Captured Thought: Dueling Societies

Just start off this blog on a rather random note, the picture to the left is the image I have in my head of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness.  Now, I know that Kurtz is supposed to be incredibly thin and sickly, but anytime I picture him, this is all I can see. I have no idea why. 

Alright, now on to the actual blog. This week in class we have been discussing the book Heart of Darkness and one of the main topics brought up was the idea of restraint. It seemed to me, that the majority of the class was of the state of mind that while the African people were considered savage by the Europeans, it was really the Africans who demonstrated a restraint typically associated with a western lifestyle and the so called civilized Europeans were the ones who acted savagely. It seemed like they highly praised African society and just completely bashed on the Europeans. While I agree with them that the Europeans did in fact act with an unnecessary ferocity, it does not mean that we should write of their life style completely. Neither society is perfect and they both have their faults, simply the societies are just different. Furthermore, the people in both societies show restraint, just in different ways. There are so many things that European people had to deal with that the Africans didn't, and vice versa. The Europeans didn't have to hunt through the jungle in search of game, but the Africans didn't have to labor in factories or struggle with an incredibly strict and oppressive social structure. Both societies we're a challenge to live through and you can't really say one was better than the other because they both had their challenges, and their rewards. 

One of the biggest themes in the book is savagery vs. society and how those two are interwoven. Heart of Darkness, in my opinion, does an incredible job of clearly showing your conscious the weaknesses of both societies, while simultaneously allowing your subconscious to realize their strengths. It enables you to draw your own opinion of the savagery and restraint  both societies display, and therefor deepens your understanding of society at large, and what it means to be "civilized". 

Blogging Around

Emily Horvath wrote a blog about her experience writing the multiple drafts of her poem. In it she expressed her perception shift as she went from hating the assignment to genuinely enjoying it in the end. I replied with:

I just want to start of by saying that I love your writing style and your gifs made me laugh, a lot. After reading your blog I feel as though we sort of went on opposite journeys during this assignment. I started out loving poetry and so excited to write my own that I began writing it that day in class. But then with each draft that I turned in and every revision, I started to hate my poem. I started to feel less and less creative as my poem grew longer, because I just didn't know how to fix what I had already written, so I instead just kept adding stanzas. Whereas you started out apprehensive and then were able to condense and enjoy each new draft you handed in.

I think that our journeys differed so much because of our attitudes when we started. I enjoy poetry and was so happy with the second draft of my poem that I became stubborn. I didn't want to change what I thought was good writing just because someone else didn't like it, but after awhile it got hard revising something I desperately wanted to keep the same and in the end I ended up just getting angry and frustrated. However, you came into this project with an open mind and were able to take criticism and mold it into a a better, more concise poem. You were able to succeed where I pretty much failed, and I have to give you props for that because I know it was no easy task. 
Jordan Arrigo wrote a blog about organizing her makeup drawer. In it she talked about how neat her drawer now was, while the rest of her room stayed messy. She expressed how rewarding it was to have even just a little thing be so tidy, but how terrifying it can be to have to organize the rest of your life. I replied with: 

I'm in the same situation. My makeup drawer is in perfect order, but the rest of my room is a disaster. It's just never really bothered me that my room is a mess though, because at least it's my mess. I've always felt like it shouldn't matter if your things are organized as long as you know where everything is and are happy with it, because really, at the end of the day, who is going to be meticulously going through your stuff? 
It bothers me so much when my mom tells me to clean my room, because I think to myself, "The door is always closed, you only ever go in there about once a week, why does it matter?" The last time I checked my mother wasn't giving tours of my room to the neighborhood, so I really just don't see why it has to be PERFECT.

At the end of your blog you talked about how scary it is to organize your whole life, but I don't really see why that is necessary. Order isn't always what's best for people and if everything in your life is immaculate I feel like you would just get stuck in a rut. So before you attempted to revamp and reorganize everything, I wanted to tell you that little chaos is a good thing and it can go a long way.