Night
I think every blog post I've looked at so far has mentioned the similarities between Silence and Night, so I won't touch into that.
What struck me, however, was a throwback to a book I had read earlier this year. There's a group of people in said book called the Um Biyara, and their way of handling death of things was to have the head of the deceased person placed into the globe at the center of the town, where it would remain until eventually all the skin would rot away and the sun would clean it. When putting on a new head into the globe, they would remove the oldest skull and stomp it into the ground. Now, that sounds really wild, I know, but it was basically a sense of mourning. The removed skull was bleached by the sun—no one knows to whom it once belonged to, so no one could feel sad that they had truly "left" their tribe.
Now you may ask "Ty, why bring that up?" well, it's because of the idea that Zelda brought up on Sunday about Night. The whole "You die twice, once when you physically die, and again when someone last utters your name", or specifically as Wiesel says "to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time". It took me a bit to place where I have heard that before, but I finally figured it out on the way to class this morning.
I commented on Natalie and Zelda's posts
What struck me, however, was a throwback to a book I had read earlier this year. There's a group of people in said book called the Um Biyara, and their way of handling death of things was to have the head of the deceased person placed into the globe at the center of the town, where it would remain until eventually all the skin would rot away and the sun would clean it. When putting on a new head into the globe, they would remove the oldest skull and stomp it into the ground. Now, that sounds really wild, I know, but it was basically a sense of mourning. The removed skull was bleached by the sun—no one knows to whom it once belonged to, so no one could feel sad that they had truly "left" their tribe.
Now you may ask "Ty, why bring that up?" well, it's because of the idea that Zelda brought up on Sunday about Night. The whole "You die twice, once when you physically die, and again when someone last utters your name", or specifically as Wiesel says "to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time". It took me a bit to place where I have heard that before, but I finally figured it out on the way to class this morning.
I commented on Natalie and Zelda's posts
“So why would someone write a book as disgusting and monstrous as this and expect people to read it?” I think you’ve summed up the answer quite nicely… If we don’t like a written account of it, imagine what actually living it was like. We owe it to the six million people that couldn’t be saved to know in detail what exactly they suffered. If we ignore them to the point where we say “I don’t care what they went through, they died eighty years ago and their story is ultimately worthless to me,” then how much better are we than Hitler? We’ve just killed all that’s left of them for our own convenience.
ReplyDeleteTL;DR: Studying history is a good thing.