The Identical Difference

B:

A:
With every sentence you read in Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, you start thinking that you understand the novel less and less, and then the novel comes to a point in which you feel like you understand it more and more. As you try to understand this novel, you begin to realize that it’s all linked to real life. It changes, but stays the same. It’s hard to understand your purpose in life, but it’s easy as well. When you add a film like “Waking Life”, to a book like “Invisible Cities”; you are left with a mixture of doubt and security, because you are so sure that what they’re saying is true, and that they’re all right, but perhaps you didn’t catch the point. The main point in both of them is simple: Life is not always the same, and there is not just one possible way to look at life.

If we take a look at Invisible Cities, for example, we find a part where Khan feels like Marco Polo is describing the exact same city but in many different ways. As if Marco Polo was carefully dismantling the city and rearranging it in a completely different order. What Khan feels is completely accurate. Polo is, in fact, describing the exact same city. What this tells us is that the way in which we look at things may change things a lot. It works in the exact same way when we take a look at Waking Life. There are many parts in which the people who the protagonist encounters throughout his dream mention how life is not really the same all the time. For example, there’s a part in which there are two women speaking of how we are not the same people that we were seven years ago, because our cells completely regenerate and change, and we also change physically. In order to remember how we “were”, we have to make up a story to connect the “us” from the past and the “us” from the present. A story that ends up being fictional most of the times. So, are we really the same person? Are those memories really ours or someone else’s? It’s just like the cities, who may all be the same at the end, but they’re different cities because you evoke them with different thoughts.

In “Waking Life”, we are basically given a very long speech by many different characters about why life is different when seen from other points of view. One of the speeches that drew a great deal of my attention was one given by a chimpanzee. At first it seemed like it was funny, then it seemed weird, and then it ended up being so serious that you could forget the fact that the speaker was a chimpanzee. Ironically, he was talking about humans´ evolution, which at first does not seem like a very appropriate topic to be spoken of by a chimpanzee. However, once you realize that the meaning of the chimpanzee is not just the irony, but the message that it transmits, you understand really why it is that it is a chimpanzee giving the conference and not a human. After all, we all relate the chimpanzees to extremely primitive humans, and yet they are not so “primitive”. In fact, in many aspects chimpanzees can be much more “advanced” than us, and this is exactly what the man who appears right after the chimpanzee talks about. According to him, there is a much greater gap between regular humans and people like Freud or Nietzsche, than there is between regular humans and chimpanzees. This is telling us that we are much less “advanced” than these chimpanzees. The monkey giving the conference about human evolution speaks also about how human life could’ve been very different if we had taken other steps, and the chimpanzee himself is a living proof. It is because of steps we made that we’ve “progressed” from chimpanzee to humans. The picture that corresponds to this situation is picture (A), which shows the chimpanzee wearing a white robe and reading his speech, while the humans are watching the show. The chimpanzee is evidently seated above the humans, showing superiority, and I could note that throughout the whole scene, the chimpanzee stays well above the humans’ heads. We can also see the chimpanzee dressed and with glasses, while at least the humans on the picture have an apparent lack of clothing and of other signs of “development”, or “technology” that would usually be present. The link between the chimpanzee and the humans is imminent, since we often relate them to the origin of our evolution, but in this picture we are seen as the same species, as if there was absolutely no difference between the chimpanzee and the humans, and maybe there isn’t. Maybe they’re just like two cities that are described differently.

Image (B) shows the movie’s protagonist walking besides one of the many different characters that he encounters throughout his dream. They are right in front of a huge city with a purple sky, and are talking about human individuality. The woman right before this scene was talking about how she’d hate to be an ant, because they’re all just like the others, and they always obey what the rest of them do. A city may be the ant colony of humans. All of the residents of a city live equally, ignoring each other and yet working in unison to make the city prosper. Is the woman’s nightmare already true? Are we perhaps already like ants? There is no connection between this picture and “Invisible Cities”, except perhaps that the background of this screenshot is a city, and that they’re talking about how we may all be the same but no one has yet realized. Perhaps we really are the same already, and we just like to see each other in different ways. Or perhaps we are all different but would like to be the same as everybody else.

In short, the pint of both “Invisible Cities” and “Waking Life” is maybe just to make us think about similarities and differences. Because of that, I think that cities as individuals are not important in “Invisible Cities”, and that’s why I think that there aren’t any cities that stand out when you relate them to “Waking Life”. What really is important are the cities as a group, since these reflect the message that both the novel and the movie intend to communicate. There are many unsolvable mysteries in the world, and we might never know the correct answers to them, even if we think we do. Our point of view may dramatically change all our life, and we must be find or avoid the difference between what is the same and the similarities between what is different.

Smart Flu

A nightmare has been around in these past few months. The flu… Well, not any flu, it’s the swine flu, which was an epidemic sickness that shook and is shaking the world. It started in Mexico, God only knows why. Mexico, being amongst the top ten most visited destinations in the world, helped the sickness move around the world, and spread it first to France and US, which are also conveniently amongst the top ten most visited destinations in the world. What’s even more convenient is that traveling is done mostly on airplanes when it’s about crossing the seas. So it’s you breathing the same air as some other 200 randomly chosen people, which perhaps raises the chances of acquiring the sickness. The US, with its admirably efficient health system, is the second country with the most deaths and by far the country with the most confirmed cases, which could also be because it’s right next to the Mexican border. However, as Mexico City resumed its regular activity and classes were re-opened, the US confirmed more cases and the flu appeared in new countries. As Mexico goes back to its regular way of life, Colombia received two days ago the news of its first confirmed death, and Japan confirmed the virus was in Tokyo, coming from girls who were in New York for an MUN conference. Weren’t there CNG students there as well?

Changes...

MacBeth Scene

Our MacBeth scenes were more fun than I thought they would be, and although we had some mistakes, I think they turned out pretty good. At least they made us and the other class laugh at ourselves, and understand more deeply MacBeth, because we can say we were in the play. I had Malcolm's role at the ending scene, which earned me one of the longest speeches in the play, and although I tried hardly to memorize them, I forgot it all at the play since I was nervous, and I must admit that maybe I needed more practice. Our adaptation was supposed to be the Puente de Boyaca battle, and I'm not sure if everyone got it, but at least our costumes were kind of good, I'm not sure how the adaptation worked. I laughed a lot afterwards at myself, because I had written down part of my lines just in case I forgot them in the palm of my hand, and when I forgot them and glanced at my hand, the ink had spread all over my hand and I could no longer read anything. My team was fun, since even though we were not very organized and forced Ana to control us all every so often, we had fun doing it and planning it, or at least I did. I liked this activity, but because of how nervous I got, I'm not sure if I would like to do it again for now.

Swift's Changes

First of all, I must say that I sort of feel bad about my past blog because of what I read in this chapter...I had said that he doesn't describe the Lilliputian culture and ways of living, and this entire chapter explains how this weird kingdom lives. However it explains it with the absurdity of always. Their ways of living are "weird" because they don't match ours, but I think that Swift is trying to show how he thinks European countries should handle their laws and cultures. Maybe that's why he directs our attention to characteristic of these weird cultures that at first seem unimportant or weird, and doesn't talk much about things that we consider more normal and worth more talking. Gulliver may represent Swift, and his time spent in Lilliput makes a lot of changes, just like Swift wants to change the culture and the way of living, as well as the laws of Europe using that text. Swift mocks a lot of stuff from the European culture, or mankind in general. But he also suggests lots of changes, and I think what he wants is to promote those changes using his books, just like Gulliver's Travels.

Ridiculous to me but not to Swift

The more I read, the more ridiculous the book seems. Not because it's bad, but because Gulliver speaks in a very weird way. He exaggerates the events that don't deserve exaggeration, and speaks little of events that deserve further explanations. When he speaks about the war, he speaks as if it was long and terrible, even though it's a war started because of how to crack an egg open. Meanwhile, when he speaks about his invasions to the Blefuscudian port (which solved the massive war between the two countries) he says that he just walked over there and left carrying the whole fleet of ships. Of some interesting stuff, like the Blefuscudian and Lilliputan cultures, he just says that he "Won't trouble the reader with that", assuming that the reader is not very interested in that. I would've liked to hear more about the cultures of those countries, but yet he manages to keep going with the story without mentioning some important parts. (At least important if we want to read about the actual story, but maybe these events are not important to Swft, the writer, perhaps Swift doesn't intend us to see the actual story, but what the story signifies). Even though it appears at first as if he is leaving out very important parts of the novel, we can begin to see the events to which he is directing us to, the ones that he really cares about. He cares about the events that seem less important.

Absurd Wars

To my understanding, the incredibly long and terrible war between Lilliput and Blefuscu started because a Lilliputan king cut his finger when he opened an egg in a certain way, and Blefuscans say that the correct way to open an egg is the way in which the king of Lilliput cut himself. If I indeed understood correctly, this is most likely one of the most ridiculous wars I have ever heard of. It reminds me of world war one, which was caused only by nationalism, which can also be called rivalry between countries. The incident that ignited the tension that spread across Europe in the 1910's was very stupid, just like the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu. The war started between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, because an importan Austria-Hungarian was murdered in Sarajevo. That didn't even have any relationship with the Serbian government, but the tension was so big that this was enough. Just like the Lilliputan king's accident with the egg, it was absurd, and absurdity is one of satire's elements, which begins to show us how Gulliver's Travels can be a satirical novel. I'm not sure what the author's mocking with this. Probably he's just mocking human wars, because I'm sure there were stupid wars before world war one, at the time when Gulliver's Travels was written, since war itself is stupid.

Lilliput and Europe...not as different.

I think this story is a little fake, and this sound extremely dumb when you're talking about a story concerning 6-inch tall people who live in an island on the south atlantic, but the culture of the Lilliputans is almost exactly the same as the Europeans' culturfe even though they haven't ever had contact with any other civilization except for maybe the mentioned island of Blefuscu, so basically the only thing that differs between Gulliver and the Lilliputans is their height and their language, because they use European-style clothes, as described in the text, as well as horses to carry their carriages, (tiny horses, but horses ), even though horses come from Europe. The king's ruling system also seems to resemble Europe's monarchies, especially Great Britain's, since they have one of the oldest monarchies in the world. So, it's almost impossible to develop an almost identical culture without having had contact with it ever. This may be a message from the author saying that perhaps we don't defer as much as we think we do, but I don't think so. I think the author's just under great influence from Great Britain's culture, so he's incapable of imagining a different culture, or he's trying to tell us something or mock something, but I can't find what it is.

Scared? Really?

As I read the first part of Gulliver's travels I noticed that it all goes on pretty fast, and the description is very simple, but what surprised me most and almost made me laugh, was how little enthusiastic Gulliver is with his descriptions of the Liliputians. There is no use of exclamation marks at all, which would've helped give emotion to the reading. He says it as if it was absolutely normal to encounter a whole country of six-inch tall people, which to me is funny.
"I was so completely thrilled and amused."...Really? If at least he used more exclamation marks or described his "amusement" more, then maybe the reader would think he really was amused, but a description like that is not very convincing. I'm not sure what the author means with that structure, but maybe he's trying to tell us that we are not sufficiently excited with our discoveries, and that we should enjoy them more, or is it irony? Saying that he's completely excited in the least exciting way possible?

Obama's Challenge

After I read The Economy is Still at the Brink, an op-ed article written by a couple of ex-workers of Wall Street (Sandy Lewis and William Cohen), I realized that even though the United States and world's financial crisis is not because of Obama's financial policies, he faces the challenge of being forced to restore the economy to how it was before he became president, because otherwise his name will be remembered as the president who crashed the US's economy. That's just about everything the American people are expecting him to do with his presidential period, and if he doesn't manage to do it, the once extremely popular president may be stigmatized as one of the worst presidents in history, not because he really is bad, but because he happened to have the misfortune of ruling during this period of time, just like George Bush had the misfortune of ruling during the World Trade Center attacks, which forced him to invade Iraq and earned him an image of a "war-hungry" president. Obama has clearly shown the world that his economic policies to get the United States out of the crisis are working up to now, but some people, like Lewis and Cohen, are still saying that he's doing a bad job, even though the stock market has still stabilized. I think and have heard that the worst part of the crisis has already passed, and that now it's just going to get better, and although I do not think that Obama will be able to completely fix this mess in four years only, I think he will give the economy the push to recovery so that it will fullfill its recovery after Obama's ruling period. Although he faces a huge challenge, he could also be remembered as the president who saved the US from the 2008's great recession. As they say, "A crisis can also be the moment of greatest opportunity".

The Red Balloon

The red balloon must be extremely symbolic, and it’s clearly very abstract. You can interpret it in many different ways. The red balloon is in the center of the picture, making it the most important. It is also accompanied by a very light background, which makes it different to the rest of the figures, and it’s the only figure in the picture that does not use straight lines, along with a tree to the left border of the picture, or at least what seems to be a tree. If it weren’t for the balloon and the “tree”, the painting would almost have no sense, which is interesting, because the only two different figures are the only two that actually have some significance, or at least an obvious significance. Thanks to the balloon and the tree, what I see in the painting is a city, built over a hill and with a red balloon hovering over it. But the red balloon and the tree are not everything, also at first impression they appear to be. At the right, a series of squares of different sizes and colors are stacked over each other but in a very interesting way, because only their corners touch each other, making them seem as if they were excluding each other. So what we see is a series of unrelated objects making a single picture, and a picture that actually makes sense, even though all the elements in it have absolutely no relation with the rest, which may signify that everything we do, or everything that is, has an affect over the rest of the world, and the rest of the universe.

Judas?

Although this is not the famous "The last supper" by Leonardo daVinci, it's some other piece by another artist, although I was unable to found the artist's name. All the peoplein the picture look bored, although it may just be sadness, because Jesus is informing them that he will soon die. However, Jesus is standing taller than them all, and his face doesn't show sadness at all. His height symbolizes higher power than all of them, however there is a man who draws more attention than Jesus himself, since he is right at the middle of the table, and is not looking anywhere but at the floor. Meanwhile jesus is pointing at this strange man with his hand, and although at first sight everyone's sight is apparently directed at Jesus, if you stare closer enough, the sights are actually pointed at this strange man. Jesus is the only one looking towards the viewer, making him seem as if he is the only one who knows that he is being watched. He knows what is happening, and this symbolizes that at that time he was also the only one who knew what was really happening and what would happen. All the other men appear to be staring with suspicion at the strange man, who can be Judas perhaps, and therefore, they were all suspecting of him, but only Jesus knows that he was the one that would betray him.

A better future?

The end of the book is very symbolic. Throughout the whole novel, Willhelm sort of feels suffocated and trapped. The author even makes you feel sort of trapped yourself, and i felt a lot of pity for Willhelm many times. Willhelm sort of drowns after learning that he has no support from his wife, has no relationship with his kids or with his father, and has absolutely no money. He also misses his lost love with Olive. As he begins torealize that he is sort of hopeless and that he really needs to start again, he even has difficulty breathing, and starts to drown. Then, the river of people carries him along and takes him to an unknown person's funeral, and he starts weeping even though he never knew the person. The riverof people represents all his burdens, and he is drowning in those burdens, and those burdens lead him to realize that he feels completely alone, as if he were dead, and it's then when he begins to weep even though he doesn't know the guy who's being wept. This is sort of the explosion of all the burdens he has throughout the book. The book begins by introducing all the probloems Willhelm has and it ends by them getting even worse, but with Willhelm realizing that he needs a new beginning. You just hope that Willhelm's future will get better, because it apparently can't get any worse. It would be fun if the author showed this future.

Vanished

It is sad how people fall for traps that guarantee easy money. I am sure that we'd probably all fall if we actually were convinced that it would work. Willhelm fell because he liked Tamkin, although he didn't quite trust him. It is also sad how there are people who are willing to steal somebody else's money so that they can do whatever they want to. It reminds me of DMG, which appeared to work for a while, and then it was closed by the government because of other pyramid-like systems that had scammed people out of their money in other parts of the country, like Putumayo. People would hand in all their money (Including their sold homes and cars) because they thought that they would win easy money, but then the next day, they would go to claim their money doubled and they would find messages saying things like "Las únicas piramides que no se van son las de Egipto", or "Feliz Navidad", since this all happened around christmas. Then no one would be there, and the savings of years, especially the savings of poor people would've vanished. It is incredible that someone is mean enough to dothis, but mostly, it's the perople's fault because they thought that easy money would just come like that, and president Uribe said later "Easy money dissapears as easily as it came". That's why, although I feel pity for Willhelm, I think it was in part his own fault.

Willhelm's mysterious past

Past events leave a permanent mark on all of us. Absoulutely everything. Even things we don't remember. This book takes place in very little time, but if there's something that we can realize quickly is that Willhelm had a happy past life, and he lost it because of some stupid mistake. He's notproud of his life, but he does talk about some woman named Margaret all the time and about his kids. It would be interesting if the story of Willhelm's past was told, however it's also interesting to imagine what happened. They got divorced, which is obvious, but why? And why did Willhelm go to NYC after the divorce instead of at least staying in the same city as his children's? He does miss them a lot, so I don't understand why he left them. Willhelm's father tells him earlier that he gives too much money to the kids, but we don't know that, since we don't know how the kids live, We don't even know how many kids he has and what ages they have, and we don't know if they're boys or girls. The story is about Willhelm, but his past should be mentioned as well, and it isn't, as if the author was trying to tell us that Willhelm is trying to forget about his past.

Willhelm in 2009 Wall Street

Who knows if Willhelm would still be as excited as he appears if he was living right now, in the middle of the financial crisis in the United States, and in the whole world. This market can be a money-making machine, but it can also drain your money away. Since my father works in the Citigroup, we've felt the crisis at home. My father was left in charge of an amount of work that is usually done by five people, and his salary was cut off. My uncle invested in Citigroup stocks when they where costing about 30 dollars. Now they're in 4 dollars, and they where in 97 cents for about a week. However, as my father says, big crisis hold the greatest opportunities. Imagine if you bought 100 stocks at 97 cents and then resold them for 54 dollars (The highest citigroup stock value in history.) You would win about 5300 dollars! But then imagine if you bought 1000 stocks for 97 cents, which is 970 dollars, and then the government decided to nationalize the bank. Then you’d lose all your money. So yes, this book was written just after world war two, when the economy was not very good but it was fine. I wonder what would’ve happened if it was written now. Would Willhelm still be dreaming about the stock market?

1970 Colombian

The relationship between Willhelm and his father is a very sad one. However, I think it is not the worst father-son relationship I have heard of. Unfortunately, here in Colombia, especially some years ago, men were forced to study the same career as that of his father, even if he didn't like it.
"What? I'm not going to have a chef under my roof! You must stay in the family business and be a lawyer, like me and your grandfather and your great-grandfather."This was a very common line,according to my father and his friends. Sometimes they actually wanted to stay in the family business, but most of them didn't, and where forced to. This was how it worked some years ago here in Colombia, and I think Willhelm's father is very much like that. Maybe the same movement that took place here in 70's took place in the US back in the 40's, but maybe it never happened and Willhelm's father just behaves like a 1970 Colombian father. My father's father died before my father went to college, so he didn't live that with his father, however when he told my uncle, who is 14 years older than him, that he wanted to be an architect, he found the following reply:
"Which architect do you know in the family?"
So my father had to quit architecture and now is an economist, which is a profession he likes a lot, but maybe he would've liked architecture more. It's sad that parents expected their children to live the exact same way they did. Nowadays you're allowed to choose your own life without your parents expecting you to live like they did. It's great that we've left behind that selfish culture.

Impressions

In chapter two of Seize the Day, we can see how important it is to take care on what we do or in how we speak. In this chapter not much really happens, except a talk between Tommy and his father. At first, since Tommy talks a lot about his thoughts, I thought he was a little exaggerated. But, after some thinking, I realized that most of us (If not all), have similar thoughts as we speak. Any thing the other one does or doesn't do can cause false impressions on us, and we can maybe even not notice. Our movements (Body Language), can annoy other people, and since most people don't tell you "Hey, that annoys me.", you have to be very careful on what you do.
"Why the devil can't he stand still when we're talking? He's either hoisting his pants up and down by the pockets or jittering with his feet".(p24) I can tell that the poor guy he's talking to is not really intending to do that in order to annoy him, and yet Willhelm doesn't tell him anything. I always tell my friends when they're doing something weird by accident, and they tell me. I think this helps us get better at talking. I don't like the fact that Willhelm criticizes but doesn't really tell the person. Also, it'snot just body language, but misinterpretations. Some days ago, a friend of my father's asked me if I knew her son,who is in 12th grade and is famous for being extremely smart. I said "Yeah, I know he's really smart, and he's not even in my grade." She then asked "Oh really? Your grade is full of smart people?", which was not what I intended to say. I intended to say that he's famous for being smart even in other grades. It was a misinterpretation, and even though she wasn't really mad becuase of my comment I felt ashamed. Willhelm makes a lot of misinterpretations, or he just over-analyzes everything people tell him. He tries to look for insinuations, or hidden meanings in phrases that don't have them. Not everyone is as extreme as Willhelm, but we have all made misinterpretations at least once in our lifes. This teaches us to be careful about our word choice, because if we aren't, we might be taken in the wrong way and this could lead to consequences we don't want to deal with.

Willhelm and Buendia

Willhelm is at an age where it's hard to change who you are. Yet he still thinks that he can change his life, and is dreaming about becoming rich with the stock market. He still thinks that there's a way to change his life completely, and it is sad to see the situation that he is in. His father seems to be very dissapointed at him, at how his life is so empty. I don't like his father, but I don't like Willhelm either. Their lifes are very sad, not just Willhelms, but his father's also. Their way of living sort of reminds me of 100 years of solitude, which I am reading right now. Both the characters in Seize the Day and in 100 years of solitude have attitudes towards life that seem to be as if they didn't like their lifes, which doesn't surprise me. Both are trying to become people they are not, and trying to change the world and their own way of living in unimaginable ways. Not only that, but they actually try to do it, and they could, I've always believed that you can do anything, but they sort of know deep down that some things are almost impossible to accomplish, and when they bump against a wall they get really discouraged and wait a long time before triying again. I think Willhelm and his father are very similar to many of the Buendia family members.

Wilham and My father

I feell like Wilhelm is trying to convince himself that he is still young, or at least younger than what he is, because he behaves as if he had just turned twenty. He cares a lot about his appearance and is still dreaming with becoming millionaire. He also emphasizes a lot, or at least the author does, that he is much younger than any other men at the hotel where he is staying. Honestly he reminds me of my father four or five years ago, and even now. He was trying to feel younger (At least that's what I think), becaue he had just turned forty, which is known to be a hard age both in men and women. We were living in Mexico City back then, because of my father's job, and had a car that could take my parents, my two brothers, and me. However he decided to change it for a sporting car, which is cool but not as useful. He decided to buy kayaks and gorafting, and he was invited by a much younger colleague to participate in a regatta from Acapulco to Ixtapa, Mexico. (And I'm talking 15 years younger than him). He also started dressing differently and traveling to places here in Colombia such as La Guajira with my 27 year-old cousin, who was like 22 back then. At times he even tarted mocking my mom, as if she was his mom instead of his wife. It was funny, both for me and my brothers as well as my mother, but at times my mom would get mad. However when we look back at that time we laugh a lot. Wilham reminds me of my father.