The multitude of underlying notions central to the all-encompassing human condition, as portrayed and delved into within a wide variety of literary and visual texts, are just as crucial to an exploration of humanity as the numerous vivid emotions and feelings they evoke. Love’s proclivity for overriding ordinary sane instincts, the nature of social connections or lack thereof amongst people in a community, and the persistent impacts of profoundly bitter regret are all particular concepts of the human condition regularly examined by authors of creative works. Through an examination of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Michael Leunig’s cartoon The Life You Lead, and Guy de Maupassant’s short story All Over, it is evident that the various fundamental interpretations of collective human existence are truly intertwined with their associated thoughts and attitudes.
No critical analysis of the instincts and desires innate to the human condition, as depicted by countless creative composers and universally contemplated by individuals within society, would be complete without a consideration of love both as a concept of humanity and in terms of its accompanying emotive effects. The undeniable romantic inclinations attributed to fellow human beings have been presented throughout time from a multitude of varying perspectives, with the common ubiquitous implication that love’s sheer power can invalidate all rational human tendencies and lead to certain fundamentally correlating emotional consequences. Such evocative impacts are evidenced in T.S Eliot’s The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock through a recurring motif in “There will be time, there will be time”, demonstrating Prufrock’s indecisive uncertainty as he procrasti...
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...tain aspects of humankind’s collective existence that are undoubtedly applicable across an almost endless array of situations and manifestations, destined to pertain to every single individual within society during at least some point in their lifetime. Particularly relevant facets of the human condition in this respect incorporate the sheer dominating irrationality of potent love, interpersonal social relationships between human beings as a framework upon which society is built, and the irrepressible tendency to ponder regretfully over one’s position as a result of significant decisions. A consideration of T.S. Eliot’s The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Leunig’s The Life You Lead, and Guy de Maupassant’s All Over conclusively imparts the notion that the aforementioned concepts of humanity are inextricably and directly linked to our accompanying emotional condition.
The Sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Love is Not All” demonstrates an unpleasant feeling about the knowledge of love with the impression to consider love as an unimportant element that is not worth dying for; the poem is a personal message addressing the intensity, importance, and transitory nature of love. The poet’s impression reflects her general point of view about love as portrayed in the title “Love is Not All.” However, the unfolding part of the poem reveals the sarcastic truth that love is important. The depiction of imagery in this poem insinuates a moaning and nagging experience; the negative and painful experience that people suffer because of an unimportant element that cannot supply the basic necessity of life: “Pinned down by pain and moaning for release / Or nagged by want past resolution’s power” (10-11).
Throughout the lives of most people on the planet, there comes a time when there may be a loss of love, hope or remembrance in our lives. These troublesome times in our lives can be the hardest things we go through. Without love or hope, what is there to live for? Some see that the loss of hope and love means the end, these people being pessimistic, while others can see that even though they feel at a loss of love and hope that one day again they will feel love and have that sense of hope, these people are optimistic. These feelings that all of us had, have been around since the dawn of many. Throughout the centuries, the expression of these feelings has made their ways into literature, novels, plays, poems, and recently movies. The qualities of love, hope, and remembrance can be seen in Emily Bronte’s and Thomas Hardy’s poems of “Remembrance” “Darkling Thrush” and “Ah, Are you Digging on my Grave?”
A common practice when faced with a difficult choice, self-examination, is the centerpiece of two popular poems: Gregory Corso’s Marriage and T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Both poems are dramatic monologues in which the speakers address the similar situations that they find themselves in. While the speaker of Eliot’s poem has a nervous and bashful approach in his attempts at romance, the hesitant postmodern speaker in Corso’s poem makes use of sarcasm to attack the institution of marriage. When these two monologues given by similar personas are analyzed together, the result is a dialogue which discusses two distinguishing views on the ideas of romance and love. Despite the similarities between these two poems, Corso and Eliot shared little in common.
..., the society begins to see love as a goal. Romantic love becomes a noble trait and just quest if one wishes to embark on it.
It is funny and yet tragic to see that no matter where an individual’s geographical location is or for the most part when in history the duration of their lifetime occurred, that they still can share with other tormented individuals the same pain, as a result of the same malignancies plaguing humanity for what seems to have been from the beginning. Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” all exhibit disgust for their societies, what is particularly interesting however, is that the subject of their complaints are almost identical in nature. This demonstrates how literature really does reflect the attitudes and tribulations the society and or culture endures from which it was written. The grievances that they feel to be of such importance as to base their literary works on are that of traditionalism and, the carnivorous nature of society. Different societies will inevitably produce different restrictive and consuming faces to these problems.
Ask the average American what the problems facing his country are, and you will get a battery of standard responses. Some people will say health care, others violent crime, and still others will say drugs. There will probably be some who complain of high taxes or express a need for gun control. Certainly, there is evidence to support the fact that these are all issues of great importance. However, these are only superficial, and there is a deeper problem that will not have a simple legislative solution. Americans have forgotten how to think critically. Hannah Arendt places great importance on living a contemplative life, and it is for this reason that her book, The Human Condition, is a worthwhile text. In it, she offers many insights as to what could help to make the American society better, and it is for this reason that she cannot be brushed aside.
Although I have been fortunate enough to have a father and mother who love me a great deal, I still think the world can be cruel and mean. But meaner than we think? Every day we hear of some new tragedy that she speaks of, “the woman who drowned her children, the man who shot first the babies in her arms and then his wife, the teenage boys who led the three-year-old away along the train track, the homeless family recovering from frostbite with their eyes glazed and indifferent while the doctor scowled over their shoulders” (159), but every day we also hear of the good things.
The two most pivotal parts from each of these books, Heart of Darkness, and Lord of Flies, are the two scenes that will be compared. The grove scene from Heart of Darkness is incredibly powerful and express much about the human condition. Similarly, the boar head scene in, Lord of Flies, is also very powerful and expresses similar things about the human condition. These books were both wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century, and like many other writers, Joseph Conrad, and William Golding both viewed the upcoming century with a pessimistic view. Both authors saw the human condition going downhill and fast. These stories both depict how they view the human condition then, and what they thought it would become. Three things that each scene portrays about the human condition are, everyone has evil in them, everyone will lose their innocence, and everyone is manipulative.
Despite these works being written over centuries apart, the authors correlation of the concepts of love were notable. Plato’s Symposium was composed of different views regarding their definitions of love, while Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” focuses on what a group of friends talk about on the topic of love. Both pieces contain groups of people discussing their ideologies and relatable experiences, which in the end emphasize the complexity and variety of this emotion. Even though these literary pieces were written over two thousand years apart, similarities could be found within them regarding the concepts of dying for love as well as acknowledging the different forms of love that exist.
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. ed. M. H. Abrams New York, London: Norton, 1993.
Some may say love is just an emotion while others may say it is a living and breathing creature. Songs and poems have been written about love for hundreds and thousands of years. Love has been around since the beginning of time, whether someone believes in the Big Bang or Adam and Eve. Without love, there wouldn’t be a world like it is known today. But with love, comes pain with it. Both William Shakespeare and Max Martin know and knew this. Both ingenious poets wrote love songs of pain and suffering as well as blossoming, newfound love. The eccentric ideal is both writers were born centuries apart. How could both know that love and pain work hand in hand when they were born 407 years apart? Love must never change then. Love survives and stays its original self through the hundreds and thousands of years it has been thriving. Though centuries apart, William Shakespeare and Max Martin share the same view on love whether i...
Does life ever seem pointless and discouraging? In Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus describes the correlation between Sisyphus’s fate and the human condition. In the selection, everyday is the same for Sisyphus. Sisyphus is condemned to rolling a rock up a mountain for eternity. Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus” forces one to contemplate Sisyphus’s fate, how it relates to the human condition, and how it makes the writer feel about her part in life.
Authors use poetry to creatively present attitudes and opinions. “A Man’s Requirements,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment” are two poems with distinct attitudes about love that contain different literary approaches. In both of the poems, love is addressed from a different perspective, producing the difference in expectation and presentation, but both suggest the women are subservient in the relationships.
Franz Kafka’s character Gregor Samsa and T.S. Eliot’s speaker J. Alfred Prufrock are perhaps two of the loneliest characters in literature. Both men lead lives of isolation, loneliness, and lost chances, and both die knowing that they have let their lives slip through their fingers, as sand slips through the neck of an hourglass. As F. Scott Fitzgerald so eloquently put it, “the loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly”. Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are both exceptional examples of such lonely moments. Both authors use characterization, imagery, and atmosphere to convey the discontentedness and lack of fulfillment in the life and death of both Samsa and Prufrock.
With full diction such as “violent and aggressive “and “feelings of exclusivity” he appeals to our deepest emotions for the sake of conveying the importance of humanism and the things we are able to feel. However, with feelings as options instead of something everyone has whether liked or not, society would overlook the importance of experiencing these emotions because of the invincibility we would have above the sense of heartbreak or grief. Although we would all love to skip the arduous times, enduring them is not only what makes us human, but also what makes us grow. We may not realize that feeling makes up society today, which is why the author reaches out at these emotions to show how Transhumanist views may make us feel better as individuals but as a whole, the social aspects of the world will