Good and evil
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Casey Latocha's evil problem
latocha_4week.rtf
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How will memory save humanity?
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Was the Holocaust an aberration of human nature or the result of it?
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I suggested at the beginning of the unit that literature is the solution to the problem of evil. Would Wiesel agree with me?
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Ask your own question and post it to the burning questions wall.
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Pick one not your own and answer it.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
banal: dull and unoriginal; boringly ordinary and lacking in originality
"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted or sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the point of view of our legal institutions and our moral standards of judgment, this normality was more terrifying than all the atrocities put together."
Hap
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? —
Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
Thomas Hardy
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Spring and Fall:
to a Young Child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Gerard Manley Hopkins |
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Stars
Stars, I have seen them fall
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault;
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt.
A.E. Housman
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AUTO WRECK
Karl Shapiro
Its quick soft silver bell beating, beating
And down the dark one ruby flare
Pulsing out red light like an artery,
The ambulance at top speed floating down
Past beacons and illuminated clocks
Wings in a heavy curve, dips down,
And brakes speed, entering the crowd.
The doors leap open, emptying light;
Stretchers are laid out, the mangled lifted
And stowed into the little hospital.
Then the bell, breaking the hush, tolls once,
And the ambulance with its terrible cargo
Rocking, slightly rocking, moves away,
As the doors, an afterthought, are closed.
We are deranged, walking among the cops
Who sweep glass and are large and composed.
One is still making notes under the light.
One with a bucket douches ponds of blood
Into the street and gutter.
One hangs lanterns on the wrecks that cling,
Empty husks of locusts, to iron poles.
Our throats were tight as tourniquets,
Our feet were bound with splints, but now,
Like convalescents intimate and gauche,
We speak through sickly smiles and warn
With the stubborn saw of common sense,
The grim joke and the banal resolution.
The traffic moves around with care,
But we remain, touching a wound
That opens to our richest horror.
Already old, the question, Who shall die?
Becomes unspoken, Who is innocent?
For death in war is done by hands;
Suicide has cause and stillbirth, logic;
And cancer, simple as a flower, blooms.
But this invites the occult mind,
Cancels our physics with a sneer,
And spatters all we knew of dénouement
Across the expedient and wicked stones.
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A relative problem
Professor Quesay was very pleased with his research on a recently discovered community. One family had invited him to a special dinner in honour of Grandfather Alloi’s seventieth birthday—and as that was a mark of great respect he said he would be honoured to go. Grandfather Alloi, together with his slightly younger wife, Grandma Alloi, had been his main oral history source for many fascinating accounts of the traditions of the society. These people were descendants of an ancient Greek society who had left their homes in Mesopotamia to set themselves up on a remote peninsula in the Americas. The venerable—but still very sprightly—old man had seemed particularly keen to tell someone all he knew.
The dinner was an elaborate affair. During the second introductory course of dried fish and asparagus roots, Professor Quesay noticed that the guest of honour, Grandfather Alloi, was not there. Grandma Alloi and the other guests were most surprised at the question. Surely the learned Professor had realised, the dinner was in honour of the seventieth birthday of Grandfather Alloi? And he was familiar with the customs of the Alloi?
‘Yes, yes,’ said Quesay, embarrassed at appearing ignorant. But he still couldn’t see Grandfather Alloi. And what was it that the Alloi had had as their particular custom for the old?
Just then the main course arrives. It is a large steaming soup tureen with bits of meat floating in it. And around the tureen are what looks like… Grandfather Alloi’s spectacles! Just then Quesay remembers the traditional habits of the Alloi. It is one that he has had many an interesting debate at college defending. The Alloi believe that when one’s parents reach seventy years of age, it is the duty of the children to kill them. And as a mark of respect, the family eat the deceased!
Suddenly Professor Quesay doesn’t feel so good. He has lost his appetite. However, he knows that not to eat the special dish would cause great offence. It is, indeed, considered to put a curse on the soul of the departed, and to prevent them going to the next world. In the view of the Alloi, there is no greater wickedness.
What should the professor do?
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