A Cycle of Life
Hello all who for some reason or other decided to visit this blog! Welcome to my very first blog post on the wonderfully mind-breaking novel The Mezzanine (I'm looking at you, footnote starting on page 65. Why, just why.). I'll do my best to keep this somewhat short and coherent, which if you know me, is a struggle at the best of times. But here's to trying!
The point I want to look into and discuss is that of transience, and how the Mezzanine as a whole seems to refute Aurelius' idea that life is fleeting and trivial. We already discussed how the novel shows this in how discoveries and innovations are built on and worked with, taken into stride, not discarded. But there's another layer to this that seems to not be intended or planned by Baker, because it is only years into the future that this layer reveals itself.
Take, for example,
... his face, when the opening door revealed it, was not formed in the fruity whistler's pout, but had a momentary flinch of surprise on it.
He said, "Oop!"
I said, "Oop!" and then, as he stood aside, holding the door for me to enter, "Thanks, Alan." (82)
Howie and his coworker use the word "oop" as an exclamation to express slight surprise, which - well, that's certainly being used very often today (by younger generations mostly, from what I can tell), and still in vaguely the same context. It may never have truly faded or died out, but it certainly experienced a revival or upward boost in use, even if it was initially through the phrase "and I oop", which was later shortened to simply "oop" (correct me if I'm wrong, people who know more about pop culture than me, I'm generally pretty out of the loop).
The point I'm trying to make, that I think The Mezzanine shows quite often (even if so many examples are escaping me right now) is that life is very transient and short, but it often moves in a cycle. Look at the way that old fashions resurface decades down the line, how old styles of art will sometimes come back into mainstream after a long break. Sometimes it comes back in bits in pieces, taking little inspirations from things that had fallen out of general favor and public mind a long time ago. You can see it in how, during our denounce/recommend game at the beginning of this class, multiple people were recommending things related to exploring antiques and reconstructing things from the past. We as humans are constantly pulling things from our history, renewing things with a fascination and interest much like how Howie sees the world. Nothing just disappears, reduced to a pile of ash leaving no trace behind. The individual lifespans of ideas, phrases, objects, fashions, and more might be short in the grand scheme of things, but they rarely ever live just once.
Yes absolutely, and this seems to be a point that Howie seems to touch on constantly. He appreciates everything, and through doing so, everyone who had something to do with the creation of said objects. He revives the relevance of seemingly unimportant items in his own head, bringing them back to life. I really like this observation.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Eliza, this definitely seems to be the case. He is always thinking about the past of how certain things and objects came to be, then pulling these mostly insignificant things out of the whole "flow" of the cycle and bringing light to it.
DeleteI really liked the idea of a cycle of things, this is very true, especially as you mentioned, in fashion. You often even see much older things brought up through means like reenactments. Although, I don't think this would count as a true revival like what you mentioned it still shows your point of the cycle to be true.
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