The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
Omelas Seminar Reflection.
ALicia Armstrong
"If everyone is always happy then no one is happy," "its like the incredibles, where the man says "If everyone is super,then no one is really super." So yea." Both quotes were said by Elliott Saslow one of my class mates. I agree with this quote to an extent, I believe that before we decide if this is true or in not true we need to figure out what exactly happiness is. To me, i think happiness is an indefinable feeling that is felt only at at a certain moment in time and its really hard to define and explaiin because we all feel it in our own way andthere are many ways we can describe is but none of the descriptions are perfect.I agree that if everyone has the same thing then no one really has it. It like happiness loses its preciousness, because it's the loss of it that makes it more amaizing.
So when i think about the whole happiness topic i usually immediately think of brave new world, just because those people are sort of conditioned to feel happy,and we have had a disscussion in the past about if they reallly are happy and about are wehappy and whoare we to say they're not so this whole topic really brings me back to freshman year. Also durring the seminar we sort of got off track and when we were talking about the first question "what role does happiness play in this story?" we started talking about a balance and having violence and sadness to really be happy you nedd to experience whats its like to not be happy. This i can really conect to a movie that i saw, its actually one of my favorite movies called "Eat Pray and Love," It has Julia Roberts who is this confused woman who just got out out a divorce and she goes on this journey around the world trying to find herself, while onthe journey she travels to this village and there she meets a medicine man name Katuck,who sort of helps her find herself by telling her some really amazing things about life and one of his quotes is about balance, where he tells her "my dear, listen to katuck, sometimes to lose your balance in love, is a part of keeping your balance in life." So i really thought about it and i realized wow he is right life has to always have this constant balance to keepyou steady and if you lose that balance then you really do lose yourself and if you lose yourself you lose the bad parts and if you lose the bad ness in yourr life then honestly you lose the good in it which means you lose your happiness.
What role does the child in the closet play in this society?
So when reading the story Ursela says on the second page paragraph three towards the bottom of the page,she says"one thing i know there is none of in Omelas is guilt." This is just a little sentence that makes sense when she starts talking about the child in the closet. You see this is a society that is absolutely free it may have everything else but guilt is not present anywhere, and i feel that the child is there to sort of help the people understand why. On page four, paragraph nine, Usela says "they all know that it has to be there, some ofthem understand why, and some do not,but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their ciity, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers,even the abundance oftheir harvest and kindly weathers of their skies, depende wholly on this child's abominable misery." Here she states why they do it, and on the tenth paragraph,last sentence she refers back to the guilt sentence on the second page."To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement, to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness for one: that would be to let guilt with the walls indeed." So i think that the childis there to sortof help the people realize why it is important to not have guilt, and i just want to say that i got a little confuse during the seminar,i think my group thought the child was being in the closet his or her whole life,when really this is just another peice of the society's summer festival.
What is the message of this story? Is there another alternative to the child being in the closet? and is the horse consider as a sacred animal in this society?
I think the message is to love what you have and acccept what you dont, and to enjoy happiness when you have it, and to accept it when you dont.