For Tai

"The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."



-Mark Twain

I started class (again) on Monday. I'm taking Young Adult Literature and for class, our teacher assigned everyone The Giver. It's a novel about a town that has evolved itself into a "utopia." The actually giver is a person in the town that holds all the memories that have ever existed. Sound familiar...? Anyone remember a certain man by the name of Socrates? He also believed that all memories live within us. However, I digress because this isn't what I want to write about...just yet. There was something else the teacher assigned. It was to look up Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory. I remember learning about Transactional Theory when I went to MSU. Basically it states that the value of a novel is in the reader, not in the text. If a book is never read then it doesn't contain value. Ergo, if a book is loved, even if it is the worst book in the world (cough, cough, Twilight)(yes Tai, I said Twilight) then it obviously has some kind of influence on its readers. Same scenario, different result; a book is written and it contains all of the world's answers, but nobody understands it (Finnegans Wake), this book, according to Rossenblatt, is worthless.

This is where I started thinking. And, just so everyone knows, this is what I'm thinking most of the time:

Anyways, I started thinking, "those bastards." Authors have been getting away with writing shit and selling it paperback because they know what the audience wants. The novel Moby Dick was hated, it was said to have had "bad English" when it was first written. Now it is one of the most important novels in the American cannon. I'm referencing Herman Melville because he is an example of an author who didn't write for the masses. Today, readers buy anything with fangs and boobs on the cover. Here's my example of a current novel's blurb:

"It wasn't exactly an ideal first day of college, Andrea had gotten lost on her walk to her first class. She tried a short cut, but found herself in a dark dank forest. Everywhere she looked there were golden cold eyes staring back at her. She thought it was her imagination, but when she started to run someone grabbed hard on her shoulder, swung her around, and bit into her neck. When she awoke she found herself in some sort of fantasy land where everyone was really really good looking. She came to find out that, even though they were evil, they were struggling to be good. Andrea, even with her better judgement, wanted to help the vampires on their quest for goodness. She chose the most attractive vampire and started a sexy, heated love affair. Even though he wanted to kill her, and he himself had been dead for hundreds of years, they found a way to live happily ever after. Then, she got her period......and she died."

I wouldn't be surprised if I just plagiarised a novel in the teen section of Barnes and Noble. If you're reading this and you don't agree with me that there is a lot of crap on the book shelves these days, I just wanted to say, don't hate the messenger, hate the author who convinced you their shitty book held anything valuable.

The Ocean

The Ocean



The ocean has its silent caves,



Deep quiet and alone,



Though there be fury on the waves,



Beneath them there is none,



The awful spirits of the deep



Hold their communion there,



And there are those for whom we weep,



The young, the bright, the fair.



Calmly the wearied seamen rest,



Beneath their own blue sea,



The ocean solitudes are blest,



For there is purity,



The Earth has guilt, the Earth has care,





Unquiet are its graves,



But peaceful sleep is ever there,



Beneath the dark blue waves.



By: Nathaniel Hawthorne







I came across this poem and it caught my interest. The ocean has always been seen as a mystery. There is a statistic that says less than 10% of the ocean has been explored and more than 90% of the ocean's inhabitants live in the unexplored areas. Sometimes I wonder why we strive to find other life forms on Mars when we have an entirely unknown world in our backyard.


Anywho, I enjoyed how Hawthorne described the ocean because it made me think of how and why the ocean is portrayed in literature. In most cases (the one's I remember) the ocean is seen as a vast question mark. It alludes to the grandeur of life. If we think of the novel, Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway, we have a perfect example of a man's life consumed by the ocean. The story starts out with a man who lives in the Caribbean and after his depression sets in, he becomes a traveling sailor. He travels to different islands and coastal towns, but he continually talks of how he is called by the sea. Hawthorne's poem and Hemingway's novel are the same story in two different forms of writing. Hemingway's character lived on the sea. It comforted him in a way human compatibility could not. Hawthorne describes the ocean as peaceful, a sort of serene that cannot be found on earth. Land, because it's inhabited, holds all the chaos that humans create. The ocean, because it's mostly untouched, stays innocent. Heminway's character felt the purity and peacefulness that Hawthorne describes.


His characters depression drove him to look for comfort in the most alien object possible. What Hemingway realizes is that the ocean has no care for the depressed. I believe that, although the ocean's cold personality doesn't seem like a shocker, I think it should. Besides Islands in the Sea there is so much literature written where characters are depressed standing next to the sea. It's so predominant, but I've never asked myself why. I believe that the feeling of unimportance we get while looking out onto the ocean is linked with the mystical quality of the ocean. It's that unknown, unintelligent, small feeling that humans have. We go through life only thinking of our needs, and being beside something so big, we can't help to feel very insignificant in the scheme of things.

The reason that people like Hawthorne find the ocean to be a symbol of everything good is that, besides the feeling of insignificance, it lets us know that there is so much more. The ocean is a metaphor for unobtainable knowledge, the idea of believing because we are forced to.