A book review which a classmate asked me to write when I was in college. Reading it now, I felt myself cringe, and I can't tell you why.
While reading this novel, I felt like I am having a mental exercise because the question that were posed by the two main characters are really thought-provoking like the nature of human “evil” and the necessity of it as a tool for human progression, and if we could really demarcate the boundaries of “good” and “evil”. The next question that will be addressed is that how does this values affected my life?
We cannot really judge people according to what they have done: We must act in a nonjudgmental manner. We are different people who come from different backgrounds and cultures and the decisions that we make is not a reason for us to discriminate other people. I myself can say that I am a victim of the everyday situations in my life; even though people might say something bad about me, only I could know the things that I have to go through in doing the things that I think is right. That is the reason for the expression, “depends on the person”, we do not have the right to judge the actions of other people just because we think that their acts are wrong. Moreover, what is wrong for us might not be so for other people.
Our actions will be seen and examined by the people who will come after us: This is actually related to the first value that I had cited. People in the future will judge us. But this is not a bad thing because it actually tells us that we must have a thorough self-examination of the pros and cons of our actions. This value tells us that we must see our actions in an objective light: we must not let emotions control us in the process of this self-examination. We might be discriminated and misunderstood by our contemporaries but we might be great in the eyes of the future generation. The bottomline is that the success or failure of our actions is our sole responsibility.
When we repeatedly do something that deed becomes ordinary: The things that we have never done before might overwhelm us at first but if we try to go beyond our boundaries and try to conquer our fears, we will end up saying to ourselves that we have our lives in control. Doing good things might earn us the discrimination of other people, but we must set aside those negative comments and continue working because these things will become a part of our personhood. To use the jargon of my major, our good values will “fossilize.” But unlike fossilization, our values are not stagnant, we continue to evolve, which separates us from other creatures.
We choose the paths that we have to take and that we can’t blame the people around us if anything turns wrong: True. Life is a choice, life is what we make of it and the things that happened to us be it positive or negative will mold our character and our future decisions. It is usual for us humans to blame our mother or father or friends with our failures and we fail to listen to their side because we wallow in grief. I myself sometimes do this because I feel that I carry the whole world as my burden and that nobody could help me. But along the way, I realized that the things that happened in my life are the effects of my choices and that I can't blame anybody except for myself. This is the time that I started accepting the things that happened and the only thing left for me to do is to stand up again after a fall and continue living my life with what is remaining. This blaming of other people, I think, is one of the reason why our world today is chaotic. People who keep on pointing the blame to other people without examining themselves first. The concept of self-examination again enters the picture, if we could just see the things that we have done; maybe we would realize the right and wrong in our actions. If we succeed in that, then acceptance would follow.
We should learn from our past experiences: The novel tackled about the hideous crimes that man has committed throughout the course of human history. History is recorded so that we in the present generation could learn from the mistakes and triumphs of the older generation. It gives us the lesson that life is continuous and that we could always improve the present through examining the past. Taking this proposition on a more personal level, I can say that my experiences in the past molded me into the person that I am. I learned from my mistakes and triumphs and tried to stand up again after a failure and improve myself after a success. Like I said earlier, life is not stagnant. It is sure that the things that happened to us in the past will never happen again but one day, we might encounter something that is very similar. And our past experiences will eventually help us in dealing with it.
The most important thing is that we are alive because we have the will to live: This is the single most important value that the novel has imparted on its readers and this, I think, is the tie that binds the novel. The tragedies and successes in our life will only happen if we choose it to happen. And this would only be so if we tell ourselves that we can always do it, that we can conquer our fears and cross boundaries. The events in our lives are signs that we are alive: the challenges tell us that we could explore the unexplorable and our successes tell us that we can always make our potentials a reality.We may experience some highs and lows, our problems will surely come back in another form but we must not give up, we must continue living because this is the only life that we have. Life will always be meaningful and that the complementary things in our life like darkness and lightness, war and peace, love and hate, and living and dying has always been a part of it. It has always been a part of the lives of the people before us and would be part of the lives of the people in the future. Problems are inevitable but we must remember that the sweet things in life are also inevitable. Our happiness or the opposite of it would always lie in our own hands and it will be our choice. The most important thing that we must remember in living is that we must not loathe life, we must love it, and we must learn to live with the challenges and successes, we must have the will to live! Just like what the teacher wrote in his letter to his wife, “We might not know the things that may happen tomorrow...the problems might come again in another form...but still, the will to live will always blossom anew.” What I am in the past is not important, what is important is that I am living my life now and that I am ready to explore the unexplorable, conquer the unconquerable, and triumph the untriumphable.
It is a cliché to say that “In life, there are no rewinds.” But then it is still relevant to us as this always makes us think that we must always go for the best. We must savor every moment of our lives because we will only pass this life once. To this, I can say that we are all survivors of life.
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