There is an ancient Chinese legend called the Time of the Ten Suns. The story describes the sons of the emperor of heaven, the ten sun crows that were each responsible for lighting up the world, alternating days. Until one day, all nine crows rebelled and flew out on the same day, burning the world to a cinder and leaving humans on scraps of uncharred ground. The emperor of heaven enlisted the help of Hou Yi, an immortal, respected archer with unmatched skill, to scare the crows back into obedience. However, when he saw the devastation, he felt it would not be just to allow the crows to live and so shot down all but one. The emperor, enraged, banished Hou Yi, turning him and his wife mortal. Regardless of his plight, Hou Yi served the humans to the best of his ability, slaying monsters and corrupt officials until he aged greatly. Desperate to survive, to regain his immortality, he sought and found two elixirs of life for him and his wife. Unfortunately, his wife took both elixirs and ascended without him. Insane with fury, Hou Yi turned upon and rained vengeance and tyranny upon the earth he once …show more content…
However, there are many individuals in the past century who were willing or have indeed sacrificed everything for doing what they believed was right. As detailed in the movie “Schindler’s List” by Steven Spielberg, Oskar Schindler was a member of the Nazi party during the Holocaust who risked his life and sacrificed his livelihood in the rescue of over 1,200 Jews from concentration camps. He purchased and acquired several ammunition and enamelware factories whereupon he transported Jews he purchased from the camps in order to rescue them liquidation (1994). The full version of the aforementioned article by PBS describes Chiune Sugihara a foreign ambassador for the Japanese government who rescued Jews in his own way during
Good morning/ Afternoon Teacher I am Rachel Perkins And I was asked by The Australian Film Institute to be here to today to talk about my musical. My musical One Night The Moon which was the winner of the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Cinematography in a Non-Feature Film in 2001. I am also here to talk about how distinctive voices are used to show the experiences of others. The voices of Albert and Jim are two characters that give us two different perspectives this is due to their views. Albert one of the characters in my film is an Aboriginal character played by Kenton Pell who is hired by the police as a tracker. Albert is a very deeply spiritual person this gave him a spiritual voice throughout the play but when he get 's kick off the land and banned from the search the gets frustrated which gave him this really emotional voice. This event has a greater meaning which I will elaborate on later and now Onto Jim. Jim is your 1930s white Australian that owns a farm and is going through tough times because of the Great depression. Jim does not allow Albert to find his daughter, This is due to his racist and prejudiced views of black Australians. Jim has an authorial voice because he see’s himself as inferior. Near to the end of
Starting in 1939 during the Holocaust, many Jews were deported to concentration camps by the Nazis where they will meet their end, but how did some of them survive? Even though most of them died, some lives were saved by the very few people with moral courage. One of the people with moral courage was Carl Lutz. Moral courage is the actions a person takes because of his/her belief of what is right or wrong, even though it may risk his/her life. Lutz was born in Switzerland in 1895 and he emigrated to the United States at the age of 18. During more than 20 years of temporarily staying in the United States, he worked at the Swiss Legislation in Washington and became chancellor of Swiss Consulates in Philadelphia. These events lead him to be appointed as Swiss vice-consul in Budapest, Hungary. During his life as a Swiss vice-consul, he decided to save the Jews because of his belief. By the time of his death in Bern, Switzerland in 1975, Lutz earned the title of Righteous Among the Nations
There are many heroic individuals in history that have shown greatness during a time of suffering ,as well as remorse when greatness is needed, but one individual stood out to me above them all. He served as a hero among all he knew and all who knew him. This individual, Simon Wiesenthal, deserves praise for his dedication to his heroic work tracking and prosecuting Nazi war criminals that caused thousands of Jews, Gypsies, Poles and other victims of the Holocaust to suffer and perish.
How much are you willing to sacrifice for another? Whether they are a family member or a complete stranger. In the novel The Kite Runner Baba was was willing to risk his life when he had stood up and was trying to stop the Russian soldier from rape the young woman as payment for letting them pass through one of the checkpoints. Then there had been Amir it was when he had suffered extreme injuries, nearly losing his life when he had fought Assef, so that he could save Sohrab for the abuse he was suffering from the Taliban. Both Character Baba and Amir were willing to sacrifice themselves for another person, regardless of who they were. Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, teaches the reader sacrificing your life can lead to another person’s happiness through Baba saving the woman from the Russian soldier and Amir fighting Assef.
Khaled Hosseini, author of A Thousand Splendid Suns, is indisputably a master narrator. His refreshingly distinctive style is rampant throughout the work, as he integrates diverse character perspectives as well as verb tenses to form a temperament of storytelling that is quite inimitably his own. In his novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, he explores the intertwining lives of two drastically different Afghani women, Lailia and Mariam, who come together in a surprising twist of fate during the Soviet takeover and Taliban rule. After returning to his native Afghanistan to observe the nation’s current state amidst decades of mayhem, Hosseini wrote the novel with a specific fiery emotion to communicate a chilling, yet historically accurate account of why his family was forced to flee the country years ago.
“Where the rest of us see a stranger, a [hero] sees a fellow human being."- Samuel Oliner. Samuel Oliner was a jew living in a town in poland. One day Nazis came to his town and gathered them in trucks and took them to the forest and killed all of them. Samuel hid in different farms and barns. Oliner eventually left his hiding place and headed into the countryside. After three nights sleeping rough he knocked on the door of a Catholic woman, Balwina Piecuch, who had known his family before the war. At great risk to herself and her family, she took him in, helped him create a false identity and hid him from the Gestapo. Balwina Piecuch is a real hero because she risked her life for someone she didn’t even know without even
Should you risk everything you have to help others? Everyone agrees that many Jews were killed during WWII, but some say that people should not have helped them, while others believed that they should have.
An example of this that is related to my life is how my mother had a choice: either take care of me, specifically be my mother, but lose a great deal of her opportunities or say, “I’m not their real mother, I don’t have an obligation to raise them.” but instead, she said, “I love these children and I only want the best for them. Also, I believe it is in the best interest of the children that they have a mother to raise them up to be kind people in this chaotic world.” Her decision lead to several years sacrificed, which I find quite touching the heart; therefore, I could only try to be the best I can be while remaining grateful at the same time being the source of her pride. The characters in “The Gift of the Magi” sacrificed something that is important to them to sell it for money to buy the person they love a gift that would be important to
As Clarice Lispector was writing what would become her last literary creation, The Hour of the Star, little did she know that while her body was plagued with the devastations of cancer, her mental struggle for peace and grace in death would inspire her most renowned novel. Perhaps it is because of those circumstances, she created a novel with intuitive reflections on both life and death, as seen through the life of the main character, Macabea. The story is narrated by Rodrigo S.M., and although Rodrigo attempts to maintain a neutral stance, he is often conflicted by his own perceptions and feelings. At the book’s commencement Rodrigo spends quite some time explaining that while the story is mainly about a woman, having the book narrated by a female would weaken the richness of content. He explains that a woman is incapable of clearly emphasizing the harshness of reality; that she is too emotional and attempting to explain the life of a wretched girl would be hard because her emotions would not allow an unbiased depiction of the cruelties of life. Macabea is introduced in the novel as a poor girl who does what she must to survive in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. She is, Rodrigo remarks, nothing out of the ordinary. Physically there is nothing about Macabea which sets her apart from the other countless street rascals who live hand to mouth. He then provides readers with some of her early life history, including how she almost died at birth because of rickets, and how both her parents succumbed to typhoid fever when she was a toddler. Finally after their death Macabea was forced to move in with her aunt, who too eventually passed away, but not before procuring the child a job to support herself. In the course of the novel the popular culture, though vague and metaphorical at times, affects Macabea and the secondary characters personalities and actions.
Women are often portrayed in stories and tales as the Damsel in Distress. We are the ones waiting in our flowing gowns for the knight to come and carry us away on the back of his white horse. In a Thousand Splendid Suns it is the women who are the warrior princesses, the ones enduring so much. It is the strength of a woman and how they deal with the human capacity for evil that jumps out as the themes of this story. A Thousand Splendid Suns shows the perspective of two women, in which they live their lives both very differently but both show the inner strength of being a woman. It is most definitely not the easiest task of being a woman in Afghanistan, where men have so much power and authority. Both these women stories’ are being told during three decades of anti-Soviet jihad, civil war and Taliban tyranny. Mariam and Laila become allies in a battle with their brutal husband, many miscarriages, mothering a daughter where women are not welcomed, dealing with many deaths of loved ones and somehow showing the resilience of being a woman.
In World War II, the German Nazi Regime, led by Adolf Hitler, killed millions of Jewish people living in Europe. There goal was to get rid of all the Jews to make the world “better.” To do this, they tortured, brutalized, captured, and enslaved the Jews through concentration camps, death marches, death trains, and genocide. During the Holocaust, five distinguished people risked their livelihood, families, jobs, careers, and lives to help the Jews. These were the Righteous Gentiles. One Righteous Gentile who stood out from the others was Sempo Sugihara. Sempo Sugihara was a Japanese Consul General who was stationed to work in Kaunas, Lithuania, in the beginning of the Nazi occupation in the 1940’s (Greene Ron). He found that the Jews living in Lithuania were perplexed and somewhat unknowing of what was happening to the other Jews and to what extent the brutality of the ongoing events where (Greene). Aware of the Nazi invasion and occupation, he intervened to save over ...
Though his experiences in the concentration camps, Elie Wiesel has developed the belief that everyone should be an upstander and not stand silently as people are hurt. This can be seen in his Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance speech years after the end of the Holocaust and the publishing of Night, “that the world did know and
Did you know that the sun’s core can reach about 15 million degrees Celsius? This bright star has many significant happenings. These interesting occurrences include sunspots, solar winds, coronal mass ejections, and solar flares. Sunspots are cool, dark-colored regions of the photosphere related to a shifting magnetic field inside the sun. However, sunspots are only dark in our perspective. A sunspot removed from the bright background of the Sun would glow brightly. Solar wind is the radiation of heat and a steady stream of charged particles. The wind blows about 450 kilometers a second throughout the solar system. Also, the Aurora Borealis occurs when highly charged particles from the sun's atmosphere move into the Earth's atmosphere via solar wind. Occasionally, particles will burst from the sun in a solar flare, which can disrupt satellite communications and knock out power on Earth. The flares are as powerful as millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding at the same time! Coronal mass ejections are huge bubbles of gas braided with magnetic field lines that are ejected from the Sun over the course of several hours. Coronal mass ejections are known to be formed by explosive reconfigurations of solar magnetic fields through the process of magnetic reconnection, however its exact formation mechanism is not yet understood.
In conclusion, the mythical aspects of earlier Chinese civilizations still play a crucial role in today’s society. Although the beliefs are not heavily believed, it is still important to understand the symbiotic message each mythical creature portrays. The Chinese myths are so far stretched and detailed, comparing to the great mythical schemes as those of the Greeks. By exploring the nature of the deities and the effects on the religion, the complexity of the myths are beyond legendary, speaking volumes to the foundation of China.
“The Sun Rising” by John Donne is an aubade all about two lovers getting woken up by the sun when all they want to do is lay in bed all day. The entire poem is the speaker, presumably Donne himself, is talking to the sun and telling him to go away. This poem is broken into three stanzas with a rhyme scheme of ABBACDCDEE. Each of those stanzas represents what Donne is telling the sun to do, which is, to go away, I am stronger than you, and that he and his lover are the center of the world. He uses diction all throughout the poem to emphasize that the sun is not welcome in waking him and is lover and throughout all three stanzas to make his three points and to give the overall points of the poem. There are many metaphors used all through the poem and one overall metaphor.