In which
ways are we alive?
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.
I completely agree with you. I think that one of our society's most noticeable characteristic is that we are so busy worrying about things that are not really important, instead of taking care of the aspects of our lives that really matter. We often find ourselves stopped by fears: we don't say what we want to say, don't do what we want to do, and then regret it.
ResponderBorrarWe have to admit it: we are all aging, our time is running out. And at least for me, it's very difficult to ignore my fears, but we should try to make the most of our lives, because it would be sad to look back and realize we didn't live.
First of all I would like to say that the song is very good. I really enjoyed listening to it. Secondly, I think you did a good job at relating the story of the song with Gretta's story from Joyce's "The dead" because both Gretta and the girl from the story of the song remember a loved one that is not there anymore. However, I find myself confused because on the one hand, I think that as you said, the girl from the song's husband is still alive in her, which means he reached transcendence,ie, he is still alive, but on the other hand, I think the girl herself, just like Gretta, is dead because all she talks about is connected to her past, especially with the experiences she lived with her husband or about her husband himself, so I think the wife from that song is in a state of paralysis (it seems she completely forgot about the present), and I think that when she has the conversation with her husband, and he (pressumably xd) says "I'm the one who is gone," what he is probably trying to do is to tell her to move on, to continue her life, to stop being in paralysis, to stop being a gnomon.
ResponderBorrarPerhaps the problem is that as songs are short, they cannot give detailed information, but at least from what I understood from this song, I can conclude that the husband is more alive than the wife, which means the past is more alive than the present (=gnomon). Thus, she is paralysed (she can't go on without him), and just like what I think Joyce was trying to say through "The dead," the only way for her to become alive again would be to overcome her past, and do something for her own life in the present so as to feel alive in both the present and the future, not just in the past like the Irish did as covered in class.
But again, the story of the song doesn't end, so I think we won't find a definite answer to my doubts.
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ResponderBorrarI totally agree with you!
ResponderBorrarI think that it's hard for us to differentiate between fictitious and real life, we spend so much time on-line for example that we don’t pay attention to our feelings or thoughts anymore. Everything goes so fast that we can’t stop to appreciate life and I think that it happens because we have the pressure to be part of the society no matter how we feel inside; we need to be “functional” in this world.
A thin line separates the livings and dead, we might be living but we are dead inside because we can’t feel anymore. I believe that nowadays life is so rational that we forget how to feel.
In my opinion, simple things require people to be simple which is difficult in a complex world like ours.