Month: October 2018

“I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”

In this video, the narrator is reading an excerpt from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman with a few visuals to go with it. For the first 30 seconds, he is reading the quote written above. I chose this video because I highly agreed with this quote and I think the concept is still relevant today.

An interpretation of this quote is that there are all these voices and ideas in the world or in people’s heads — Whitman calls these voices “the talk of the beginning and the end” — and this means that the voices are all too busy worrying about the past or the future. With all this noise, however he is still able to separate himself from it and have a mind where he controls his thoughts and he chooses to live in the present. He is motioning to the idea that we need to remove all outside disruptions and really listen to our own thoughts and ideas and that is a notion that holds true today more so than ever.

In today’s world, we hear other people’s opinions whether it be how we should live our lives, what ideas we should believe, or what politics we should abide by every way we turn with all the media that surrounds us constantly. Sometimes it becomes easy to get lost in these voices and lose our own because we are bombarded with other people’s ideas that we mistake to be ours. I like that this excerpt reminds us to take a step back from all the noise that seem to be the “right way” and formulate our own views no matter how different or unheard of the may be because that is what Whitman does.

When I first became familiar with the story of Don Quixote, he seemed childish and delusional to me – I did not understand the reasons as to why he would go on the adventures that he did and how he seriously thought of himself as a knight when he obviously wasn’t one. It made him seem as though he was a little child, being obsessed with fictional stories and believing they could be true in the real world.

However, after watching this video response, explaining how Don Quixote is actually an admirable character in some ways, made me see him differently. The narrator brought to my attention how some of the most notable people in history probably seemed crazy to those around them at the time. In fact, their rejection to what was perceived to be realistic (as how Don Quixote does) was what made them so great. The narrator used the Wright brothers as an example. Who would’ve thought that traveling through the air was even a possibility in their times? Probably not very many people. But that didn’t stop them from being successful in  inventing one of the most unimaginable forms of transportation – the airplane.

This dismissal of reality is evident in Don Quixote when he sees the windmills and thought that they were giants and it was his service to God “to sweep so evil a breed from the face of the earth”. No matter how many times Sancho tried explaining to him that this wasn’t true, he wouldn’t have it and went for it anyway. This is a very extreme case and there is clearly no good reason as to why Don Quixote is fighting the windmills. However, the same theme is displayed. The narrator explains that these windmills are a representation of obstacles that we may face in accomplishing brilliant end goals and even if we fail, as Don Quixote did, we should not let that stop us from living our lives as if we are invincible.

*Video time: 2:40 until the end