The Bluest Eye

"Then she stopped staring at the green chairs, at the delivery truck; she went to the movies instead. There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as a possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assess in it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scales one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. There at last were the darkened woods, the long roads, the river banks, the gentle knowing eyes. There the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches. There death was dead, and people made every gesture in a cloud of music. There the black-and white images came together, making a magnificent whole--all projected through the ray of light from above and beyond."

Silly girl, this does not happen to you, does it? My dad actually accused be of this a while ago, telling me I was lost in a fantasy world. Seeing that this accusation came from my dad, I immediately leapt into a defense without thinking about the possible truth in his words. I still don't think it's true, but maybe I should at least consider the possibility. As much as I revel in the depressing and the abstract , I've realized that many films I love are unrealistic. Amelie? Pure whimsy. Wes Anderson? Encased in his little hermetic world. But then there is a strain of the bleak and oppressive: Brazil, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Fat Girl. Perhaps the opposite is true of my father's words: cinema has aged and jaded me to the world.

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As for The Bluest Eye the novel, I think I've encounter one of the formative books of my reading. Yes, that's a little hyperbolic, especially considering I hated and promptly wiped it from my memory when I read it 2 years ago. Silly sophomore then. It's funny how I so wholly repudiate my past selves, always establishing my present person as the most superior. I also think I sound like a douchebag right now. It wasn't until Dan and Katie remarked on the stilted vocabulary that I realized how pretentiously I write. Ack.

So for more disjointed thoughts (or stream of consciousness as more literary types would call it), the irony of Crick lecturing us on black "funkiness" and "vitality" is rather. . . disconcerting. New England high school valedictorian, Harvard grad wants to teach us the black american experience of poverty? What? I have to say though, he's a very competent English teacher even if discourses on "funkiness" seem pretty hokey coming from Crick.