Untitled

This week, we finished The Crucible and had a great time analyzing John Proctor's most heart-wrenching decision, to tear up his confession and go to the gallows. Reputation, honor, and legacy are enveloped in a main theme of The Crucible and address the question of which is more important: honor or life?

The romantic, Disney-story side of me congratulates and cheers on Proctor's noble decision as worthy and honorable. However, as a devout doubter, I doubted this. 

Confused about my own misgivings about Proctor's decision, I asked my father what he would do if he were one of the accused. My father, ever the pragmatic and wise Asian man, said that he would confess. Why? "Because everything comes from life. Religion comes from life. Honor comes from life. Shame comes from life." And so I pondered.

I think that what he meant to say is that life is so precious and important that we cannot give it up for something like reputation that seems so insignificant in comparison. Life is concrete; once we give it up, it can never be retaken. Reputation, in comparison, can be altered, can be started anew. Some would argue about what the point of living would even be if one's honor was lost in confession. I guess because I'm still young, I'm optimistic about living. You can change things. You can start over. You can go and begin anew. 

We discussed a Goethe quote that read, "The whole art of life consists of giving up our existence in order to exist." We noticed the difference between the "existence" as a noun, an inactive object, and "to exist" an active verb. We agreed that the quote meant that we must give up our stagnant "existence," or our life, in order "to exist," or maintain our honor and self-respect. I... kind of disagree with that.

To me, life is the ultimate verb. It entails so much of our existing; our movement, our breathing, our feeling, our touching, our thinking. In comparison, things like honor and reputation seem pretty stagnant. They are the nouns of our world. And I think that the Goethe quote should be interpreted as, we must give up our worldly objects, our worldly preoccupations with honor and reputation, and instead focus on ourselves, our own physical and beautiful existence. 

As Richard Dawkins so eloquently stated, "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We are the privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds; how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

If ever asked to choose between something as malleable and impermanent as reputation and something as beautiful and as irreversible as life, I will always choose life.