VANISHING INNOCENCE

VANISHING INNOCENCE

Found Poem, taken from Lord of the Flies by William Golding,

[CH 4: pg. 61, CH2: pg. 39, CH12: pg. 224-225]

Music performed by Ying Ni, taken from: 

Chopin Ballade in C-minor

Haydn Sonata in C-major

Bach Partita No.2

Together,

They staggered up the last steep of the mountain.

Together,

They chanted.

Together,

They crashed the log on to the great pile.

Together,

They laughed with triumphant pleasure.

One by one, 

The boys stopped going back for more,

And stood.

Breath came even by now,

And sweat dried.  

Strange things happened.

The sea rose up,

Moved apart in planes of blatant impossibility;

The coral reef and the stunted palms float up into the sky,

Quiver,

Be plucked apart,

Run like rain-drops on a wire,

Or be repeated as in an odd succession of mirrors.

Illusions merged into the sky;

There,

The sun gazed down like an angry eye.

Tears began to flow,

For the first time,

He gave up;

Great,

Shuddering spasms of grief

That seemed to wrench his whole body.

His voice rose under the black smoke

Before the burning wreckage of the island;

Infected by that emotion,

The boys wept,

For the end of innocence,

The darkness of man’s heart,

And the fall through the air

Of the true, wise friend.

The sun sank,

Darkness dropped,

And soon

The shelters were full of restlessness,

Under the remote stars.

Group Found Poem

Wonder of Nature

<Lord of the Flies> by William Golding

Once more,
Amid the breeze,
The shouting,
The slanting sunlight on the high mountain,
Was shed that glamour,
That strange invisible light of friendship,
Adventure,
Content.
[Page 39]

Trees,
Forced by the damp heat,
Found too little soil for growth,
Fell early and decayed:
Creepers cradled them,
And new saplings searched a way up.
[Page 39]

There was sudden bright explosion,
And corkscrew trail across the sky;
Then darkness again
And stars.
[Page 95]

By Ying, Philip, Paul, David, and Ricky

Denouement of the Reflections on THE ENGLISH PATIENT

After all, I must say that Michael Ondaatje delivers too many crucial and valuable underlying messages through The English Patient. It is my misfortune that I fail to grasp every single one of them.

            “A novel is a mirror walking down a road”. Just like other successful novels, this novel reflects different paths taken by different individuals, and hence teaches as much as one needs to learn for an entire life. 

Ninth Reflection on THE ENGLISH PATIENT

My last inquiry of my last reflection on The English Patient is purely for myself: if I were Almasy, would I have the courage to live on?

I struggled to persuade myself into believing that I can be as tough as the English patient, accepting and coping with reality. Yet, to be honest, my final answer is a definite no.

Although severely disfigured and disabled, Almasy still does not give up on his life. Overwhelmed by Hana’s care and love, his broken heart gradually begins to seam piece by piece. Hana once again gives him the confident to believe in the existence of good force in the middle of a brutal war. However, there is still nothing he can look forward to; even the end of the war does not mean anything to his distorted soul and damaged body. He has no dream, no hope, and no future…

            If I were Almasy, I would have killed myself after the plane accident. Why would I live with a disfigured face, which myself cannot even recognize? I cannot think of any rationale behind keeping myself alive when everything good about life is gone forever. What is the point of living when one’s memories are torn into pieces, body is destroyed by a plane crash, and soul is abused by the war—what is the point of living? I cannot live a day without hope and dream, which keep me moving forward even when I am exhausted.

            From reading the life of Almasy from multi-perspectives, I finally realized that the only real challenge of life is to learn to be strong and stay strong. The world never ends as long as the sun still rises in the next morning.  

Eighth Reflection on THE ENGLISH PATIENT

“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

-       George S. Patton (US General during WWII)

The dictionary says that a war is a state of armed conflict between different nation, states, or groups. Yet, The English Patient elaborates the definition of war by depicting it as a battle due to greed and the hunger for power and domination with the sacrifice of not only countless lives, but also humanity.

War alters people…

From the very beginning of the novel, each character arrives at the Italian villa is either physically or emotionally wounded, or even both. The young nurse Hana is suffering from the sudden death of his father; Caravaggio’s thumbs are chopped off by the German army; Kip is undergoing the pain of losing both of his parents; most severely, the English patient loses his love, faith, hope…almost everything, except a merely pumping heart. Also, It is rather too difficult to not lose humanity as all the characters find it necessary to protect themselves not physically, but emotionally.

 Why should they bear all those pain and sacrifice their future?

…Because they are in the middle of a war, which severely, inevitably, and negatively affects everyone in any corner of the world, even if they are not fighting on the frontline. 

Seventh Reflection on THE ENGLISH PATIENT

"[Desert] could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed."

         The desert itself is presented as an integral element of the novel. Almasy, the English patient, is obsessed with the desert, where he can completely lose himself, and does not belong to any person or any nation. In his past, he is constantly seeking to immerse himself in something greater, something that is immortal, and he finally finds that in desert. It is also the only place where no one cares about the superficial concepts of nationality and identity, which he hates the most. Nevertheless, the desert is also where the plane crushes, where his lover, Katherine, dies, and where he is disfigure and disabled forever. It is a living entity that has the power to kill, to bury, and to alter lives.

I have never been to a desert and I would never want to go there. Merging all the information I have obtained from books, movies, and other people’s descriptions, I depict desert as a horrible place filled with nothing but sand. From my imagination, it is a place where no life would survive, except cactuses, due to the torrid heat and the dryness, which sucks away all the liquid in any living creatures. I thought that deserts must be drab as it is a lifeless land without any dialogues, laughter, or passions. To be more concise, I am afraid of deserts. To me, they are harsh, ruthless, and soulless. 

Sixth Reflection on THE ENGLISH PATIENT

The War

The Villa

After glancing through the last few pages of the novel, it is now the right time to come back to our original inquiry: are people completely altruistic? In one of my previous reflections, I have firmly acknowledged Hana as one of the most altruistic person in the world. However, is she completely altruistic? I am afraid that I have to oppose and revise my previous opinion. Although it seems that the patient ties Hana to an unsafe place, she sees him as freeing her from the awful horrors of war. Moreover, the English patient makes her feel that she can once again become emotionally attached to someone, and that she can finally let down her guard. They rely on each other and the level of trust between them continues to reinforce each minute. Thus, Hana’s aid for the English patient is only partially altruistic because by living in the isolated villa, she is able to fulfill her desire to escape the reality and the brutality of war, and once again bring herself to humanity.