Anthem, hooray!

For this post, I thought it would be a neat idea to bring in a guest writer (because that's what big, important blogs do...), so I asked my daughter, Emily, if she would step in and share her thoughts on Ayn Rand's Anthem. Enjoy!!




First of all, I want to thank my mom for giving me the opportunity to share what I think about one of my favorite books! Anthem is one of the first books that I recommend to people when they ask me which novels they should read.

One of the main reasons that Anthem is so interesting is that it follows a specific philosophy born out of the mind of its author, Ayn Rand. She developed a personal creed of individuality and selfdom known as "objectivism" (yes, you CAN create your own philosophy, just make stuff up!). This belief system was fostered by Rand who, as a young woman, had seen the tyranny in her homeland of Soviet Russia and who had lived through both the Kerensky and Bolshevik Revolutions. After communism won the country over, Rand began to embrace American politics, and it was from her dreams of freedom and morality that the ideas which would fuel the plot of Anthem were born.

The novelette is told from the viewpoint of Equality 7-2521 (yes, that's his name), a twenty-one-year old living in a futuristic world where the word "I" and the human soul behind it no longer exist. In spite of the oppression which is masked by words like "brotherhood" and "State", the young man recognizes himself as one who is different from his brethren and he dares to follow the curiosities of his mind until he discovers knowledge, power and-- Rand's most important declaration-- his sense of self as a free man.

Freedom is the driving theme of the book: the freedom that every man, woman, and child should have to think for themselves, to learn, to advance, to choose, and to love. Rand is careful to express, however, that this freedom cannot come from a decision of the State; liberty comes from a person's own realization that, as a human being, one is free. (I just had a flashback to Braveheart...) Equality 7-2521 does not gain his freedom by fighting for it with his brother men. He does not peacefully protest until the mob begrudgingly grants him independence. His "selfhood" comes to him by his own will, by his own conclusion of who he is. As he proclaims after discovering the sacred "I", the lost word, "Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: 'I will it!'" (pg. 95) This is definitely a powerful statement coming from a young woman who grew up in a world where everyone was told they were the same, and where no one was more than just a piece of the pie!

Along with freedom, another message found in the pages of Anthem is that of identity. Rand solidifies Equality 7-2521's identity by having him and his chosen love pick names. To make something true and identifiable, people give things and ideas names. Instead of a faceless number, the youth names his own, free identity with the title of "Prometheus", who, in Greek mythology was the bringer of fire to earthly men. Rand is encouraging her readers to understand to understand that both freedom and identity come from the human concept of self, not from one's peers, not from one's parents, and certainly not from what a government dictates. The young man in Anthem sees himself as someone who brings light to other men, and decides that this will be his identity because this is what he sees in himself.

This is an amazing read. The entire book is only 105 pages long, so you're getting bargain brain-fodder for only about a third of the time it takes to read those other mind-tinglers (c'mon, what other Russian authors can you appreciate in less than a week?). Be cautious, however: this book will probably make you want to change your name, steal a woman from a random field, and go live in the forest. Or, it could just encourage you to think for yourself. :) Happy reading!

Eat, Pray, Love - Books 2 and 3

I have less to say about the last two parts of Liz Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love than I had about the first part. Just a bit of a confession here, I just don't agree with most of her thoughts on God and spirituality. Now that doesn't mean I am criticizing her beliefs - they are just very different from my own. However, I don't argue with some of the lessons that she learns during the second part of her journey, which is to India where she lives in the Ashram of her Guru for four months. One of the main lessons has to do with being still and meditating. Again, I believe that as a culture, American's are horrible at the concept of quiet and actually listening to God. Gilbert talks about how difficult it is to meditate because when she asks her mind to rest, it will quickly become, in turns, bored, angry, depressed, anxious, etc. I can totally relate to that. She says that she is burdened with what the Buddhists call the "monkey mind" which can swing from one topic to another. And I thought it was just me who was ADD. I guess not. Having this tendency to swing from thought to thought keeps a person from being present and in the moment because he or she is moving from the present to the past to the future in thought. Gilbert achieved the needed focus through a mantra. Her conversations with herself in this section are funny and so relative.

Gilbert also uses this section to talk about how sometimes in religion, humans create rituals that start out for a specific purpose but then nobody remembers what the ritual is all about and the ritual ends up driving the faith. Here is a story told to her by the Indians about a saint who was surrounded at his Ashram by his followers. For many hours a day, they would all sit around and meditate. However, the saint had a cat which was particularly annoying, so they tied the cat to a tree to keep it from distracting the meditation. This became a habit. As years passed, nobody remembered the original reason for tying the cat to a tree, and they believed that they not could find God unless they tied a cat to a tree. The moral to the story is not to get too obsessed with the repetition of ritual just for its own sake. There is more to the search for a relationship with God than ticking off the ritual.

Part 3 is Gilbert's return to Indonesia and the paradise that is Bali. Here she reunites with the medicine man who read her palm several years before. She includes some really interesting history of Bali in this section. She also meets some very important people like a medicine woman who is a real healer and good friend and teaches Liz important lessons about trust. Gilbert also meets a man and learns to love again.

I really enjoyed reading this book and got a lot out of it. It was honest and open and not at all preachy, which is great. It was simply a sharing of a woman's experience from a very dark part of her life to a new type of light.

Eat, Pray, Love - Book 1

After I finished reading The Mayor of Casterbridge on the vacation, I immediately started reading Eat, Pray, Love by Liz Gilbert. I purchased this book for my e-reader right after I watched the movie. Now, a word about this practice... I realize that many teachers of English frown and turn their pointy noses up at the idea of "book set in film" and believe in some twisted, purist sense that true lovers of lit should never make comparisons between the books and their film versions. I have an excellent Greek word for that idea - it's "Hogwash." I really like being introduced to a book via a movie version. I am very visual, and a movie gives me a (teacher word coming - look out) "conceptual framework" for placing the book. In other words, it gives me a place in my brain upon which to hang the ideas in the book. This works well with teenagers also. When I teach Shakespeare, I show pieces of a movie along with the reading so that the kids can spend more imagination on the plot and less on setting and character because those images are already fixed in their minds.

Back to Liz Gilbert. I saw her on Oprah in 2007 when her book was published, and I thought she was moderately interesting, but didn't think I would care for her writing. The movie starring Julia Roberts was more interesting, so I Netflixed it this summer. Loved it! After a long and difficult, but perfectly pleasing year of teaching, I was intrigued by the first part of Liz Gilbert's journey in particular. Here's the summation: Gilbert was married young and later decided that she didn't want to be married any more. A falling out of love, if you will. Apparently, getting a divorce in New York is more difficult and more painful than removing a leaprous leg with nail scissors, particularly if one party is not in favor of the action. It took about 4 years to get the divorce. Yikes! During this time, Gilbert was lost, confused, ungrounded and miserable - just like any other normal human being would be. Long story short, she decided to take a year of her life to figure it all out. She started with 4 months in Italy. Actually, she had been to Bali previously for an article she was writing, met a medicine man who read her palm and was told she would eventually return. That's the end of her journey (Italy, India, Indonesia).

After all of this heartache and misery, Gilbert decides to spend 4 months in Italy to discover pleasure. Not a bad place to find pleasure. One of the ways she finds pleasure is through food, hence the first part of the title. She actually goes there to learn the language, but winds up finding a lot of pleasure in eating. But that's not the only place she finds pleasure, and I'm not talking about sex. Now, when it comes down to it, Americans are pretty horrible at enjoying themselves. According to Gilbert, we come from this uptight, Puritan, guilt-ridden background that makes us work really hard and criticize the idea of true relaxation. Imagine the executive on vacation who can't keep away from the blackberry long enough to go to the beach with his kids. I recognize this in myself. Anyway, Gilbert learns about the idea of "bel far niente" which is "the beauty of doing nothing." Here is what she says about the Italian idea of "bel far niente": "The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement" (95). I love this idea. I read it (Chapter 17) to my husband and my kids. It was "food for thought" if you will.

Gilbert goes on to explain that we don't get this in American culture, and we have to be convinced that we deserve to take it easy. Think about American advertisements - "You deserve a break today" and "You've come a long way, baby!" Then we think, "Of course I deserve a break, so I'll work really hard (what!) at relaxing and overindulge in it and then experience excessive guilt because of it." This is not the way to experience "bel far niente." Experiencing this concept really comes down to asking yourself, "what would make me happy right now?" Sounds sort of selfish but it isn't because it generally incorporates the enjoyment of people you love. Long dinners around good food with good conversation and lots of laughter. Lazy afternoons of coffee and cake with your girlfriends. For me, when I think about the times that I have been most content, the scene usually incorporates my husband, my kids, my friends, yummy food, lots of laughter and great conversation. What it doesn't include is my twisted American sense of time management. How long do I have to spend here in this spot where I'm having fun before I have to get to the next task? This isn't pleasure; this isn't giving myself up to the moment.

So what I took from the first part of Gilbert's book is this - Work hard, but don't look to work as my reward. Be present in the moment of pleasure without mentally running to the next thing I "have to do." Banish guilt. This idea right here is so strong in my life that sometimes I have a hard time praying because I think I should be multi-tasking while I am spending time with God. Ridiculous! Be fully present with the people I love and give them my attention so that I can enjoy them unhindered and they can do the same. Chew! Incorporate "bel far niente" into my life and slow down enough to truly get it. Not a bad lesson for 1/3 of a book I didn't want to read in the first place.

My next post will take us to Liz's trip to India.

Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, pray, love: one woman's search for everything across Italy, India and Indonesia. New York: Viking, 2006.

Home again, Home again, jiggedy, jig!

After a lovely vacation with the family in which I did a lot of reading, I am home again. The house is relatively clean, so I can sit down and blog again. Let me just say that riding on trains and planes are great for reading, but I still can't read in the car.

While I was gone, I finished The Mayor of Casterbridge and I have to say that I absolutely loved that book! There is so much to say about it, but I think I will start with some of the themes. Hardy seemed to have a lot to say about marriage, respect/respectability, consequences of a person's actions (that one could branch off into half a dozen conversations). But I believe that the most intriguing concept for me was Hardy's commentary on what happens when a person tries to push bad behavior under the rug. He seems to be saying the same old thing that I have told my children and my students for years - just own the blasted mistake and move on. Let's begin: (Spoiler alert! If you plan to read the book, I might spoil a few things in the next couple of paragraphs, but I will NOT tell the ending.)

Michael Henchard sold his wife and child at an auction while in a drunken stupor. Bad mistake. So he did the right thing by falling on his knees before God and swearing off liquour for the next 21 years. He also tried to find Susan and Elizabeth Jane, but the reader gets the idea that his search was not an open one - making quiet inquiries, etc. Also, when he comes into his position as the Mayor of the city, he never discloses his past (obviously because it would have hindered getting/keeping the position - that idea of respectability) and this is his fatal flaw (or one of them). Again, when Susan and Elizabeth Jane return to him, he keeps the truth from Elizabeth Jane by covering up with a lie. He asks her to take his name - sort of an adoption situation. She doesn't buy it (out of respect for her father - Mr. Newsom) until her mother dies and Henchard finally tells her the truth. Devastating!

Susan Henchard never tells her daughter any fragment of the truth and it makes Elizabeth Jane's life extremely difficult. There are a few things she doesn't tell Michale Henchard whens she returns to Casterbridge. Namely (and here is a spoiler) that the original Elizabeth Jane - Henchard's child - died a few months after they were sold, and Susan had another daughter by Newsom, whom she named Elizabeth Jane to ease the pain of the loss of the first. Susan allowed Henchard to believe that the current EJ is the former EJ, and she never tells the current EJ that there was a former EJ. Yipes! When Henchard finds this information, his feelings for the current EJ change dramatically.

Another character tries to sweep some messy information out of the way as well. Lucetta is new to the city of Casterbridge, but an old hook-up for Henchard. In fact, they had a tryst that ruined her reputation and Michael had promised to marry her. With Lucetta, Michael straight up told the truth. He told her about his former wife, how he treated her, and there was a possibility that she might come back to the picture. The ONLY person in the book with whom Michael is completely truthful. Actually, Donald Farfrae gets a pretty accurate picture of Michael Henchard's life, but Henchard puts a bit of gloss on it for Donald to maintain a modicum of respectability. Anyway, when Lucetta enters Casterbridge, she creates a veneer of respectability and is about to "court" Michael Henchard again when she meets his friend Mr. Farfrae. Sparks start a-flying! Lucetta also befriends Elizabeth Jane and tells EJ her life story, but couches it as the story of a friend. EJ sees through that one, but doesn't realize who the male players are. Once Lucetta's story is revealed through an act of revenge on the part of a disgruntled townsman, Lucetta's veneer shatters, her life is ruined and she suffers a terrible fate.

In this book, the truth will always find you out; hiding it only leads to pain and suffering. Hardy allows his characters plenty of pain and heartbreak, but he always rewards those who try to cover up their sins in order to be more respectable with a painful unveiling - one that flings suffering farther than the character ever thought it would go. Better to own the past and live with it than try to sweep it under the rug.

So much more could be said about this book, but I'm ready to head to the pool with the next one. I'm about 2/3 of the way finished with Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Very interesting read. More on that later on.

A brief departure

The day before yesterday, I realized that my Nook (a/k/a best friend since Christmas) needed charging, and I had time to read. So, I picked up another book which really should have made the summer reading list, but I forgot about it. One of several. My good friend and colleague, Rachel B. gave me a copy of Witch Child by Celia Rees. I believe she has put this book on her 10th grade summer reading list. It is always a challenge for English teachers to find summer reading books that are relevant to our curriculum, readable for our students and really good (that looks like the three R's of summer reading:) Parents and students alike find summer reading a challenge, but it is really necessary. Short story - reading is a skill that needs to be practiced and there is no way we can teach all the literature/concepts within one school year which students really need. Hence, summer reading.

Anyway, I picked up Witch Child, and it was quite good. The basic premise is that a young girl named Mary escapes England with the Puritans and winds up in a settlement close to Salem. Her grandmother was hanged in England as a witch, and Mary has a few odd quirks which make the suspicious Puritan folks turn a second glance. The writing is quite accessible for teenagers, but Rees did not lose the diction of Puritan writers. Some "period pieces" written for modern readers have diction that sounds like a contemporary sit-com. It never works. Rees does a great job with authentic diction. The thing she does even better than word choice is the inclusion of lots of historical data carefully woven into the plot. This will give students entering 10th grade American Lit the background they need to understand some of the more difficult pieces they will encounter in the fall. Also, it is really interesting. I loved the ending, which was different and quite unexpected.

So, the Nook is charged again, and I have managed to reach Casterbridge with Susan and her now grown daughter, Elizabeth-Jane. More on them later.