The Happiest days of our Lives
".. The newspaper stories were like bad dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edge of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories."
From The Handmaid's Tale
2 comments:
'...too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives'...'
It connotes a detachment that I do not recognize today.
People read the news: everyone has a comment/opinion/criticism to make. Some try doing something about what they read: we have people organizing all sorts of things here: apart from protest clusters, you have people visiting homes and shelters, trying to do their bit.
Take the tsunami: we had people from college go to the affected areas, camping there for awhile and providing what support they can...
I don't think this is something that applies to us anymore, not today, not to my kind
Maybe. You can't relate with/act on every newspaper tragedy though!Daily life's eccentricities don't allow you that.
A fire in the Peleponnese might escape your attention while a Tsunami in your city will.There's really nothing anyone can do about it. Only Margaret Atwood's words sound so beautiful when they talk about this semi-unreality of the other's life!
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