Category Archives: Blog

HW for 11/30

Things Fall Apart ch 5-8 due for class discussion Thursday!
Please review notes from today, as well as notes from last 2 units for potentially overlapping themes/questions/points of contrast.

Blog group 1 post due by 5 pm Tuesday. Same rules as always apply.

best,

Professor Kwong

Through the Eyes of Okonkwo

“Looking at a king’s mouth,” said an old man, “one would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast.” He was talking about Okonkwo, who had risen so suddenly from great poverty and misfortune to be one of the lords of the clan. The old man bore no ill will towards Okonkwo. Indeed he respected him for his industry and success. But he was struck, as most people were, by Okonkwo’s brusqueness in dealing with less successful men. Only a week ago a man had contradicted him at a kindred meeting which they held to discuss the next ancestral feast. Without looking at the man Okonkwo had said: “This meeting is for men.” The man who had contradicted him had no titles. That was why he had called him a woman. Okonkwo knew how to kill a man’s spirit.

The text above provides a better picture of how Okonkwo is as a character and how he stands before other men in his tribe. We see how his brusqueness is in dealing less successful men as he was a son to not so successful man who held no title. He had to rise up from nothing to get where he stands now and he is proud of what he has accomplished. However, seeing how his father was not a good role model, who left him nothing, and was not an inspiration to become someone like him, we see how that has affected Okonkwo’s view on others who are similar to that of his father. Okonkwo values those that are successful, who hold titles, and who have a name for themselves and those who do not will be looked down upon by him and treated not as equal but of lesser man, in this case by killing the man with no titles spirit by calling him a woman in a “man’s” meeting.

Finding something else?

“But we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything definite. We had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper day kept the blackness from being absolute. Having automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed debris formed an impression we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger.” “The other odor ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and more frightful odor.”

In the previous chapter, we found that they saw some evidences about the old ones, who lived there millions of years ago, and Dyer mentioned that he actually liked their cultures. Now we can see they are finding more stuff. They were smelling an odor but they didn’t know what was it. So, we can connect that with the previous topic that they will find something that was belong to the old ones. He mentioned it was less and more frightful, so I think they are little scared about what will happen next.

“The Old Ones”

“They have lived under the sea a good deal,building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown principles of energy. Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledge far supassed man’s today, though they made use of its more widespread and elaborate forms only when obligated to. Some of the sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage of mechanised life on other planets, but haf receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying.”
when looking back at our class discussion we started to wonder how far advance were these beings at one point. We knew that they had created their own city and by the way that it was described it seemed to be very well made. It also seemed to be far advance than what man knew how to do till today. In this snapshot we see that the Old Ones have been on earth for a long time at lot longer than what dyer thinks. We also start to see that the Old Ones had lived under water and has also built cities down there too. Dyer also talks about how it seemed that the Old Ones had used their abilities when only needed. This could also mean that they did not use distruction, they rather used their knowledge for building more on their society. And because of there advance knowledge it looked like they had lived in other planets before coming to earth. At the ending of the snapshot it says “ finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying” which makes me think that although the old ones have traveled and built many cities in different places one spot was never enough so they had to keep moving and building more.

Are We Alone?

As I walked towards the building which only continued to overwhelm me in size in which the architecture blew me away. As I entered the building, I noticed the Labyrinthine complexity structure the building had. The contours and proportions of the building seemed off to me but I dismissed it for a moment to marvel at the beautiful geometric symmetry some of the murals and sculptures contained. I have never seen anything like this, nor has any human ever capable of replicating what I was seeing. As I approached the light-debris filled echo chambers, both me and Danforth eyes gravitated towards the five-point we have been seeing. We started realizing that the connection to religion wasn’t the reasoning but something we didn’t want to believe. Upon inspecting the carvings, we realized the time frame in which the monstrous dead city lived in which man’s ancestors were merely primitive archaic mammals. It only meant one thing as both the thought left us frozen in time. We knew what we concluded would be hard to be taken seriously even with photographs that can only capture only an essence of what we encountered. We were not alone and I realized what must be stopped… the invasion of the Antarctic…..

The above monologue of Dyer simple shows his thought process as he is discovering the building and its insides which give him and his partner an insight to the date of the carvings of the sculpture and the city itself. The realization of the five-point not being associated with religion or any culture ideas leads him to believe in the far-fetched belief he shared of the aliens living long before the humans and how they functioned and lived as a society with the governmental and hunting process.