"Δεν καταλαβαίνω", "non capisco", "ich verstehe nicht", "Je ne comprends pas" ("I do not understand")

By
Well sort of... but as you can see not all is lost! I have become quite familiarly agitated with the use of the different languages that Eliot just loves to throw in his work. Just when I begin to understand; I do not understand.

What I do understand from "The Waste Land" is that for one I do not like it. The way the bartender continues to say, "Hurry up its time", reminds me of a scene in some movie where some bomb goes off once he says it for the last time; when really he is just getting ready to close for the night. What is worse is in the process of this being said a separate conversation is going on about how a man gave his wife money to get new teeth because he cannot stand to look at her. Like What? Then each section relates to death or something darn near depressing. I guess that is why it is called "The Waste Land" because what is good about it?

Now moving on to "The Second Coming". Yeats, in the beginning stanza, somehow manages to portray a crazy dystopia of how humanity has come to complete craziness. It seems while the world is falling apart, what is good has now become bad and what is bad now has become good. The reference to the lion, human thing was probably my favorite part due to having a bit of prior knowledge to the Antichrist and how it can actually kind of relate to the biblical revelation. I have to say though I did prefer this over "The Waste Land" simply because I could understand it; not because it was any more delightful.

P.S. I commented on Natalie and Will's post

Comments

  1. Will BradyJanuary 15, 2018 at 8:11 PM

    "The Dragon." "The Beast." "That hideous thing with seven heads and ten horns." "The Sphinx" fits in with that group quite nicely... Good is bad and vice versa? Also biblical, you've probably heard 2 Timothy 3. It's weird how the Bible's end times stuff can be so intriguing and so terrifying at the same time. Yeats' style fits that feeling pretty well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michael TurnerJanuary 15, 2018 at 8:46 PM

    Several writers I have read from use a multitude of languages in their work. "Wasteland" definitely pulls a little too much from all over the board. I still cannot fully understand it. Perhaps none of us ever will. Sounds like a great dissertation idea to me.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Honest Reaction to Reading "Honest to God"

By
Originally I said in my last blog post that I liked this book, but I have sort of changed my mind. It is not that I hate it or anything, it is just weird and I don’t really agree with what John Robinson is saying most of the time. I appreciate that he is trying to write something different and new, but my problem is that some of the ideas are just a little too radical for my taste, and I disagree with him a lot. In the seventh and last chapter of the book, Robinson himself acknowledges his radicalness and writes about how he knows that this type of thought on religion is controversial. He goes on to write how all great thinkers were seen as controversial when they first started and says, “Every new religious truth comes as the destroyer of some other god”. To further prove this point, he uses the example of how Socrates was condemned as an atheist for not believing in multiple gods, and while it is true that Socrates was a great philosopher who was not seen as so when he was alive, I ...
Read more

Raphael and a man walk into Eden...

By
I'll just start off by saying Raphael is one of the three named archangels in Scripture we hear the least about, and I thoroughly enjoy just reading and seeing his name pop up. Regardless, I want to touch on Adam's recounting of his own..."birth". Take that with a grain of salt as Adam was not physically born, but rather he simply became. In truth, we should all be able to give a similar account to their first memory of consciousness and fully aware. Adam was created, but he realized he could walk, talk, and speak without first learning. Imagine being able to think clear thoughts in your native language and be a functioning individual right out of the womb. It's an incredible thought, and Adam can give a recall of this like it were yesterday...which it might have been, who knows? Aside from that, Adam could even give an account to Eve's creation. The Bible says nothing pertaining to this matter so this is where Milton does a bit of adlibbing and writes around ...
Read more

Extra blog

By
OK so, honors project! Honestly I really loved it as a whole. I said this already in the video, but I feel like I personally could've done better. I just feel like I didn't have enough time to completely process some questions and be able to give my best responses. I really enjoyed reading the O'Connor piece, which I think was everyone's favorite anyway. I love narrative stories like that, but honestly I'm glad I got to be in the Russell group. I feel like that group was the easiest to argue and answer from, honestly. As a whole, I would love to do a project like this again in later semesters. It was a lot of fun and time FLEW by.
Read more