English 67

John’s presentation definitely affected my reading of The Children of Men. I saw the movie first.  I saw it this summer and hated it.  But I love the novel.  I was pretty blown away by the two main themes I took out of just the first few pages–themes which remain significant throughout, in my opinion. 

The first concerns the format of the book itself.  It’s tricky to tell what the format of the book is.  But for the sake of this paragraph I’m going to go with the fact that there is something journalesque about it.  Theo expresses the need for some type of motivation to begin writing.  The new year, combined with his birthday and the death of the youngest person alive seem, to him, to justify an entry.  I too have struggle with starting journals.  I wrote in one when I was much younger and it kills me on a regular basis to think of how incredible and valuable for me it would be to be able to read my 13 or 15 or 17-year-old thoughts.  Yet I can never get a pen on a piece of paper because of the pressure I feel to recount all that my life has been so far.  That’s hard.  But that feeling has a sort of underlying presumption, I think.  It presumes that someone will be reading and judging your work, which is not something I expect of mine and is definitely not something Theo expects of his.  He says, “I shall open one of my tins of hoarded matches and light my small personal bonfire of vanities.”  He sees himself as relatively insignificant, or at least not as necessary for a future world to note and understand (a position that is arguable adjusted throughout the story, thus making the form of a journal useful).  I can’t say I sympathize with that.  On some level I think I suffer from the vanity he puts down and believe that my journal would be quite profound.  But I sympathize with his struggle with writing and with his considerations throughout the process.  

The second theme is one we mentioned in class today: science.  I again sympathize with Theo when he says “Science was never a subject I was at home with.  I understood little of it at school and I understand little more now that I’m fifty.  Yet it has been my god too, even if its achievements are incomprehensible to me, and I share the universal disillusionment of those whose god has died.”  I don’t like science much.  I’m not very good at it and never have been.  I am also not a religious person.  And yet this line reminded me of my dependence on science, almost as a god of sorts.  It forced me to recognize how much I trust and believe in it.  The spin this line of discussion took in class had to do with animals.  I stand by the idea that science in terms of technology definitely distinguishes humans from animals.  But I really appreciated Devin’s point about the idea that science classifies humans as being like animals, whereas religion brings man closer to a higher being. I think my connection to animals stemmed from the following idea:  “Like a lecherous stud suddenly stricken with impotence, we are humiliated at the very heart of our faith in ourselves.  For all our knowledge, our intelligence, our power, we can no longer do what the animals do without thought.”  Science as knowledge, intelligence, and power gives us confidence, and lack thereof humbles us.  It causes us to behave more barbarically, forgetting the structure of society and resorting to more primitive ideas.  Though a fight with guns is a very human thing, is the aggression of a fight not sort of animalistic?  It may not be.  I don’t really know.

Anyyyyyyyway.  Having determined that movies suck, I decided I should step back and take a second to list some basic pros of both film and literature.  I came the conclusion that it totally depends on your taste.  Movies have actors.  Actors act.  That sounds dumb, but acting is an incredible medium.  The way that certain expressions express emotions and movements bring meaning and understanding to an audience is very appealing to a certain type of person.  Those who criticize films based on books sometimes cite the fact that they take away from your personal interpretation of a book.  This is true.  But they also then, by definition, do things you could never imagine!  They present spectacles that were beyond your ideas.  I prefer literature, though, for a similar reason.  Sometimes there are ideas that simply can’t be portrayed by face or gesture or scene.  Books force you to think about these ideas, like the two described above which have just gorgeous quotes (like the ones cited that put things ever-so-poetically).  You can’t miss these ideas.  When you’re reading a book you can’t happen to be looking at one character or background piece at one point and miss a main (or even not main) idea.  You read these lines and you get something out of them, just as I related to the two above in my own way.   I used to be really frustrated by language.  I couldn’t understand how certain feelings and experiences could ever be expressed or related to others.  But some actors and some authors can express the most seemingly intangible or inexpressible things.  For me, writing does this incomparably, and I just feel passionate about it.