the world on her own. This independence only gradually develops as her doting father was always around so she relied heavily on him and it wasn’t until he was gone that she matured and developed her confidence. I have not had any personal experience with a blind person but my sister suffers dyslexia and struggles with reading and writing on a daily basis. What my family and I have come to discover is that she is very creative and has a conceptual mind which benefits her greatly in other areas.

I connected to the character of Marie-Laure and appreciated her struggles but was impressed by her strengths even more and the emotional connection I had to her character provided me an engaging and heartfelt experience from the book. 

Novel

Butter

Erin Lange

The novel ‘BUTTER’ by Erin Lange is a story of a lonely obese adolescent in the harsh society of today. This novel highlights the issues today’s youth faces when using the internet in the harmful ways. An unfortunate encounter with his childhood bully causes the main character to indulge in a whole pound of butter, therefore earning him the nickname “Butter”. Butter doesn’t have many friends and spends a lot of time alone but he plans to turn this around and make history. “Watch as I eat myself to death – live on the internet – tune in if you can stomach it”.

One of the many ideas portrayed in ‘BUTTER’ is the multitude of problems arising with the internet. The ability to communicate instantly and universally creates many different social issues including 24/7 bullying and peer pressure. In the novel, Butter sets up his website stating that others could join in, comment and interact while he prepares to eat himself to death and by doing so he opens the gate to further and around the clock bullying and pressure. He was relentlessly insulted and even encouraged by his peers to commit suicide. Butter is one of the millions around the world suffering from the internet’s harmful effects. The world is evolving so fast that there is no time to establish effective boundaries and rules. Kids have grown up with parents telling them it’s bad to talk while eating, never to swear, to eat with proper manners but the world has overlooked the internet, the one sole thing with the worst effects. I have had personal events where I have been affected by the internet and the absence of guidance has played a big part in my life. The lack of limitations and extremely magnified reality in social media is also seen to have caused serious effects in the controversial TV series ’13 Reasons Why’. The main character ends up killing herself as a result of multiple extreme sources of bullying mainly prominent on social media.

I feel that I have connected with the character Butter as I too have been bullied about my appearance. In previous years of my schooling people used to call me names and make fun of skinny body as a joke at my expense. This helped me to feel emotionally connected to the situation that Butter was experiencing and this, in turn, caused me to be more engaged in the novel.  Although I have only experienced bullying on a very minimal level the way the kids treated Butter and the way many other kids are treated across the world because of their genetic appearance or for any reason, changed my approach to how I interact online and with my peers.

The interpersonal connection I felt with Butter caused me to become more engaged and enhanced the experience. The relevant issues also are seen in the book began a changed lifelong approach to social media and how I interact with it.