Anti-priety

1) A framed story - a narrative within a narrative within yet another narrative, and so on and so forth - if pulled off properly, can add a profound element to a novel, as is the case with Wuthering Heights.

2) I am, for the time being, a Romantic displaced in a Post-Modernist age. The language employed in the former Literary Period (Heights falls under this category): unspeakable. 

3) If you like irreparably dark novels - with little to no hope contained in them - read this book. 

An autobiography of author Richard Wright, who lived in the Jim Crow South in the early 1900s.

Thoughts after finishing the book:  

1) You know you’re headed in the right direction when those around you think you’re crazy. 

2) How did the idea of subjugating a group of people come about? 

3) Slavery wasn’t wrong until enough people agreed upon its inhumanity. What, in present-day, is our “slavery,” an accepted social norm that, in 200 years, will be greeted with the same level of appall, in which people will say to each other, “I can’t believe in 2011, they permitted _________.”?

The world is at a standstill.

But even that’s a false statement.

For in each moment, you’re expanding or contracting.

Thus, you are, at all times, consciously or unconsciously,

Choosing growth,

Or settled comfortability.

That’s the one that’s gonna hurt us:

                The ability to be contented.

To be contented means to stop caring, to stop looking for where you can improve,

Where you can create,

Where you can cause the world to wake from dormancy.

More than just to own an awareness but to truly care,

To possess within you the drive to move forward,

That’s the real first step.

But we’ve decided, now is a good place to rest.

We’ve established the checkpoint and aren’t curious to see

                What lies beyond.

But let she who sees nothing past the established, the ordinary, the commonplace,

                Let her step forward anyway,

                Turning a staircase into a mountain,

                And make her into a giant-ess,

                Such that she may never have to move these mountains to get to the other side,

                But may crush them beneath her feet instead.

-Steven Lo

We’ve all heard people attribute MONEY as the fundamental source of problems for humankind.

I don’t agree at all. “No holes on my side of the boat” - this seems more accurate as THE BASE PROBLEM from which all other problems - from littering to world hunger - stem. 

Imagine you’re in a row boat at sea. You and a stranger. You’re floating along - everything is fine - until a hole opens on the stranger’s side of the boat.

You think, “Not on my side? Not my problem.” 

Yet, it doesn’t matter where the hole is located. Either way, the boat is going to sink. 

Applying this metaphor to real life: if something doesn’t affect you in some way, then why should you care? Not your problem, right? 

If you pass a homeless person on the street, do you truly care if he or she is starved and without anything to sleep on except pavement? It doesn’t directly affect you…

But if you pass a homeless person on the street, and you look more carefully and realize it’s a family member, then you can be indifferent no longer. You do something in hopes to ameliorate the situation. 

And this is the problem - “no holes on my side of the boat.” Put more plainly, we as human beings have a very limited view of who makes up our immediate family. 

If you treated the homeless stranger with as much care as your mom, [fill in the blank]. 

1) What if family didn’t mean mom and dad only, but included every living and breathing entity in the world? 

2) Tragedy of the Commons in reverse - imagine if everyone in the world picked up one piece of trash a day. 

3) Prayer is nothing more than a statement of gratitude.