words. by Tosten Burks.

Is it really that hard to figure out what Occupy Wall Street stands for?

In Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, the crowded, carnivalistic home of the impassioned and growing Occupy Wall Street movement, people play the bongos. Trumpets blare. Men and women of all ages, of all creeds and colors, chant. There are speeches and there are shouts and there are drums, but most of all, there is momentum.

Occupy Wall Street, now almost a month strong, has rooted itself in dozens of cities across the country. This crusade against what protestors call inequalities in the economic system, inspired by the Arab Spring movement, looks like it will last long into the fall. So why, in its impressive and continuously inclining mobilization, is Occupy Wall Street being derided as so hollow?

Protestors are lining up to line up to participate in this campaign, yet detractors can’t stop focusing on how these tired, poor, huddled masses don’t exactly stand in a straight line.

Occupy Wall Street is a complex movement incited by a complex struggle. Can’t it be appreciated in its complexity without being boiled down to a tag line?

This maudlin mob of angry citizens in Zuccotti Park is not the Tea Party, the media’s last darling protest story, loved by talk shows because it was so easy to talk about. Occupy Wall Street is not so simpleminded. “Lower our taxes!” may be an easily digestible thesis, but to put it simply, revolutions are not simple. OWS makes no attempt to provide such a plain solution to the broad problem that its supporters claim is killing the American Dream.

It is important to remember that these protestors are congregating to protest. To complain. About unbridled corporate greed, about the hopelessness of unemployment, about the tyrannical power of the banking system, about the stranglehold corporate money and lobbyists have on policymaking. It is a long list of grievances. It makes no sense to demand one easy mission statement from the grievers.

Which isn’t to say that Occupy Wall Street has no mission. There have been demands to repeal the Bush-era tax cuts, to eliminate corporate personhood, to pass the “Buffet Rule” that would require millionaires to pay a greater share of their income than the middle class, and to investigate and prosecute financial executives responsible for the 2008 recession, among other things.

Yes, this is a broad list of demands, but the economy is a broad system. Can the protestors be faulted for not surmising a catchall solution? Has anyone ever surmised a catchall solution to economic woes?

When it comes down to it, the men and women in Zuccotti Park are marching and demonstrating and playing the bongos to draw attention to the symptom of a very serious problem. Isn’t it the government’s responsibility to find the cure?

If critics really demand one sound-bite-ready goal from Occupy Wall Street, here is what these people want: change. That tag line seemed to be good enough for the country when a certain Illinois Senator used it just a few years ago.

Where I’ve been

I started writing for a music blog maintained by one of my favorite music journalists and fellow obscure-adjective-lover Jeff Weiss. The website is called Passion of the Weiss. You can find my articles, for the most part just over-ambitious word splooges about underground rappers, here.

Since I last posted, I started attending Northwestern University. I will probably start posting work that I do for classes and for various other Evanston journalistic-ish adventures. I say probably just to be casual. I’m actually about to post one such article right now.

Additionally, I have many old things that I meant to post but never did. I might post some of those things sometime.

I also have rekindled my relationship with Twitter, in the interest of acting like an actual writer with nothing to do with my time except procrastinate past deadlines by using Twitter.

To conclude, WATCH OUT WORLD.

SDSU falls in tournament but rises in prominence

There is nothing better than a lovable loser. Just don’t call the Aztecs one.

San Diego State ended the season tragically, in a 67-74 loss to the Uni versity of Connecticut in the Sweet 16. It was a Ford Pinto of a contest, a match in which neither team truly felt comfortable in the driver’s seat. There were eight lead changes – in the first half. Neither team was ever up by double digits. Disastrously though, UConn ended the night up. And with that, SDSU’s season simply ended.

The loss left a city disappointed, and that is the most uplifting aspect of this entire 34 win, top-5 ranked sea son. That a Sweet 16 loss isn’t good enough for a team that has historically been irrelevant – SDSU averaged just over 10 wins a season in the decade prior to cur rent coach Steve Fisher’s arrival – is a testament to the triumph that Fisher has led this year.

“It should hurt, regardless of when, where and how,” Fisher said after the game. “For our team this year, for what they’ve accomplished, it hurts exponentially more.”

This is a powerful statement. This Aztec season was an accomplishment. And the loss to UConn, the winner of the Big East conference tournament, popularly considered to be the top conference in the nation, was painful.

Listen. Pain is proof of existence. And San Diego State basketball now exists on a national level. UConn pinched them in a ma jor way, and it hurt. They weren’t dreaming; this fantasy season was real, real success that will leave a real legacy.

First and foremost, this 2010 Aztecs clan was one of frontcourt dominance. While senior point guard D.J. Gay may have been the team’s spiritual leader, its passing pas tor, the offense undeniably hinges on its two temples in the post, senior forwards Billy White and Malcolm Thomas.

White is an emotional bull of a player, known for beat ing his chest with an unhealthy violence and beating de fenders with a left shoulder turnaround that manages to seem defiantly in-your-face even in its undefiant consis tency. He can back into the block just as easily as he can pull the ball out and drive the baseline, which is to say in a way that doesn’t appear easy at all, but rather full of pas sionate, blustering effort, until the ball effortlessly floats off the backboard into the hoop.

Billy White plays like a strong wind; full of unre strained tumult, until he’s past you, when he becomes a smooth, clean breeze running back down the court to play defense, two points in the bag. Also like wind, White never stops. He played 39 of a possible 40 minutes in the loss against UConn.

What White is to strength, Malcolm Thomas is to length. He stands at 6-foot-9, but plays like a 7-footer, mostly because he has the arms of an 8-footer. Thomas has this exact unrefined raw talent of a young giant. At times, he is awkwardly missing layups, but at others he is blocking shots with such smoothness that it is almost friendly, like he is just offering the offense another shot.

Against UConn, Thomas dropped 13 points, eight re bounds, and three assists in a performance that seemed much more dominant than the numbers even show. He made plays more consistently throughout the night than any other man on the roster.

Which brings us to sophomore Kawhi Leonard, the most consistent man on the roster throughout the year. He is 6-foot-7, 225 pounds, and probably the most ath letic player in the Mountain West Conference. No Az tec plays calmer than Leonard. More importantly, no one plays smarter. Leonard is the star, the freak who can guard centers and shooting guards, who can drain threes and rebound them with an equal amount of expertise. He put up 12 and nine against UConn, numbers that were surely drowned by his early foul trouble.

Most likely, Leonard will leave the team to be a first round pick in the NBA next year. To go with this end-of-season theme of bittersweetness, this departure is at once the worst and best thing for SDSU basketball in a long time. They are losing perhaps the best player they have ever had. But they are also, after many years of produc ing near-NBA’ers (Randy Halcomb, Marcus Slaughter, Brandon Heath) finally putting a representative onto the global stage.

Leonard will go from being the player most crucial to SDSU’s team to the player most crucial to SDSU’s repu tation, an altogether more important job.

And that is what this 2010-2011 Aztecs team is really all about. They went 34-3 unfortunately not on the path to an NCAA championship, but on the path to respect.

“We went from nobody even knowing about San Di ego State,” senior forward Billy White said after the game.

They became a rising member of the college basketball canon. This Aztecs team will not fade into history.

Thornton Wilder (senior year, AP Lit, log 4)

1. What does Wilder conclude about life through his characters and use of irony?

Writers have a tendency to overthink. They overanalyze, overcomplicate, weave miles of depth into the slightest turn of phrase, and turn subtlety into anything but. Writers revel in profound complexity. Thornton Wilder laughs at it. If James Joyce is modernism’s 1920’s mural painter, Wilder is the decade’s pencil sketcher.

His novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and play Our Town, both Pulitzer Prize winners, are nuanced, simple, brief works of absolute beauty. They tackle the biggest thematic questions of all, the meaning of life, what happens after, and give a magnificently small answer. Through his characters, compounded by his use of tragic irony, Wilder submits in The Bridge that fate, destiny, and afterlife mean nothing in comparison to sheer love and life, and emphasizes the significance of this pure, unending, unfailing love in Our Town.

Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey is first and foremost, a novel about dying. In this, Wilder is able to present an inspiring maxim on living. Every character is presented in the frame that their stories in the book all lead up to their tragic death in the collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey. From the beginning, this sets up dramatic irony that influences the reader to view the characters in terms of not how they lived, but how they lived up until their approaching death, which is a profoundly different viewpoint.

First, Wilder puts forth Dona Maria, the Marquesa de Montemayor, an affluent Liman elder whose entire goal in life is to have a passionate, loving relationship with her daughter, Dona Clara, who moved to Spain to marry into royalty. Wilder traces Dona Maria through her letters, sweeping, desperate messages and pleas to her daughter, one of which she sends every week. The tragedy is that the letters are in vain. Dona Clara resists her mother’s begging attempts at affection and has resisted her entire life. The letters are mere annoyances. That is, until one letter changes everything – not one of Dona Maria’s letters, but one penned by her companion and helper Pepita, a girl serving Maria on the orders of her patron, the Abbess of a local convent, Madres Maria del Pilar.

In the letter, which Pepita is too embarrassed to send, Pepita shows a humble devotion to the Abbess, who has been a mother figure to her. Pepita’s words transform Dona Maria. In them, she is struck by a sense of courage, a feeling of awe-inspiring tenderness and adoration. Dona Maria realizes that her entire life’s work of wooing her daughter has been selfishly shallow.

She has always been about the surface qualities of the relationship, never about the brave, selfless heart required by the type of relationship she dreams of. “She had never brought courage to either life or love. Her eyes ransacked her heart” (37). With this profound new understanding, Dona Maria writes what she calls “her first letter” (37). She writes with true love, true devotion to her daughter and the relationship she prays they will soon repair. Wilder divulges Dona Maria’s revelation in a way that makes the reader experience the same joyous epiphany.

Through Pepita, we and Maria learn the grand importance of selfless, eternal love, and perhaps more crucially, how empty and hopeless life is without it. To call this idea life changing is to understate it. Dona Maria is completely renewed, baptized and reborn into a life solely devoted to love. As she whispers to Pepita, “Let me live now. Let me begin again” (38). This is her resolution. Two days after writing this “first letter,” she dies on the bridge.

But that is less of a wrap up than her evolution into a disciple of love. Wilder submits that everyone should be such a disciple. Dona Maria’s tragic end is not important. This is Wilder’s point. Death isn’t significant. Fate and cosmic meaning aren’t significant. The only thing that holds weight, the only thing that means anything, is love. This is why Dona Maria’s chapter, 25 pages long, spends 24.5 of those developing her journey to love, and only one sentence at the end reminding readers that she dies in the accident.

The novel’s other characters, the bridge’s other victims, also undergo transformations similar to Dona Maria’s.

Uncle Pio was a man who mentored Camila Perichole, molded her into the famous actress she would become, and fell in love with her. Camila eventually moved past her acting and also drew away from Pio. Yet, Pio’s love never died, and his attempts to give this love to Camila never ended. After Camila is disfigured by smallpox, Pio painfully convinces her to let him take care of her son. Uncle Pio is a parable for the sacrifice of love, and Camila is a model of love’s trust. Pio falling with the bridge alongside Camila’s son is perhaps the most tragic of ends in the novel, but again, the tragedy is given a sentence, whereas the path to this mutual trust and sacrifice, this mutual empathy, is given 27 pages. Love outweighs death in every possible way, an idea echoed in the story of Esteban.

Esteban dies on the bridge after finally resolving to forgive himself and come to terms with his twin brother’s death, caused by the treatment that Esteban was forced to give Manuel for a knee infection. He falls victim days after committing to become a sailor on a work-boat, Esteban’s first steps towards moving on from the tragedy that turned him into an unstable, lonely outcast in the months following the death.

With Esteban, Wilder is expounding the virtues of love that has even lost its source. “We push on Esteban, as best we can. It isn’t for long, you know,” the captain of Esteban’s would-be-boat preaches to him (64). For a while, Esteban takes the loss of his beloved brother as a loss of the love. But what is gone is simply the object. Wilder is repeating the fact that people are temporary, as is everything in life aside from from. Death pales in importance to love, and it can’t even restrain it.

This is the idea that Wilder famously ends the novel with: “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them” (107). This emotion is eternal. So much so that love is more than an emotion, more than an act. Love is an elemental foundation for life. It is the only elemental foundation for life. It makes death insignificant. More importantly, it makes life significant. Love is the lifeblood of life.

If The Bridge is then a sermon teaching the power and necessity of love, Our Town is a lesson in how and when to apply it – the answer being always, in every moment, in every breath.

The play follows the course of a town and two of the families in it. Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire is a town with no distinct qualities. The Gibbs’ and the Webbs could be any family in early 20^th century small-town America. This overwhelming normalcy and plainness lends the play almost a sense of high burlesque just from the simple act of producing an entire play about places, events, and people so commonplace, from dramatizing such a non-dramatic world.

This sense is a hint at Wilder’s theme in the play, which is that basic life goes tragically unappreciated, that the most manila moments deserve every ounce of passion and love. Wilder imparts this through the tale of the two families, most specifically through the relationship between George Gibbs and Emily Webb. They are neighbors and classmates, and also members of the only two families that the play chooses to really spotlight in terms of entering the house on stage and introducing every character.

In Act I, George and Emily discuss basic school things. Everyone in Act I does and discusses basic things. It is a painting of Grover’s Corners as a stereotypical American place. The newspaper editor, Mr. Webb, describes it as such: “We’re lower middle class: sprinkling of professional men… Eighty-five per cent Protestants’ twelve per cent Catholics… Very ordinary town, if you ask me” (24). The first Act borders on boring, a feeling that is crucial to Wilder’s conclusion in Act III.

Act II however, moves along the plot dramatically. It is three years later, and George and Emily are planning to marry each other. We are taken back to the day when they realized they were in love, a pretty confession of feelings in a soda shop in 11^th grade. By the end of Act II, they are husband and wife. Then, in Act III, Emily is dead. She died giving birth to her and George’s second child.

Except, Emily is the star of Act III. Wilder presents a surreal vision of death, one in which the dead are their own community in the cemetery, communicating, moving around, doing everything besides living. However, as Emily learns, there is the ability to relive. The dead can go back to any time in their life. Against the advice of all the rest of the dead, Emily chooses to relive one of her early birthdays. What she discovers is tragic, a discovery that contains Wilder’s arching standpoint on how to live life.

Emily discovers that it is painful and unbearable to relive life because “you see the future. You know what’s going to happen afterwards” (99). As Emily relives her birthday, she sees with full perspective how agonizingly beautiful the people and the experience are. Forced to redo the day the way it was originally done, Emily is consumed by regret at taking such beauty for granted during her lifetime.

This leads to Emily’s grand realization, the play’s incriminating evaluation of people. “I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed” (108). Emily speaks for all of humanity in her remorse. Wilder wants the reader to feel this guilt at ignoring the splendor of every simple experience. He wants the reader to look back at Act I with an embarrassed eye recognizing not its boredom, but its glory. This shame is his tool for change. Every moment with family and every moment with life that we don’t cherish is a moment we waste. “That’s all human beings are! Just blind people,” Emily says damningly (109). She speaks a sad truth, and through it, Wilder speaks the only solution.

The Bridge submits the holy merits of love, and Our Town submits when to love: always. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?” Emily asks, begging to find some hope in man (108). The answer is bleak, and serves as Wilder’s fuel for writing. But the answer is also inspiring. “The saints and poets, maybe – they do some,” the stage manager responds (108). Wilder believes that there is a saint and poet in everyone. He believes that there is love in everyone. It is movingly optimistic. Every moment is lovable and dear, and every man has the capacity to embrace every moment. All it takes is that one act: love.

Wilder is a prophet of simplicity. In just over 200 pages, he puts forth two works that ask the grand question, the meaning of life, and answer it with prose that is painfully, inspiringly moving. Our Town’s subject matter is as simple as it gets, a normal town, normal families, normal lives; The Bridge is basic in its brevity and in its structure, quickly tracing three paths towards death. And the product is a simple resolution. Death doesn’t matter. Fate doesn’t matter. Love matters. Love is all that matters.

2. Does Thornton Wilder fit into the time period in which he wrote?

Thematically, Wilder surely fits among the other modernists of his time, and stylistically, Wilder demonstrates a type of explorative rebelliousness that is often used to classify the era.

Our Town is most blatantly a work that flees from the stylistic norms of previous movements and generations. It shuns almost all stage scenery and even most props, aside from a few chairs and tables and the occasional ladder. The stage crew sets up what little props are used out in front of a curtain, for the entire audience to see. The “stage manager” also serves as the narrator and multiple characters in the actual story. In all of his personas, he interacts with the actual characters. He also stands on stage in between acts and watches people come back to their seats, an eerie statement of in-your-face uniqueness and bold discomfort. On top of this all, the story rejects for the most part a sense of linear progression. There is a clear beginning and a clear end to the play, but from point A to point B, the stage manager jumps viewers back in forth in time, through flashbacks and time lapses. There are even moments that hold no place in time at all, such as when newspaperman Mr. Webb and local historian Professor Willard are invited onto stage to details facts about the present and past of Grover’s Corners. These portions of the play don’t fall on a timeline at all, an extremely avant-garde method for Wilder to use.

These dramatically modernist stylistic choices overshadow Wilder’s modernist themes, but they are also nonetheless very era-appropriate. Modernists for the most part rejected cosmic, spiritual, and religious explanations of things, which is The Bridge of San Luis Rey’s entire premise. Brother Juniper is a local priest looking to scientifically find a Godly reason for the tragic deaths that occurred when the bridge collapsed. Mirroring Brother Juniper’s deep exploration into each person’s life, Wilder also takes readers into their backgrounds, their past, their problems and their thoughts.

Brother Juniper’s conclusion, that God had a reason to take the lives of all five individuals on that bridge that day, was deemed heretical and he was burned at the stake, a beloved priest, but a crucified one.

Wilder’s conclusion is one much less conclusive. In fact, he self admittedly has “left this question [of fate] unanswered” (Wilder). Whether the only thing controlling man’s destiny is his own will or God’s will doesn’t mean nearly as much as pure love means. Such an ambiguous end is typical of the modernists. They rejected any absolute, universal truth. Wilder rejects all absolute truths except one, love.

3. What lines define the two works?

The Bridge of San Luis Rey: “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning” (107).

Probably Wilde’s most oft-quoted passage, it is also the one that most characterizes his novel as a whole. The closing sentences to The Bridge, it swiftly bats down the importance of life and death, quickly dismissing any existential questions one might still have at the end of the book in favor of a much simpler resolution. The idea that love is the only survival and the only meaning precisely summarizes the idea Wilder pushes with each character. Dona Maria only finds meaning in her life when she figures out how to truly love. Uncle Pio gives renewed meaning and purpose to both himself and to Perichole through a powerful last burst of love in taking Camila’s son under his wing. And Esteban survives through the death of his brother only by clinging to his love for that brother, a love that for a short period of time he tragically thinks has passed away with his sibling. And while these powerful people faded into the water when the bridge collapsed, it isn’t a tragedy. These powerful lovers gave powerful love, however short-lived it may have been. That love is the most joyous, least tragic product of life possible.

Our Town: “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you” (108).

Here, we see Emily lamenting the entire dilemma that Wilder sets out to resolve in his play: the idea that no man truly appreciates everyday life the way he should. This is the catalyst of the entire book, the whole motivation for the theme. It also is subtly even its own example of man’s folly. The sentence is short and succinct; it can easily be overlooked. The verb “realize” is extremely simple given what Emily is trying to convey. But that is the point. This is a profound little statement that could easily be brushed away just like a typical everyday breakfast with family or a 13^th birthday in Grover’s Corners. To appreciate and love this sentence is to fully understand its purpose. To appreciate this sentence is to appreciate life just the way Wilder begs all man to appreciate life. 

4. How did these two works impact you personally?

I came into Thornton Wilder’s writing ready for the themes I was getting myself into. For the last year, I’ve been struggling with an internal crisis of faith. I consider myself pretty seriously strong in my spiritual beliefs. This isn’t to say that I’m extremely religious, but simply dedicated to following Christ. As a developing Christian, I approach questions and doubts thirstily, looking to struggle and overcome, ready to wrestle with new uncertainties and come out the other end with even stronger faith. One of these questions and doubts has not strengthened my faith at all.

When Chelsea King died, I, as did countless other people, asked the question, “How could this happen to such a brilliant, amazing person?” The existential crisis was “How can bad things happen to good people?” The spiritual doubt was “How can a loving God let such destructive tragedies happen?” I’ve been raised on the idea of fate, or at least I thought I had been. God has a plan. Everything that happens is a part of it. This is a hard idea already, but after what happened to Chelsea, I became strangled by it.

How does the idea of fate and destiny mesh with the idea that God grants free will to? I couldn’t reconcile this. I just now am reaching a point where I am kind of understanding a compromise, a world where God may have a plan, but it doesn’t always happen. Humanity wills every part of its own existence, but only one Man knows whether it aligns with the hopes of the Father.

Looking at the parable of Adam and Eve, God’s plan was for man to live in harmony with Him and nature in Eden. That was his plan. Corrupt man didn’t exactly live out that plan. God’s plan might have been for Chelsea King to live an extraordinary 75 years of beauty and peaceful influence, but one corrupt man simply ruined that. God weeps with us still as we remember her, just as he weeps that he had to banish his Biblical “first creations.”

This has become more tangential than I planned. Simply put: I started to read Wilder hoping to break ground in this internal conflict on fate and death and meaning and divine will. The answer is, I still am struggling. Wilder submits no answer on the subject, but instead gives a beautiful avoidance.

Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey have helped me reach a point where I’m not fully enlightened in the way I’d like to be (who is?), but I’m more at peace with that, and more focused on leaving my thoughts and questions in faith in a simpler, less urgent part of my mind, and spending even more time doing exactly what Wilder commands: loving. Wilder finds that it’s infinitely more important that existential answers. I may disagree a little, but love is definitely more fulfilling and impactful.

BYU cares about its athlete’s morality, should we?

Last Tuesday, BYU forward Brandon Davies was dismissed by his team for having sex.

He broke the Brigham Young University honor code, a set of rules that, among other things, prohibits students from having pre marital intercourse. Davies violated not just the school code, but also the principles of the Mormon religion. And for this infraction, he no longer can play basketball; he no longer can lead the Cougars’ frontcourt in a possi ble championship run later this month in the NCAA Tournament.

The situation is damaging to BYU’s postsea son chances, but more importantly, it is a blow to the very way sports fans perceive their ath letes, their idols, their entertainment. Or is it that important?

Davies’s dilemma is certainly polarizing. Pun dits have risen in defense of BYU, praising the school for holding to its standards and having integrity in its beliefs and policies, possibly at the cost of making a deep post-season run. The university is not giving its star athlete any special privileges or blind eyes, as society seems to do so often.

But at the same time, people have criticized the school for making the scandal so public. Reports that specifically declare Davies’s in fraction as premarital sex do not source the school, but rather “those with knowledge of the situation.” Nonetheless, BYU chose a pe culiar time to boot Davies, right after the team’s biggest win of the year, a road trumping of the fourth-ranked San Diego State Aztecs, and on the eve of the Mountain West Conference Tournament. Critics say that BYU is making an example out of Davies simply because he is a public figure, denying him the Mormon way of solving spiritual issues in private in order to make the school look stronger and bolder in its beliefs.

No one can argue however, that BYU isn’t displaying a refreshing sense of passion about the character of its athletes. Which begs the most crucial question of this entire situation, should we all show this passion?

An athlete displaying questionable moral character is nothing new. Just last year, the world was blindsided by possibly the story of the decade, the demise of Tiger Woods, the world’s grandest sports hero exposed as a chronic adulterer. Scandals sprinkle sports like autumn rain, a periodic annoyance that shrouds the beauty of the season, that distract from the athletic triumphs we revel in. I say annoyance, because no matter how much posturing writers and fans do in defense of ethics and all that is good in the world, the sporting audience enjoys home runs more than good deeds.

Now, I’ve brought up the morality of sports in this space before. With Tiger, I argued that the public had little right to know his relation ship’s most intimate problems, and in fact shouldn’t even want to know because it terror izes not just Woods himself, but our enjoyment of him.

When pulled away from pure sporting plea sure by a question of morality in the star who produces that pleasure, my resolution was to hide from the question, to keep the immorality in private. But the Brandon Davies scandal has made me reconsider.

With Davies, BYU approached the moral ity of its players head on. Sports are a mis sionary tool for the Latter Day Saints, and thus the character of those who participate in those sports is key. For the rest of us, sports are entertainment. They are physical art. Now, the connection between art and morality has been debated for centuries. The 19th Century aesthetes held that art is purely about sensual pleasure. To discuss its morals and sentiments is to defeat the purpose.

Except, sports have a higher purpose, a high er goal. They aim deeper than the senses; they root in hearts and in souls. Anyone who has cried after a crushing loss or bonded with their father playing catch in the backyard knows this fact. Sports are accessible, beautiful, athletic doors into humanity’s essence. Let us then start taking athletes as humans rather than posters on a wall.

This means having the courage to judge our heroes. It also means having the courage to for give them. We shouldn’t push away the fact that Brandon Davies broke the rules he agreed to, but we also shouldn’t define him by that fact. It is time to watch athletes’ awe-inspiring human feats in acknowledgement that they are humans – humans with problems right alongside their prowess.

Evaluating Oscar Wilde’s hedonism (senior year, AP Lit, log 4)

1. What does Oscar Wilde have to say about morality and the purpose of life?

The Victorian Era was one of glorious dignity. The upper class defined the period with an ethos almost entirely focused on being fancy. For the affluent, appearance ruled society, and morality was an accessory in that cultural outfit. While Victoria was Queen, style was King. In Oscar Wilde’s late 19^th century novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and play The Importance of Being Earnest, the writer takes this idea to the extreme.

In Dorian Gray and Earnest, the main characters lead dual lives, existences where the front entirely rejects society’s moral obligations and conscience is delegated to a sort of secret shadowed identity. Through this, Wilde preaches the values of hedonism, but also confronts the imperfections of it. Dorian Gray and Earnest serve as very fair presentations of life lived in defiance of society’s morals, of life lived entirely for pleasure.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde focuses on the rejection of society’s moral code. Earnest is much less serious than Dorian Gray, but that is the point. The play is a comedic farce of society; it satirizes all that is moral and typical of the Victorian culture, marriage, the idleness of the upper class, sincerity, and in this, it embodies Wilde’s thesis that life is best lived apart from social norms and expectations. Earnest’s main characters, John Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, are societal rebels who mold their worlds to fit their own desires by reveling in what they call “bunburying,” basically the adoption of alter egos to evade social obligations or responsibilities. Algernon creates a fictional invalid brother named “Bunbury” who he “visits” whenever there arises a dinner or other social event that he doesn’t want to attend. This idea of fake identities is the basis of the play. John (or Jack) Worthing only calls himself such when he is in the country. When he is in the city, he puts on a mask of free-living unrestraint and goes by Ernest. Under this guise of Ernest, he proposes to Algernon’s cousin Gwendolyn, who loves him and loves his name. Meanwhile, Algernon comes to visit Jack at his country home in order to meet and propose to Jack’s ward, Cecily. Here, Algernon poses as a fictional brother of Jack named… Ernest, a name that Cecily also loves.

This name of Ernest represents society’s image of man, a noble title that embodies class, wealth, and all the respect that comes with it. As both of the girls say to their respective “Ernests” during discussions about the name, “There is something in that name that inspires absolute confidence” (552, 578). The irony is that in reality, Ernest should inspire no confidence. In both instances, the name is a farce.

This is Wilde’s point. Society’s dictation of what a fine male suitor should be, society’s dictation of what anything should be, is hollow and wrong. Later in the play, after a ridiculous series of events and discoveries, it turns out that Jack’s real name actually is Ernest after all. However, this is not some concluding justification of the Ernest ideal, but rather a compounding blow to it. The story of how Jack goes from John to Ernest to John to actually Ernest is so unbelievable and illogical that it just turns the Ernest archetype that represents what society views as good into something not just wrong, but something absurd. Wilde turns society’s morality into a complete joke.

The title of the play itself adds to this scathing critique. The Importance of Being Earnest really defends the importance of not being earnest. To be earnest is to be serious, something that Wilde is firmly against. Seriousness equates to pomposity, to sincerity, to humorlessness. And as Gwendolyn says to Cecily at one point in the play, “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing” (591).

This is Wilde’s aestheticism coming through. Society’s standards are faulty in that they favor such sincerity and seriousness, when truly life is about style, flash, and pleasure. In rejecting the Victorian morality, Wilde isn’t building a new morality. His proposal is simply to live in absence of morality. Morality is a form of earnestness. The Importance of Being Earnest teaches that the best way to live is to be as un-earnest as possible.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray then, Oscar Wilde serves an example of just that: living without earnestness, in defiance of society’s moral foundation and conscience. Wilde presents Dorian Gray, a character that at the beginning of the novel is completely innocent. One of Dorian’s friends, the artist Basil Hallward, in fact describes him as an “ideal.” According to Hallward, Dorian has “a simple and a beautiful nature” (36). That is, until Dorian meets Lord Henry, an aristocrat who revels in the witty deconstruction of everyone else’s ethics and morals and ideas. When Dorian meets Lord Henry, he is introduced to the philosophy of hedonism. Henry admires Dorian’s beauty and invites him to wallow in it himself. “Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances,” Henry teaches Dorian (45).

From here on, Dorian undergoes a profound change. He starts to live for all things beautiful, collecting jewels, perfumes, and other fine items. He riots in sensual pleasure. Most significantly, he becomes enamored, obsessed even, with his own beauty. When Basil paints a portrait of Dorian pre-Henry-influence, a portrait so pristine and innocently perfect that Basil calls it his best work ever, Dorian becomes livid at it, hating the fact that he will grow old while the portrait will stay young and beautiful forever (50). Dorian wishes that instead, the portrait will grow old with time and he will preserve his beauty over time.

As Dorian soon discovers, this wish comes true. Dorian Gray is able to live however he chooses without the consequence of age and conscience wearing on his physical appearance. Instead, these gross detractors of beauty vandalize his likeness, his portrait, which becomes a sort of mirror into his soul, a physical depiction of his moral degradation.

This contrast of Dorian’s physical purity and painted corruption becomes analogous to the general concepts of pleasure and morality. Wilde paints the young, beautiful Dorian Gray as a symbol of sensual pleasure. Dorian, in the physical sense, is beautiful, reveling in the materialism that his hedonism teaches him to love. Wilde looks at the aging, cruel painting of Dorian Gray then as a symbol of the hedonist’s conscience. Dorian as a character isn’t an example of living without conscience, but living without being weighed down by that conscience. Dorian lives entirely for sensual pleasure, but he doesn’t do it in ignorance of the moral consequences. He simply is able to much more easily hide from those moral consequences by draping a cloak over the painting which he banishes to the most obscure room in his manor.

Dorian Gray is almost a dream to Wilde, an epitome of his entire thesis and worldview, a rebel from society’s morality and a servant of sensual pleasure. However, in Dorian we also find a bewildering insight into Wilde’s ideas. Dorian evades morality, but doesn’t detach himself from it. In fact, the morality is entirely necessary to his pleasure. He loves the fact that his conscience is hidden from the world, but he also loves looking at that conscience himself. Gray develops a passion for looking at the painting that shows all of his flaws and destruction. The text describes it as thus: as “he grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, [he grew] more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul” (159). These shoved-away moral consequences are exactly what make the sensual pleasure so appealing. “There were moments when he [Dorian] looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful” (179).

This is maybe a contradiction of the idea in Earnest that society as a whole should drop its hypocritical and shallow morality. A hedonist of the sort that Wilde champions needs society’s morality. The breaking of that morality is necessary to the hedonist’s pleasure. This is the essence of all rebellion. In a way, perennial rebels must support what they are rebelling from, because without it, there is nothing to rebel against. In Wilde’s critiques of morality, he can’t forget that without that cultural concept of “good,” there would be no “evil” at all to look on as a mode through which to realize his conception of the beautiful.

2. Does Oscar Wilde fit into the time period in which he wrote?

Oscar Wilde entered the literary fray at a time of transition. Realism, as championed by Tolstoy and Flaubert, was past its prime, and modernism was only beginning to plant its roots. In late 19^th century Britain however, a revival of sorts was occurring. Gothic fiction, which rose in coordination with Gothic architecture in the 18^th century, was suddenly, after decades of being not much more than a source of parody, again a prominent literary tradition. And Wilde’s works fit into the genre smoothly. At the same time, aestheticism as a literary movement was also coming to a close near the end of the 1800’s, but Wilde clings it as it fades, both in his style and in his philosophy.

In terms of Gothicism, Wilde exemplified the movement in his embrace of the supernatural and also his dedication to atmosphere and emotional exaggeration. Gothic Fiction was also called Gothic Horror because of the way it introduced horror as a foundational plot device. Typical Gothic characters include werewolves, angels, demons, and other similar monstrosities, including the most famous Gothic hero of all, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray doesn’t employ any of these, but it does position the supernatural as an elemental base to the story. Dorian Gray’s self-portrait, an inanimate object, is anything but inanimate. It ages and grows with every new Dorian sin, reflecting its subject’s corruption. It even shows blood on its hands after Dorian commits murder. This is entirely supernatural and entirely Gothic.

Gothic fiction also mirrored the gothic architectural revival that sparked it, a revivalism that itself was a response to Neoclassicism and all of its clarity and rationalism. Gothicism devotes itself to emotional and atmospheric extremes, something seen in both Wilde’s novel and in his plays. In Dorian Gray, Lord Henry specifically calls out the rationalism of literary realism and defines Wilde’s view on the genre: “My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for” (231). Wilde relishes in building characters and moods and atmospheres in a way that could only occur in fiction; that is the entire point of fiction. Hence, Wilde’s supernaturalism, his layered descriptions of the upper class lifestyle and its subjects that fill Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, dinners, parties, operas, as well as the lower class lifestyle, dark streets and darker bars.

Wilde’s timely aestheticism is probably even more representative of his work than his Gothicism. As an author and as an individual, Wilde is possibly the premiere aesthetic of the 19^th century. Aestheticism is, at its simplest, a rejection of art as anything more than sources of beauty. Art does not have cultural relevance, or political impact, or social commentary. Its sole purpose is to be purposeless. This idea comes through especially in The Importance of Being Earnest. As a play, it really doesn’t have much of a moral aim. In giving it the most credit, it looks to critique the moral aims of other fixtures in society, which is really a quintessential aesthetic theme. The aesthetes were obsessed with beauty, and Wilde typifies this, as do his characters. Dorian Gray became obsessed with his own beauty and with all beauty in the world, just as much an aesthetic individual as the author who created him.

Wilde also took this aestheticism to its next logical step, devoting his own art towards beauty. If art serves to be beautiful, and one is an artist, shouldn’t one’s own art serve that same purpose? Wilde certainly does all he can to accomplish such a conclusion. His writing style reads majestically and fancifully, the dialogue full of swift witticisms and the descriptions brisk, clean brush strokes of artistic decadence. Wilde is known for his epigrams, just as much because of their sound as because of their truth. He writes musically.

Lord Henry, whose voice in Dorian Gray echoes Wilde’s authorly voice, is described in a way that perfectly encapsulates Wilde’s own aesthetic way of speaking, always with an ear towards appearance: “He played with the idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox” (66). Wilde is pristinely detailing Lord Henry and himself. He approaches words like one would approach clay, shaping them into art and then polishing them with a final coat of beautiful enigma.

3. What lines define and summarize the two works?

The Picture of Dorian Gray: “To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.’ Yes, that was the secret” (220).

This passage describes Lord Henry’s worldview and philosophy, and consequently the basis of Dorian Gray’s philosophy, a hedonism that encapsulates Oscar Wilde’s entire morality. It is also a quintessential example of Wilde’s famous paradoxical aphorisms. After meeting Lord Henry, Gray lives his entire life in search of sensual pleasure, seeking out temporary joys like they are a drug fix that can only be quenched by jewelry, by partying, by every surface bliss that the world, in all its beauty, has to offer. At the same time, the soul must drive it all.

This perspective is one that reveres beauty above all else. It is one of an aesthete. Ideologically, it is everything Wilde stands for. Stylistically, it is everything Wilde strives for. A statement that contradicts itself, but in its contradiction, makes more sense than anything less hypocritical could. The senses are the only thing that can cure the sweet desires of the soul, but at the same time, the soul is the only cure for sensual desire. It makes no sense, and in this, it makes beautifully perfect sense.

The Importance of Being Earnest: “’My nephew, you seem to be displaying signs of triviality.’ / ‘On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest’” (604).

This line epitomizes the theme of the play as a whole and is also a perfect example of the tongue-in-cheek sarcastic wit that defines Wilde’s tone throughout the work. The Importance of Being Earnest is, at its core, a conflict between triviality and earnestness, a battle between the ideals of seriousness and a lack of it in society. The name “Earnest” represents somberness, a devotion to sober politeness, or what Wilde interprets as a complete lack of humor and color. The antithesis of this then is triviality, which Wilde sees as perceptive, fun, and most importantly, correct.

The wit of the passage is that while Jack Worthing expresses an understanding of the importance of being earnest in the last scene, that same scene teaches the reader Wilde’s message, which is the importance of not being earnest. This line is the last line of the book, and in context, it leaves us with an understanding that to be serious is to be morally wrong. However, in typical Wildean style, this understanding is presented sarcastically with the main character embracing such seriousness, such “earnestness.”

4. What impact did these two works have on you personally?

Ideologically, Wilde’s writings served to provide fodder for a personal debate that I’ve struggled with for months, and also to confirm and invigorate a perspective that I’ve wrestled with for much, much longer.

Before reading Dorian Gray and Earnest, I was already in the midst of an internal dilemma that presented itself as a main theme of Wilde’s works, and that is his aesthetic rejection of art as anything more than examples of beauty. Wilde denies the idea that art has any relationship with morality. Lately, I’ve been struggling with that exact concept. I have always been someone who, perhaps shallowly, defines myself by what I like. Recently, this has meant that I equate my essence with rap music, skinny jeans, and bowties. The rap music is what haunts me.

I can’t resist a nice, clean 90’s boom-bap beat, or a crisp, looped soul sample, or a grimy bass. Wu-Tang Clan, Kanye West, The Roots, I have these musicians on repeat. And the lyricism of a Jay-Z, of a Black Thought, of a Mos Def, the inside rhymes, the assonance, it’s candy to me. But then there are the themes. Hip hop’s central motifs are basically, without disrespectfully boiling down an entire musical genre to a simple thesis, drugs, girls, and violence.

Is that me? Can I enjoy music that I don’t agree with? Is it okay to love the sound of a song that is sounding out something that is so often disagreeable? Wilde presented to me a possible answer. If art has no connection to morality, then it might be okay to appreciate an Andre 3000 double rhyme without defining myself by what Andre 3000 is double rhyming about. I’m not completely reconciled, but Dorian Gray and Earnest Worthing have pushed me closer. In the meantime, I’ll keep internally debating while listening to Notorious B.I.G. “We just sittin here tryin to win, tryin not to sin / high off weed and lots of gin.”

In a more broad sense, Oscar Wilde, with his theory of frivolity, is a man after my own heart. I don’t take anything seriously, possibly to a fault, and Wilde’s intellectual stance against seriousness gives me more courage to keep on my path. I will continue to be sassy and sarcastic even in the most inappropriate of situations. I will continue to laugh during dramatic movies. I will continue to find humor in every part of life. And I will blame it all on Oscar Wilde. Thank you kind sir.