Big I, Eye, Aye.

WARNING: Following content is/has

• tirelessly naive and hopeful
• written personally (uses I, we, etc.)
• enthuisastic
• only 6paragraphs (and not in properTREEREEREEC form)I need to get it out there so I can step back and tone it down.

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               The three greatest humans who have ever or never lived, have no names for me. To tie down that title to one person, one face, one identity is too great a task for my Taurus-born-Gemini mind. The three best people to have lived, or never lived, are nameless characters. Those who have been, and those who will be. And mostly, those who bring life and truth. These three people expose humanity for all it’s ugliness. To bring man’s folly and triumph to light, and thus truth to light is a gift to everyone. My choices 
do not do the following, they embody it.

              The first is the writer. To capture life and put it on paper was man’s greatest achievement. A writer can catch the philosophical churning of a mind, the swift rising of a chest during a moment of passion or the full-blooded flush of rage. They can take these emotions, settings, and characters into a person’s mind and enable a reader to live as if they were there. It is great that we are able to escape as fully as we are able in a story, and that we may glean strength from characters as a cat gleans heat from a patch of sun. A writer is not a writer of just letters. A writer wrangles the soul and harnesses it to do their bidding, if only for a short while. Whether the writer is a published author or a closet scribbler is inconsequential to me. The brave undertaking of the act of creating art is enough to make them an admirable person in my eyes. So I name the writer one of the three greatest humans to live.

               The next greatest person is a person that will be in 15, 20 or 30 years from now. I think they will be the greatest because of what they will have to face, and in turn what they will do. Today’s world is brimming with problems, especially when one considers new global dilemmas such as the energy crisis, animal extinction, and exploding human populations. A future person will have to face these. Through my thick naivete and optimism, I know that some end will come, but I believe it won’t be an entire tragedy. Disaster will strike, maybe there will be deaths, famine, war. That the world will be changed is a fact. But through that sometimes comes profound understanding. The human ability to find love and light in times of tragedy is astounding. I think that because the possible tragedy is so enormous the findings will in turn be on an even larger scale. In short, a future person will fail. But they will tumble blazing with truths. In the very least, they will blaze with humanity – something which seems to be sorely lacking in today’s world.

                  The third person of my choice bends the image of a ‘greatest person’. They are not great, per se, but greatly influential. This person is the objector of change and acceptance. These are the religious extremists, the traditionalists, and the scared little people. I will not include the infamous (the Crusades, Hitler, etc.), because at a certain point human suffering is entirely needless and cruel and no positivity that may be gathered from the tragedy in retrospect outweighs the pain the victims were put through. I include the small objectors who steadfastly cling to the mast of their ever quicker sinking ship, serving as a necessary kick in the pants of society. 

                   Without conflict we would lack the fuel of revolutions. Revolutions not as an overthrowing of government, but an overthrow of prejudice and misconceptions. Revolutions need, essentially, passion. Passion in the form of anger, despair or hope. If there was no opposition, what would there be to lose? There would be passion, but the quantity and quality would reduce. Without these ‘great people’, we would have no foe to fight. The edges of our battles would become unfocused and slowly our battle against ignorance, cruelty, greed would become undefined, diluted. In 1984, Big Brother held meetings centered on intense emotion against the ‘enemies’ of the moment. Without these meetings, would 1984’s society function properly? No, for there would be no drive ((justification?)). Our situation need not be so extreme, no government-induced convulsions are needed, but our society is a dystopia as well. Without some aim, revolution will flounder, and necessary changes will never be made.

                   Let me ask any of my blog visitors three questions. One, has a piece of writing affected your life, significantly or otherwise? Two, did the generations before Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Susan B. Anthony dream for them? And finally, would you play hockey against an empty net? It has, I hope, and I would not. This, simply, is why these three figures are the greatest people who have ever (or never) lived.
 

My thesis statement for Kafka’s The Trial is:

The Trial progresses from existentialism to nihilism. While Josef K. is on trial, the novel reflects or is anchored in existentialism. This changes in the last portion of the book, where it is then anchored in nihilism.

Existentialism
I’ve found slightly different definitions of existentialism, which annoyed me.
From my go-to site (wikipedia):  
“Existentialism is a philosophical movement that posits that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to deities or authorities creating it for them. It emerged as a movement in twentieth-century literature and philosophy, though it had forerunners in earlier centuries. Existentialism generally postulates that the absence of a transcendent force (such as God) means that the individual is entirely free, and, therefore, ultimately responsible. It is up to humans to create an ethos of personal responsibility outside any branded belief system. In existentialist views, personal articulation of being is the only way to rise above humanity’s absurd condition of much suffering and inevitable death.”
Whereas this site http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/lit/chap10.htm defines it as:
“A philosophical movement embracing the view that the suffering individual must create meaning in an unknowable, chaotic, and seemingly empty universe.”

Nihilism
From Merriam-Webster.com (which always reminded me of great-aunts, don’t you agree?):
“-a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless
 -a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths”
From wiki again:
“a philosophical position which argues that Being, especially past and current human existence, is without objective meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. Nihilists generally assert some or all of the following:

• there is no reasonable proof of the existence of a higher ruler or creator,
• a “true morality” does not exist, and
• objective secular ethics are impossible; therefore, life has, in a sense, no truth, and no action is objectively preferable to any other. “

I know, what a shinyhappy essay this is going to be!

The Trial was a strange book… I didn’t think much of it while I was reading it, but once I was finished I really enjoyed it. And I finally appreciated how depressing it was.