The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

We spoke in class of soul-selling; bargaining up your soul in return for something you want.  Faustus sells his soul for 24 years of life with Mephistophilis as his servant. This brings me to the question, what good is a soul? Do they really exist, and if so, what does it mean for us? Are our bodies just shells, dresses that our souls wear to prom? Souls are, in a sense, our life essence, in the way that some people see it. Without them we are nothing, so if you sell your soul don't you become nothing? Just a walking body, void of a human inside. I guess your soul stays with you until your deal is up, but it's tainted. I, honestly, don't believe in Heaven or Hell, though it's fun to pretend. There's a show called Supernatural, and one character is soulless; he doesn't feel anything. No remorse, no guilt, no shame.  So, if your soul is gone, are you fully functioning just without a moral sense or are you simply walking flesh? I have to connect this to the world somehow, so I'm going to connect it to the court system. Everyday lawyers, fully aware of the guilt of their client, fight on the defense. They know their client had committed the crime they are being accused of, the murder or the rape or the theft, yet fight for the person to go free. All for what?  For a fast car and a shiny watch?  Isn't this selling your soul to the devil? Except instead of a forked tail and two horns this devil has a gleaming eye and a pocket full of cash. The people on the defense team for O.J Simpson had to have some idea that he had murdered his wife and her friend. (Of course, I was only one year old when this happened and am not a cop so my opinion can't really be relied on.)  But they defended him, found a way to get him free. People in everyday society sell their souls to the devil, for all kinds of reasons, and just because it doesn't come with a 24 year contract doesn't make them any better, or Faustus any worse.  What I'm saying here, I think, is that even though I don't believe in a devil, I still think it's possible to sell your soul. To go against what you believe is right because it benefits you in some way. 

Dead Poet's English Class

There is an amazing movie called the Dead Poet's Society (starring Robin Williams and the one guy that plays the one guy on House who's girlfriend killed himself or something, he was cute in this movie but not in house, but I digress), and in it Robin Williams says to the boys of the school, "Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? --- Carpe --- hear it? --- Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary." Another quote featured in the movie is from Thoreau, similar to the one that we wrote the Awakening paper on: "I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life ... to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." This sticks out to me more than any other quote I have read. In my life I wish to suck out "all of the marrow," to enjoy every day, through the good and the bad.  If I choose to write a novel, I will write a novel, if I choose to move to Texas, I wish to have the ability to move to Texas. This might be a little incohesive because my head is rather fuzzy and I start to ramble when I'm tired, but my point is that I want to live life exactly as the quote says... There was one quote that I read once, I don't remember it exactly, something about how I want to fall into my grave, bruised and scraped, and smiling all the way down. Life isn't truly lived if you die without a blemish. Women in the past, as Virginia Woolf explains, weren't able to do this. They were supressed because, they are just women, what good are their opinions? What I'm trying to say here, is that I am so happy to live in the time that we do, because if not I would not be able to die and discover that I HAD lived. I would, as Shakespeare's sister, have to use other means of expression, some not so great.  Because these women were not allowed to write, speak, walk, or act the way they truly would have liked, they were not able to live.  Carpe diem, seize the day, take everything you can to its full advantage and never let a day pass by where the decisions you make aren't your own. I'm just going to bow out now, and write a better blog next month. The thoughts here are in my brain, but aren't coming out with much sense here.

The human race is perfect.

We make no mistakes, we have no imperfections.  We treat everyone with respect; no one person lesser or greater, and it has always been that way- at least, according to Alan Gribben.  This is the man who has chosen to remove the words "nigger" and "injun" from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, because parents find them too offensive. Shall we rewrite all of Bill Clinton's presidency because some citizens find his affair offensive? This desecration of Mark Twain's classic novel is such a farce it is hard for me to understand. Did racism and slavery never exist? Should they be swept under the rug because we're embarrassed by what we did?  I had thought that people had learned that shielding us from the past takes us one step closer to repeating it.  The book deals with a young child and his struggle with the realization that his slave, Jim, is a real person, too.  The harsh words and demeanor of  some of the characters in the book is what makes the acceptance of Jim such a monumental thing. Even though people call him a nigger, he is a person and has feelings and emotions (redundant, I know), same as anybody else. We have a Banned Book Month for a reason, because these books, no matter the content, were written for a reason and deserve to be read the way they were designed.
We wrote a Friday essay comparing two poems, both about truths and lies, and the effects these words had.  In one poem, the teacher made the past fluffy and fun, and saw, or actually didn't see, the children showing early signs of violent dispositions.  Because he hid from them the horrors of these poor actions, they didn't realize that they were acting in the same way.  If children aren't exposed to the words "nigger," and the less familiar "injun" (for Native American), how are they ever going to realize that using the terms is unacceptable? That racism and discrimination are awful, yet they happened. I feel like I am saying the same thing over and over, and maybe I am, but, maybe, that's how to get the point across. You can't erase the past, because it happened, the best we can do is learn from it and move on to be better people.  Looking at the world through rose tinted glasses isn't going to make it any prettier, just throw you farther into the thorns.