Hando
"Is it on?"
"Yes, Mr....ah..."
"Hando, you can just call me that."
"Of course, Hando. Well, just start whenever you’re ready."
"I hate being recorded, but we might as well get it over with. I am getting a check for this, right?"
"Yes sir. Your story will be a great contribution to the civilization of Zyemlya and a wonderful edition to our magazine. It really is quite remarkable after all."
"Yeah, well, whatever. As long as I get my check. Social Security just doesn’t cut it these days. Seems if my story was so remarkable, this ungrateful generation wouldn’t have stuck me in this home, after all I’ve done."
"Most have forgotten. Maybe you’ll get the respect you deserve after your story is published."
"Maybe. Just maybe."
"What exactly is it you did?"
"Well, I’ll get to it. You want something to eat? Nothing but hospital food, but what can you do?"
"No thank you."
"Suit yourself. Let’s see, where to begin. We obviously won the Conflict, since we’re here talking to each other right now. After that victory, there were lots of questions about what to do now. There were only about 4 or 5 hundred of us left. Thousands had died off, most of the population of Zyemlya. They resisted the change. Most of them still couldn’t believe what was going on, even after all that happened. They didn’t actually die; it was more that they faded out with the Being. We all lost loved ones; I lost a sister and a groundhog, but we knew it was necessary to destroy the Being.
"We had never had our own world before, our own will, our own lives. The Being had made sure of that. We never really knew exactly what it was, or where it came from, or if it even was an "it." We just knew it was there, and what it was doing.
"I’ll take credit for that one though. That was a long time ago, and me with my slipshod memory, I don’t know how well I can recount it all. Now you young whippersnappers come in here and want to scoop out my brains to put in your magazine. The way things work around here, this will probably turn into a half page section in some fifth grader’s textbook.
"I guess I’ll start with the dreams. I hadn’t always had them; they started when I was about 16.
life, and in it he attempts to explain that which has evaded and mystified even
...f the major Optimism of the Jews is that they could not comprehend the killing of all their people. They see it as a task that contains no possible way to be fulfilled. They justify it by saying “Was he going to wipe out a whole people? Could he exterminate a population scattered throughout so many countries? So many millions! What methods could he use?” (6). The answer to their question is yes but there is many chances to escape this fate, although the Jews of Sighet deny it.
“All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self- contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.” (Page 180, Paragraph 1, ll 2- 7).
Not only is human connection vital to live a happy and joyful life, but it is necessary to create a legacy, and thus live on through others. But in order to do this, one must first overcome their ego and their sense of self. Once all of the “I” thoughts are gone, one can relate, but fully understand, the higher powers as well as other human beings around us. However, it is important to accept that we may never fully understand the driving force of this universe. While it can be experienced, and we can briefly get an idea of what it is, it is impossible to define these concepts in words, because we don’t have a language that transcends what we can understand. And though many recognize that these concepts could never be fully understood by the human brain, determined minds continue to ask questions that will never have an answer, “pushing their minds to the limits of what we can know” (Armstrong,
“We’re going to print out copies of the books we have remembered over the years that we have stored, and share with the leftover survivors that we have been found.”
"Boy am I glad at least for that." I told them. "Though most would consider this situation rather bleak and dismal, I see it as a blessing."
around us. He argues that humans are naturally inclined to think of the world as if we are its
One of the aims of Being and Nothingness is to describe consciousness, or human subjectivity. Sartre distinguishes two different modes of consciousness in order to accurately describe human subjectivity. These two modes are being-for-itself and being-for-others. Being-for-itself refers to a transcendent conscious being (Oaklander, 238). Transcendence is the antithesis of facticity. I will describe facticity first, in order to make the concept of transcendence more tractable. Facticity denotes the concrete details of the subject’s being including past decisions, plac...
Continually, there was a second question, when and where is matter? Our own mind can answer this, we find that our souls are what is important to our existence. All of the esteemed values and morals we seek to grasp, are in our own Spirit. nature isn’t formed around ourselves, but within ourselves. We have no bounds. We have the power to know all.. and see all, just as...
"In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, - no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."
...urvivors crawling towards me, clawing at my soul. The guilt of the world had been literally placed on my shoulders as I closed the book and reflected on the morbid events I had just read. As the sun set that night, I found no joy in its vastness and splendor, for I was still blinded by the sins of those before me. The sound of my tears crashing to the icy floor sang me to sleep. Just kidding. But seriously, here’s the rest. Upon reading of the narrators’ brief excerpt of his experience, I was overcome with empathy for both the victims and persecutors. The everlasting effect of the holocaust is not only among those who lost families÷, friends,
"Now, because it has only phenomenal knowledge for its object, this exposition seems not to be Science, free and self-moving in its own peculiar shape; yet from this standpoint it can be regarded as the path of the natural consciousness which presses forward to true knowledge; or as the way of the Soul which journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of the Spirit, and achieve finally, through a completed experience of itself, the awareness of what is really is in itself.
"It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the ...
Man must come out of his puny self, which is a jar, and become a well, which is a form of awakened consciousness, in order to reach the dimension of the sea which is his real self, his freedom. (41).
Heidegger proclaims that in the quest to enquire into Being itself, we must consider not-being equally as much. We must accept our future non-existence and recognize our distinctness and isolation during our death. Death can thus be taken as the “possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all”. This acknowledgement of the impossibly of our existence is a key step towards an authentic life. There will be a point in an individual’s life where the existence of all ordinary things will cease and this is the point, before acceptance of his mortality, when the individual feels a sense of alarm while imagining oneself suspended over a void. It is this recognition of nothing, that we raise the question of why there is something at all and thus lead us to the contemplation of