The insights of Shira

There is a line in the book that I cannot pass until I have posted about it, and exclusively it. On page 239, Shira thinks to herself "Most of life was bizarre when she stopped to examine it." When I got to this line, something like 75 different tangents, themes, ideas, and other bits of thought jumped my brain and took it over for a moment. I was thinking everything from "Socrates was right; we STILL don't know what the good is, or anything for that matter" to "this is why I dislike Macs" - needless to say, a large array of things occurred to me. I suppose that the reason this passage resonates so strongly with me is that I am and have always been an individual who enjoys tinkering and taking things apart to see how they work. This is not everyone, which I understand, but I feel like many people lack the capacity to appreciate something because they don't understand its inner workings. For example, people who prefer Macs to PCs sometimes list as their reasoning "because it always works." Thats great, if you like things to work without you understanding anything. I would argue that OF COURSE their overly expensive computers work seemingly perfectly, because all the components are manufactured by the same company, and their software is designed to work on their hardware. I prefer the ability to fix my own computer and know why things work the way they do, as I can and have done with my custom desktop computer. And, for the record, Macs do break, and there are viruses they can get. Just know that my partiality does not lie with Windows. Anyways, this is a fairly small example. On a larger (and more important) scale, people suffer from not stopping to examine life: racial hatred, where people fail to stop and realize that all parties involved are imperfect humans, so everyone's race has committed a wrong at some time or other. This is a good way to get back into the text, where about a quarter of the story revolves around the parallelism between Yod the cyborg and Joseph the clay-being, and how racism against Jews in the 1600's/racism of sorts against the free cities in the future are similar. In fact, the entire setting for the book is an ecologically-destroyed world, the result of almost everyone not examining the costs of strip mining, and dumping trash in the ocean. More specifically, it is showcasing the effects of removing oil from the picture, a la bombing the Middle East totally into a wasteland. Unfortunately, as seems to be the intention of all people, short-sighted concerns rules everyone after the pseudo-Apocalypse as well: the different corporations control much of the land that is worth having, there are massive slums in between them, and then there are a few free cities on the dangerous coastlines. The slums are left as they stand (in abject poverty), and then the multis fight each other for resources and the short term advantage, while the free towns pander to different multis to stay alive. Forgive my idealism, but one might think that after the world goes down/up in flames and there are much fewer people who know have near instant access to information, they might work together to improve things? Apparently not. Nevertheless, this one line in the book seems like it might have tempered the actions of enough people who heeded its wisdom to change history as presented in this book, but instead you got Eliot's 'The Wasteland' on steroids. With lasers and more-human-than-robot cyborgs. Great.

I suppose this blog is not the best medium to plead for more critical thinking on everyone's part, but thats what happens when books (or in this case, single lines) are thought-provoking, I guess.

-Mike