Epiphany: Planet Of The Apes

In Virginia Woold's Mrs. Dalloway, an important motif is the epiphany. Clarissa at the end of the novel, after hearing about Septimus's death learns about herself and about life. This moment is an epiphany, or moment of being, that it has been an important part of many novels and movies.

A clear example of an epiphany is the final scene from the 1968 Movie directed by Franklin J. Schaffner "Plante Of The Apes". In the movie, the main character, the astronaut George Taylor played by Charlton Heston, after waking up from hibernation finds himself in an unknown land populated by apes that govern the entire planet. After all the events that occurs throughout the movie, George in the classic scene walks into the statue of liberty and realises that he has been on planet Earth all along. This Epiphany leads to the realization that humanity had condemned our own planet to that fate. 

I choose this movie because, even though is science fiction, and it is only related to Mrs. Dalloway in the sense that has an epiphany in it, it makes us think about what we are doing to our planet and what are we doing to nature for the sake of science.

By Daniel Palacios.

Escaping from life...

In Mrs. Dalloway there are certain moments in which the “moments of being” – where the person is fully aware of what is happening outside and inside him/her – are  represented, but the one that I’m pointing in out right now is the moment where the pressure that Septimus held on his back, with his internal fighting between reality and the tricks that his mind played on him - past-, could be seen as a way to avoid what was surrounding him, so he finally give up to the pressure of society and throw himself through the window. This could be seen as a reflection of what Mrs. Woolf did with her life when she committed suicide in the river because she could not overcome her depression.

Furthermore, in the story, Clarissa avoided thinking in what was happening with her life by preparing parties and she starts questioning her position in the party when receiving her guesses, but in the moment that she realizes what happened with Septimus, she felt sympathetic to the situation when she states:

“But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself.She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away.” (156-157)

From that moment on, Clarissa started to change the way she looked at life and started to appreciate the beauty of it. And stops living in the happines and confort of the past days and enjoys the present times.

As a conclusion, I would like to share the quote I found in the movie The Hours that states that “You cannot find peace by avoiding life” and that’s what led to Septimus to commit suicide, he, as well as Virgina, were trying to avoid -real- life by neglecting their present life because no one really knew and understood what was really happening inside their minds and what they were going through.

By Natalia Aguila Morales  :P 

Intense emotions

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”

                                                                                                  ― Virginia Woolf

  

I found this quote made by Virginia Woolf in one of her diaries and I would like to share it with all of you. I chose it because I would like to relate it to what I personally believe and to what I experienced while I was reading the book. 

For me, it isn’t good to live in the past, but it is necessary to look back to appreciate and clearly understand how and why we have got to this point in our lives. It is like what we talked in classes about “tunneling” which I understand as the characters' past experiences that are like caves to the past that evoke past feelings and thoughts. 

Our feelings and emotions become stronger through time, sometimes we can come back in time when we listen to a song or read a book.

I strongly believe that sometimes our past make us free because it remember us the times where everything was easier and we used to see life from another perspective maybe from a more innocent perspective. 

Mrs. Dalloway doesn’t live in the past, but she feels free when she thinks about what she was and what she has experienced, it seems that her thoughts bother her and that she is in a constant battle between the present and the past. Inevitably Clarissa has to face the present but at the same time she embraces all the moments that make her feel like the woman she used to be.  

Only Yesterday (Daniel Riquelme)

Only Yesterday:  Omohide poro poro. (Isao Takahata, Ghibli Studios, 1991)

http://www.animeid.tv/ver/omohide-poro-poro-1

This movie is about an office worker who started to question about her life. Her name is Taeko and she is 27. I don’t want to spoil the movie at all, so I’m going to focus my discourse only in the main themes treated in the movie and connect them with Virginia Woolf’s sense of tunneling in Mrs. Dalloway.

Taeko bored of her routine and life, decided to travel to the countryside where, as the last summer, she help her grandmother in agriculture work. During her trip, she started to remember herself when she was on fifth grade. She remembered many episodes of her childhood that shaped her character and identity.

“Even the more trivial things came lively, filling my mind just like watching a movie, and overwriting my real me” - While remembering (tunneling), sometimes through visions, she realized that society obliged you to follow some rules, she thought that life was just like math; If you follow the procedure you will success in life. But this trip would totally change her mind, the connections made during the trip and the experiences lived with the characters of the countryside made her suffer a metamorphosis, just like a caterpillar changing into a pupa just waiting to become into a butterfly.

Just like Mrs. Dalloway, the process of tunneling had a vital role in the protagonist; she realized how the structured life helps in the process of losing the personal identity. She grew up learning prejudices about how life must to be lived; doing what is correct.

Also, she met a man called Toshio who is working on a revival of organic agriculture, he grew up in the countryside and his dream was to live in the city; Tokyo. His simplicity showed Taeko that sometimes life is not that structured, and everyone needs to make its way through this almost unbreakable wall in order to keep alive the identity, and to feel alive (moment of being).

At the end, she made up her mind and realized that that was her moment to abolish all the prejudices and start living the life that she wants.

Are we living the life that we want? Are memories making us question the person we have become? Are we truly alive? Or are we following the life that society proposes?

Maybe we can find the answers to these questions asking them to our inner child that every time that he can knocks our mind to make us notice the signs that we have to follow to find our identity in this structured world.  

Daniel Riquelme C.

An epiphany.

Hello everyone, I would like to share with you an extract of a movie called Sixth sense. I suppose that probably you have already seen it, but in case you have not, I will give you a brief explanation of the context. 

Dr. Malcolm Crowe is a child psychologist who tries to help Cole Sear, a boy who has an extrange problem: He sees dead people wherever he goes; people who don’t know that they are dead and go on with their lives as if nothing had happened to them, having the possibility to even talk to them and hearing what they have to say. Through the movie, Crowe teaches Cole to deal with his gift by giving it a purpose, that is, to help the dead to accomplish what they left unfinished. Crowe has to deal with his own problem too, his wife does not pay him attention since an incident occurred months ago with a former patient he had years ago. Cole tells Crowe to talk to his wife when she is asleep and to be true about his feelings towards her. This is what happens when Crowe decides to follow the advice: 

The moment of epiphany that Crowe experienced in the fragment that you have just seen, regarding being dead instead of being alive, as he always thought he was, made me immediately thought of the final part of The dead, where Gabriel changes his mind about what means to be dead and what means to be alive, specially when it has to do with feelings. Both of them knew the truth through their loved ones and experienced the sorrow that this truth brings with it, even though their wives are not willing to hurt them. For both of them, nothing will be the same after they knew what really happens in their lives. The only difference is that Gabriel, unlike Crowe, probably will continue living besides his wife in spite of what he knows; he will have to struggle with the sorrow of knowing that she will never love him the way she loved Michael years ago, that is the way he loves her. Crowe, on the contrary, has to leave this world and, even though he feels bad about leaving his wife alone, he feels that he was true to her and told her that she had always been the most important part of his life so, in the end, he could close that part of his life peacefully.


By María Soledad Torres

Time is...

The other day I came across a picture with a beautiful inscription that made me think about some of what we have read, particularly Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce's The Dead. The inscription was in Spanish, so I googled it in order to know if it was part of a song, a book, or something else. It happened to be a poem, from American author Henry van Dyke, titled "Time Is":

"Time is

too slow for those who wait,

too swift for those who fear,

too long for those who grieve,

too short for those who rejoice,

but for those who love – time is eternity."

From my point of view, these descriptions of time represent some of the characters we have read. For Gabriel, in Joyce's The Dead, the time passed slowly when he was waiting to be alone with Gretta and then, waiting for the perfect moment to call her "Gretta". He was longing to recall to her their most beautiful moments together, "to make her forget  the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy." (Joyce, p. 18) But he waited for so long, he didn't find the perfect moment.

Those who fear see the time pass by very swiftly. We can see this reflected in Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa, Peter, and other characters,  become aware and a little bit afraid of the passage of time: They are aging and getting closer to an end. They start wondering about how they have spent their lives and if they have made good use of the time they've had. 

The time for those who grieve, as in the case of Gretta, is too long. The men whom she loves/d had been dead for a long time, but she still is grieving for him. But not only one can grieve over the dead, but also over the living. Lucrezia was suffering because of Septimus' state. For her, it could be a torture to spent time with him, because it was like being alone. At some points in the book, she said that she could not stand it any longer, that that grieving was lasting too long.

In the case of those who rejoice, time is too short. The perfect example of this is Clarissa's moment with Sally Seaton. In Clarissa's words, that was "the most exquisite moment of her whole life." It didn't last for long as they were interrupted by Joseph and Peter.

Finally, the time for those who love is eternal. We can see this represented by Gretta and her love towards Michael Furey. Not even the death have stopped that love. He's still alive in her memory, and even after many years, she still thinks of him.

The perception of time is different for everyone, and at different moments of our lives. For you, how is time? 

PS: Here's the link of the picture I found: https://scontent-b-lax.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/t1.0-9/10003073_706826806027914_7026978944551595777_n.jpg

Your Limitless Self

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-intelligent-divorce/201404/your-limitless-self

This article is about life's boundaries. If we think about what Mark Banschick states in it, we will realize that it is very similar to what Virginia Woolf expressed in Mrs. Dalloway 89 years before.

Clarissa was filled with boundaries that were imposed by society, and not as trivial as the alarm clock going off in the morning but that arise  similar feelings of being obliged to respond to the boundaries in a determined way (in the case of the alarm clock: getting up, and in Clarissa’s: being a perfect wife).

Dr. Banschick says that even our bodies, families, and eras that we are born into are boundaries. This reminds me of the concepts of repression of the female body, patriarchal society, and time in Mrs. Dalloway because as we all should know, the female sex was not allowed to have sex or experience passion; families were organized in a male-dominated way in which women stayed at home and men went to work/study outside the home; and time in the sense of its inevitability: we cannot live again nor change our past. These concepts are some of the boundaries that shaped Clarissa’s life and made her turn into Mrs. Dalloway.

Additionally Dr. Banschick believes that “This dynamic between what we are and what we yearn to be can make for unhappiness or be the source of incredible creativity.” I think that Dr. Banschick’s words reflect an important episode on Mrs. Dalloway, which is the following:

            She [Clarissa] parted the curtains; she looked. Oh, but how surprising!—in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! She was going to bed. And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But  there it was—   ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. The wind must have risen. She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to watch her, moving  about,   that old lady, crossing the room, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating, with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing- room, to watch that old woman,  quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled the blind now. The clock began striking. The young man had  killed him- self; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the   sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him— the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel  the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.

That is the moment in which Clarissa recreates when Septimus commits suicide. She is aware and can understand the meaning of it. And at the same time, she is making of life something beautiful (art) because she is discovering some sort of patterns of life that leads her to embrace the concept of death, which is something that no one can avoid.

According to Dr. Banschick: “Perhaps, just perhaps, there’s magic in embracing what we can't escape.” This reflects Clarissa’s moment of revelation stated previously. I think that it is surprising how even today it is possible to find validity in ideas that were conceived long before in literature.

On the other hand, Dr. Banschick asks the following question: “Can living within our boundaries, open us to something bigger?” I think that Woolf asked herself the same question and expressed it in Mrs. Dalloway through the concept of androgynous mind as a means of reaching complete happiness and wholeness. In this way, Clarissa is liberating herself from the boundaries of men and her femininity does not limit her.

Finally, I think that what Dr. Banschick states at the end of the article, in “A Useful Spirituality,” is part of what Clarissa discovered in the episode that I quoted above, and if you find some similarity with the concept of tunneling, we will agree on that.

Importance of time in our present

                                         Importance of time in our present   

While reading Mrs. Dalloway, we can notice certain elements that are included with the purpose of making the reader understand Woolf’s intention.

Personally speaking, I found “time” element one of the most important in this book. By time element I particularly refer to the Big Ben. One of the examples I consider that is worth mentioning is the following: “It is this, he said, as he entered Dean's Yard. Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. Lunch parties waste the entire afternoon, he thought, approaching his door. The sound of Big Ben flooded Clarissa's drawing-room, where she sat, ever so annoyed, at her writing-table; worried; annoyed.” (Woolf, p. 84) In this case, this element is acting as a kind of dividing line between reality and past for Clarissa because it happened right after Peter visited her. That particular scene demonstrated, for me, that not only she realized how quickly time had passed, but also the sound kind of broke that line, making her come to the present, to her reality as a married woman, and the perfect hostess.

In addition, there is another clear example of this element, which occurred at the end of the novel: “Big Ben struck the half-hour. How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching, to see the old lady (they had been neighbors ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string.” (Woolf, p. 91) In this scene, she started thinking about life and friendship when a common situation called her attention –this old woman. At the same time, she was well aware of the moment she was part of, and the connections she had made during her whole life with people present in her party. For instance, her special connection with Sally (the first woman who kissed her), and with Peter (the man who still loved her). I strongly believe that she started appreciating the beauty of life in every small thing she saw, felt, and remembered.

When I was writing this, I came up with a movie (based on a novel) that can undoubtedly be connected to this element of time and dividing line. This movie is The Notebook, which is about a man whose ritual is reading a notebook to his wife who suffers from amnesia. I believe that this man acts as the dividing line that was previously mentioned. He can take his wife to her past life to experience all they lived together. Furthermore, he is who separates her from the past, and at the same time, who keeps her alive in the present, by making her happy remembering who she was and who she is.

As a conclusion, I invite you all to reflect on what makes you take part of this present, and what allows you to go back in time.

To be dead or alive

In which ways are we alive?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xewk7OgIrPU

Thinking about Joyce’s story The death,  the song in the link came to my mind since the story the songs tells is similar to what happens with Gretta and her  teen lover Michael Fury.  The lyrics of this song are about someone who lost her loved one; however, the husband that is dead is still alive by being present in the seeds and memories that the wife has, he is so alive that he has a kind of conversation with his wife. Beauty can bud from simple things.

Reflexing on this story, on the fact that sometimes the dead ones are even more alive than the living ones, I asked myself: what am I doing to be alive or to –at least- feel that I am present.  Here my thoughts turn to Mrs. Dalloway. One of the ideas in the novel is the concept of moments of being, that means the finding of beauty in the usual, the “non-important” in order to last or to find some sense in life. Then I go back to wonder whether I’m realizing those moments in the present. Did you think about that too?

Mrs. Dalloway and Dubliners were written in a time of change, crisis, and dehumanization that may have provoked a loss in the way people lived their life. Maybe today we are living something similar, at least from my point of view, there are many instances in which we can get easily distracted from life, making us feel /be dead in life. One example of that (from my experience) is the abuse of social networks because it seems to be that the real place where everything exists is in the on-line world, when there’s a true world outside!  But that’s another field.

Going back to the song and The Dead, this story doesn’t “end”, so I would have liked to know what Gabriel does after realizing that the dead one was him…  Maybe he does the same as Clarissa, he makes himself conscious that there’s a slight line between being alive and being dead and that line is the beauty everybody can find in different moments which will depend on each one.  Maybe in some way or another he starts doing thing to find the way he could signify something for his wife…

Regarding the song, I know that some of you will find this song nice, some others won’t, yet I invite you to listen to it and see in which things each of us could last, could leave something.  I don’t think that we are here simply to be here, we all have a purpose. Maybe we are going to leave something in our future students, maybe in other people, who knows, but each of us have that something.  

Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est

http://youtu.be/cvY5aOcTihI

I think that this video shows part of the horrors of war that probably Owen went through in his life. I think that the soldier with eyeglasses from the video is playing Owen’s role in the sense that he sees other men dying and asks for help but no one came because of such destruction. I think that if a man who had fought in the WWI had asked for help or denounced the horrors of war, he would have been treated like a coward. For Owen, his only outlet was his poetry. That was the way in which he told the old lie: that is proper to die for your country.  In this way, he demystified the idea that war is a glorious thing and revealed the truth of what war really is about.

There’s a moment where the soldier with eyeglasses is desperately asking for help to captain Smith but there’s no answer. I think that Owen felt that way. Society, institutions, Church, etc.,  could not give him an answer. 

A reflection on the concepts of fragmentation and tunneling connected to our own beliefs

http://advancedlifeskills.com/blog/how-your-beliefs-create-your-reality-part-1/

As covered in class, Virginia Woolf used tunneling in Mrs. Dalloway to explain her characters’ attitudes, beliefs, current feelings, actions, and so on. Furthermore, in the scene of the plane writing letters in the sky we readers see how different people see something different, though they were watching the same: for example, while a woman is spelling what is written as “K, R,” Septimus conceives in his mind the phrase kay arr, which meaning is “fry someone’s brain.” This particular scene from Mrs. Dalloway is to me a good example of the fragmentation of reality, which as seen in class implies that objectivity doesn’t exist and that we can just have access to fragments of reality. Thus, every human being has on their mind their own version of reality, of the truth, of everything that surrounds us.

Considering all of the above, I suggest that you read this article which is part of a series entitled “How Your Beliefs Create Your Reality?” which I believe will make you put your own beliefs into perspective.  Another reason for reading this is that although they aren’t explicitly mentioned, it helps to understand the concepts of fragmentation of reality and the importance of tunneling ones’ lives to understand why we believe what we believe.  For example, in the first article it is stated that “everything we see, experience, think and feel is adjusted to fit with our beliefs,” thus, “our version of reality is a creation of our beliefs.” In those quotations lies the concept of fragmentation covered in class in that it can be inferred that since we humans don’t experience the same things, and that even if we do, we don’t feel the same way as we experience them, our beliefs are prone to be different. Thus, on a given experience, we’ll tend to adjust it to our beliefs, and our opinions toward it will be different.

Moreover, it is also stated that our beliefs operate unconsciously. This part is very important because some of our beliefs are deeply integrated to our perception and opinions, so much that we don’t realize that they aren’t applicable to our adult lives. For example, if we as children were taught that a person dressed in a particular way is a thief or is dangerous, perhaps we unconsciously judge people dressed that way as such, though they aren’t necessarily thieves or dangerous people; perhaps they are just poor. Thus, it is, I believe, of utmost importance that we make our beliefs explicit so that our judgment of life, of events, and mainly of people isn’t influenced by obsolete beliefs that more than uniting us as Clarissa’s party did with every person invited to it, they are just alienating us more and more.

So I leave you classmates with the invitation to put your own beliefs into perspective.