Point 2 Flashcards
P1
In retelling the events, the narrators ascribe meaning to them, and explore the human experiences of learning that knowledge does not enable us to control our futures nor eliminate our innate fear of the unknown and discovering how facts disconnected from meaning do not lead to true understanding.
P2
Children expect to be capable of tremendous achievements as adults, just as those who go to war expect to be received as heroes fighting for a cause. War never leaves the world as it was. It creates uncertainty and starts to broaden the horizons of those inhabiting it.
P3
Soldiers and civilians all enter the war less knowledgeable and more innocent than they exit it. The passage “History didn’t greet us with triumphal fanfares: / - it flung dirty sand into our eyes”, represents that the world is more bitter and the future less clear than the narrator had believed as a child.
P4
In saying her world consists of “poisoned wells and bitter bread”, Szymborska’s narrator symbolically now sees the corruption in the world, corruption that impacts the water and food necessary to nourish her body, and contaminating her belief in the goodness of people and her hope for the future, leaving her with a view of the world as a bitter place. Once these wars, either metaphorical or literal, were over, her understanding and knowledge increased, but at a cost.
P5
After experiencing the eclipse, the narrator of “Total Eclipse” compared seeing this black body to seeing a mushroom cloud, evoking a feeling of doom by equating the blocking of the sun by the moon to an apocalyptic symbol of nuclear destruction.
P6
The experience conjured for the narrator a fear of evil in the depth of our souls, saying that “In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us” through letting go of the civility we have learned in society. The narrator suggests that by riding those monsters “over the world’s rim”, you can “find what our sciences cannot locate or name”, referring both to the point in the past with less formal knowledge and people were more driven by the primal knowledge within us. This metaphor also depicts that the knowledge is imperfect in that it cannot explain why people feel and believe what they do, even in the face of facts to the contrary and social conventions that impose a specific belief system.
