"The Bluest Eye"
Am studying for literature exam.. today and just read this last part of "The Bluest Eye". Simply saddening but true even in today's world.Pecola, the her in the following passage, was raped by her father and went crazy from the isolation.
"The birdlike gestures are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world - which is what she herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us - all who knew her - felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used - to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength."
I know I'm supposed to be studying, but reading this makes me want to cry because it's so sad and so true. How many of us have actually done this? Compare. Every few minutes or hours, we are sure to do it. Maybe this will make us think twice next time.
posted by tstar @ 12:37 AM
2 Comments:
can me stupid, but I don't quite understand it.
does it mean, we are using other people's sorrow to find happiness for ourselves??
something like that. we compare ourselves to those who are worse than us, so that we feel better about ourselves, without considering how the other person feels... I just thought it's kind of cruel and the thing is I've never thought about it this way before when I did the comparing...
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