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Book
I've been reading a book called From Here to Eternity over the past couple of weeks - I'd actually had plans to finish it a couple of weeks ago, but between loosing my reading time to unplanned naps (I am still slightly sick), and the fact that its over 700 pages long, I'm not giving myself too much grief.
The book is a lot of things, I could easily see a teacher dedicating an entire class to the work alone, but one of the big things that strikes me, is how every character, it seems, is trying to express something genuine of themselves in a world that does not easily permit that. Prewitt in particular really gets to me, the way he keeps doggedly gripping onto his own dignity and sense of right, knowing full well that he will be punished for it, is hard not to emphasize with. It doesn't help that he gets all the best speeches, too.
Just listen to this:
"Do you want to be just an unremembered body? When we come here and then go away we need to know at least that we're remembered. Maybe we seem all alike but none of us is ever all alike. Men are killed by being all alike, always unremembered. They die inside."
Later, while being given "the Treatment" by his superiors for refusing to be a boxer for their company's team, he has a rather long and sarcastic internal monologue on the falsity of choice and freewill.
There are also a lot of lines that may as well have been ripped straight out of our current year, plus or minus an out of place typewriter or two. I think my favorite so far is this one:
"It was not the same now any more, you could do it all, the same as you used to do it, but it was not the same."
...Yeah. I feel that.
The book is a lot of things, I could easily see a teacher dedicating an entire class to the work alone, but one of the big things that strikes me, is how every character, it seems, is trying to express something genuine of themselves in a world that does not easily permit that. Prewitt in particular really gets to me, the way he keeps doggedly gripping onto his own dignity and sense of right, knowing full well that he will be punished for it, is hard not to emphasize with. It doesn't help that he gets all the best speeches, too.
Just listen to this:
"Do you want to be just an unremembered body? When we come here and then go away we need to know at least that we're remembered. Maybe we seem all alike but none of us is ever all alike. Men are killed by being all alike, always unremembered. They die inside."
Later, while being given "the Treatment" by his superiors for refusing to be a boxer for their company's team, he has a rather long and sarcastic internal monologue on the falsity of choice and freewill.
There are also a lot of lines that may as well have been ripped straight out of our current year, plus or minus an out of place typewriter or two. I think my favorite so far is this one:
"It was not the same now any more, you could do it all, the same as you used to do it, but it was not the same."
...Yeah. I feel that.