Best of Week: Epiphany

This week, I was very fond of the themes brought up during the discussion of the short story, "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver. My mind was particularly stimulated by the question about the nature of epiphany. In the story, the narrator experiences somewhat of an epiphany while drawing a cathedral to show the blind man, Robert, what the majestic building looks like. In the end, he doesn't have to open his eyes to know that he created mastery and expressed himself, and he keeps his eyes shut when he tells Robert that the drawing is "really something". This anticlimactic ending to the story would disappoint most, but it says a lot about the way people experience abrupt changes of mind.

I keep thinking about how epiphany doesn't happen like it does on the TV show House. People don't stop mid-sentence with a look of mind-blowing comprehension on their face, then drop what they're doing to go implement their epiphany, like Dr. House is known to do. What more often happens is that someone has a minor "aha!" moment in their head and keeps it there, continuing to do whatever they were doing in the way they were doing it. But that little "aha!" causes bigger changes in their life when faced with similar situations in the future. After all, an epiphany is a change of mind or worldview, and in the narrator's case, it was in the way he views the blind and the way he expresses himself.

Therefore, I believe that it is a fallacy that an epiphany is this huge and monumental moment in your life when everything changes forever. People can experience many epiphanies which shape the way they interact with their surroundings. And they don't even have to be positive realizations; I recently had the epiphany that I'm often needlessly stubborn and probably won't ever change. But now at least I realize this, because sometimes knowing something bad about yourself is better than not knowing anything about yourself.

From this, I have decided that I like the way "Cathedral" ended. As a reader, I knew that the narrator had experienced an epiphany, even if his last statement was in his typical underwhelmed style. And I know that if the story were to continue, we would see the implementation of this epiphany in his life, hopefully for the better. I think we should all learn a lesson from the narrator and be more aware of the little epiphanies in out life.

An Inconvenient Truth: Over-Caring

Though given the opportunity, I'm going to try to avoid ranting here, but it may be difficult. What really drives me crazy in the literature I read, particularly Heart of Darkness, is how much people care about everything, and in a shallow way: themselves, their circumstances, their money, their food, their comfort, their image, everything!

Particularly the character of the Manager is illustrative of this caring. He's so obsessed with the way the Company is seen and the way he is seen and how easy or difficult everything is, that he has absolutely no understanding of anything going on around him. He's so focused on the tiny little details of his life that he can't step back for clarity. It's like looking at a Renoir painting from an inch away; all you'll see is the blurry brush strokes, not the beautiful masterpiece it is from afar.

There is an issue when you can only see the big picture and none of the aspects which make up the whole, and in a way, this is very superficial. But this obsession with details is even more superficial, even though one would think it would be deeper.

The reason this rubs me the wrong way is that I have lately been trying to open my eyes to the bigger picture of my life, trying to "go with the flow", so to speak. With college-thinking and AP exams and sports all coming up on me at once, I'd go crazy if I tried to keep a view of all those little things in depth. I self-evaluate and ask myself, "does this really matter to my future? Will my life be worse because I couldn't accomplish this?" And the answer is usually no.

So the basis of my issue with over-caring stems from the fact that I could manage it and these people, like the Manager, don't even try. I know it's necessary to have some character dynamics; otherwise, the book would be flat. There's no way all the key players can have a perfect insight into their life. But I find it unbearably frustrating to be forced to experience this narrow-mindedness along with the character, and feel powerless as they get caught up in all the little details that you, as a reader, know don't matter.

I guess I'll just have to deal with this because I know that it adds something to the story, though it may drive my crazy. I have to face the fact that the book wasn't written to my taste; I have to trust the author to resolve this issue before the conclusion of the novel. I just have to go with the flow.

Connection: Heart of Darkness and Avatar

There's been a lot of talk in the media lately about James Cameron's mindblowingly expensive 3D film, Avatar. And why shouldn't there be? It was a movie I loved, as did everyone I know, despite having a slightly cliche storyline. Those floating mountains just blew me away. But the reason the storyline was a little weak (besides that fact that it mimicked the cartoon Fern Gully) was that we'd all heard it before. It was telling a story that has reoccurred throughout history, one of imperialism.

There was Hernan Cortes with the Aztecs in the early 1500s, the Dutch with the Khoi Khoi people in the 1650s, the British empire with basically the entire world from the 1600s-1900s, the Afrikaners in South Africa in the late 1860s, and the list goes on and on. Worldly minded people expanding their influence outward throughout the world to bring in commodities, labor, and revenue, at the expense of anyone who got in their way.

In Avatar, a business-minded man with no regard for anything but boosting his profits inhabits the planet Pandora in search of a rare and valuable ore. And along the way, he massacres and attempts to destroy the hometree of the Na'vi people. This is the exact theme told by Charlie Marlow in Heart of Darkness, only this time it's the Belgian King Leolpold II in search of ivory in the Congo Free State, wiping out Africans along his path.

This very familiar theme of losing all morality in the face of money is a strong characteristic of imperialistic occupation, which sheds light on the possibility that imperialism might not be gone from the world. When James Cameron made this movie, he brought the history of this sometimes dark occurrence back to the forefront of our minds. And the worrying fact remains: if imperialism were to come back into "fashion" in our world, it might not all end as well as it did for the Na'vi.