Marzieh Ghiasi

The past few days Montréal’s temperature has averaged a cool -20°C, otherwise known as nostril-hair freezing cold. This kind of cold is not really a great motivator for hanging out outside. So I’ve been occupying myself with the news (a mix of alarming and horrifying), drinking tea and re-reading some Vonnegut. I find myself coming back to these books year after year, and every time finding them more powerful, more truthful… and myself crying like a baby. This is from Timequake, his answer to… why bother?

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.‘”

ps. This blog has a new look and a new name!
pps. How awesome is that door garden gnome? I want one.

This is a peice I wrote about 4 years ago (10^th grade) about a book that remains one of my favorites, and a subject that I sill find intriguing.

The twentieth century will be marked in history for its many civil rights movements, none of which was more tremendous than the anti-apartheid movement of South Africa. Alan Paton was an author and a political activist who created the South African Liberal Party, and who would later become one of the most prominent voices of opposition to apartheid; the South African government’s policy of racial segregation and discrimination against the black majority population of the country.

Born to a white farming family in South Africa in early twentieth century, Paton grew sympathetic to the anti- apartheid cause as he watched first hand a socially frayed country where “fear loomed over everything.”¹ Throughout his life, Paton published his views on apartheid, crime, and justice in South Africa in a body of works, of which the novel Cry, the Beloved Country would become the most renowned. Thought by many as the initial and the most compelling novel to emerge out of the crises in South Africa; Cry, the Beloved Country brought into spotlight the problems that plagued Africa’s southern tip, and set a precedent for other critical South African pieces of literature that would later surface.

In Cry, the Beloved Country, Paton deals with three different accounts, one of the land of South Africa and the great tribes that once presided across its plains; another of the search of a father, Stephen Kumalo, an old rural black minister for his son Absalom in a large corrupt city; and finally an old rural white man, James Jarvis’s confrontation with the loss of his son. The story combines all of these elements to illustrate a glimpse into, and an explanation for, the condition of South Africa during the 1940’s and beyond.
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The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Oh my god… one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century… Kurt Vonnegut is dead! Heart pain. :(

I don’t know what to say. On personal level I am sorry I never had the chance to write to him to tell him that somewhere in the world another person was absolutely inspired by his work. There are only a few writers who I can say have transformed my being and helped defined my views about life and the world. He was one of them. I am just glad, grateful that he lived in at time where his visions, his writings, his art, his satire was needed the most. He’s not gone forever, his legacy, his flame… he will always be here.