September 14, 2005
Our prof made us do something called "creative writing" recently. We started out as a character in the woods. We were forced to describe our surroundings and the like. Then, every threee minutes or so, the prof would introduce a new element, a new object, for us to respond to and describe. Later, at the end of the exercise, it was revealed to us that each of these elements that was introduced was supposed to represent something in our lives; an animal to represent how we thought the world viewed us, and the like. Personally, only one of these representative items hit their figuritive mark. We were supposed to be in an abandoned house, and then we would see a vase. This vase ended up representing something that we had lost, a relative most likely. While writing this story, this was the only case in which what i put represented what it was supposed to. The rest ended up being no where near what they were supposed to be. All in all, this was an allright free-write, and i ended up writing a pretty good story, if I do say so myself.
November - ish
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible. While this is not entirely an accurate statement, it is the general consensus among the friends of Ivan Ilyich, and really Ivan himself. Ivan Ilyich lived his life according to the status quo. He got a job that the people around him respected. He got a job that they would respect. Then he got married to a respectable wife from a respectable family. Again, this was exactly what was expected from him as he continued his life. He does all of these things, not really for his own pleasure, he doesn’t really love his job or his wife, but instead for stature and public opinion. Most of Ivan’s life is spent conforming to the status quo.
The status quo is a load of crap. It puts expectations on people and if those people do not fulfill them, they are considered failures, not only professionally, but they are really considered failures at life. If everyone was to conform to the status quo, no one would be original and we would see great digression in the arts, politics, and most aspects of life that deal with any kind of thought. This scares me.
The idea of everyone doing only exactly what is expected of them by society reminds me of two things. The first is the idea of communism. In a communist state, each person is assigned a job, and they do that job. They then receive supplies and goods based on what the government thinks they need. No one receives any more than any one else. A communist state also gets rid of religion, because if someone has a different religion than someone else, they could be considered different, against the status quo. This was the problem of communist Russia, and the basic reason that communism can’t work in the real world. People are greedy. People want everything their neighbor has, only bigger, faster, and better. If you’re neighbor gets a brand new eighty-four inch plasma screen T.V., then most people will want one like that, only bigger. People are greedy, and no one alive is innocent of that. The other reason that it can’t work is that people are also lazy. Once people realize that they will get the same amount of stuff while not working as hard at a job they don’t like, they won’t work hard. It’s just against common sense, unless the government will kill you if you don’t work hard. This brings me the second thing that reminds me of mass conformation to the status quo. In the book 1984 by George Orwell, the government is everything. Society is under the complete control of the Government under the figure of Big Brother. The government controls every aspect of society through its’ four ministries. The Ministry of Plenty controls food and supply distribution. The Ministry of Peace keeps the nation at peace through continuous war. The Ministry of Love is responsible for controlling the love of the government, meaning it kidnaps and reprograms anyone that is even a little bit suspicious. No one can say anything against the government or else they disappear and it seems as though they never existed, which is the responsibility of the final and scariest of the ministries, the Ministry of Truth. The Ministry of Truth controls history itself. It takes and rewrites history so that Big Brother is never wrong. There is one such instance that takes place during a war speech. Big Brother is talking about the nations’ enemy, and then the enemy switches mid-speech. Big Brother continues as though nothing is wrong while the war banners against the now ex enemy are replaced. The government and the status quo have such great power that no one who is listening even notices; if only that would work for George Bush.
That is the danger of the status quo. People no longer think for themselves, and when that happens, controlling the masses is a piece of cake. The beauty of the story of Ivan Ilyich lies in the ending of Ivan’s life. While lying on his deathbed in the final moments of his life, Ivan realizes the pointlessness of most of his life. He sees the problems of conforming to the status quo, greed, and in general, life in society. This reminds me of another book/movie. In Fight Club, a man loses everything he has. He is unmarried, without family, and in general pretty lonely. He suffers from insomnia, which makes it impossible for him to live normally. He spends his nights either watching infomercials or wasting his time elsewhere. All this changes in a single day, where he meets a man named Tyler Durden and loses all of his property, which is basically his life, when his condo explodes. This all leads to him moving in with Tyler, and they start a little thing called Fight Club. Slowly, as more men join fight club, and ultimately swear loyalty to Tyler, Tyler’s plans are slowly revealed. “In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” This is Tyler’s dream. He has realized the problems in society and wants to go to the most extreme. He wants to bring down society.
This idea actually relates to Tolstoy himself. Tolstoy broke off of the established church and set up a church that was separated from society and focused more on the person than the world around them. Because of his pacifist beliefs, Tolstoy was considered to be an anarchist. He didn’t like the military, so he didn’t like the government. This is very much an anti-norm point of view, as well as an anti-society point of view, which I believe is reflected in the story of Ivan Ilyich. In the end, Ivan realizes that only by accepting that death is a part of life can a person really appreciate the pleasures of life. This is what I believe to be the final lesson of Ivan Ilyich. As people go through life, we take everything for granted. We always assume that there will always be tomorrow to talk to that person or read that book or take that trip, but we have to realize that there won’t always be a tomorrow. When we do, we can start living each day to the fullest, taking in each thing and doing as much as we can every moment of every day. The lawyers that Ivan worked with lived as though they had eternity to do anything important, so they wasted their time playing cards and working at jobs that they might not have enjoyed.
That is what I gather from The Death of Ivan Ilyich. It is a story condemning society’s emphasis on material possessions and other people’s opinions. It is a point of view that I very much agree with. If each person just lived life in a way that made them happy without worrying about other’s opinions, the world would be a much better place, as long as there are still laws and the like to keep people form going too overboard. So, now I’m going to end with my favorite quote from Fight Club. “Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”